[MUD-Dev] Re: MUD Design doc - Combat

[James Wilson]

On Tue, 05 Jan 1999, Koster, Raph wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: J C Lawrence [mailto:claw at kanga.nu]
>> Sent: Monday, January 04, 1999 12:29 AM
>> To: mud-dev at kanga.nu
>> Subject: [MUD-Dev] Re: MUD Design doc - Combat 
>> 
>
>> I *really* dislike generically automated combat.  There's a balance
>> there between control and amusement.  I'd rather not enter commands
>> for every beat of my character's heart.  I'd also rather not see
>> enter-command-and-sit-back-until-desired-state-accomplished.
>
>There's one darn good reason to have the latter--it's less vulnerable to
>latency. The more interactive, the more vulnerable the player is to loss
>of connection or packet loss or plain old lag which causes them to miss
>or mistime crucial input.
>
>Lots of ways to handle this, of course, some of them more subject to
>abuse than others. Queuing systems and programmable actions & the like
>can help with this, of course. But a queuing system loses actual
>interaction in favor of pre-programmed estimates. Programmable actions
>are, frankly, only for the expert gamer, which may not be your target
>audience.
>
>-Raph

I'm curious - has anyone implemented a system allowing variable levels of 
combat detail ('brief-mode' vs 'verbose-mode', for instance)? 

James