[MUD-Dev] Re: MUD Design doc (long)

[J C Lawrence]

On Tue, 12 Jan 1999 22:12:55 +0000 
Mik Clarke<mikclrk at ibm.net> wrote:

> J C Lawrence wrote:
>> On Sat, 09 Jan 1999 22:34:11 +0000 Mik Clarke<mikclrk at ibm.net>
>> wrote:

>> This makes objects responsible for their own data public contents
>> (ie their attributes and method return values), and not for what
>> is done with them.

> Yes, but you also need a 'tag' field of some sort to indicate the
> abilities that the character needs to be able to percieve the
> information, so the client can work out exactly what the player
> does see.  

I used a simple protocol which started with clients requesting from
the servers what types of data items were available, and then built
from there with the client requesting suitably scaled reponses from
the server for various levels of perception.

> This is a property of the object being described, not of the
> player percieving it.  I put the 'what can be seen' decision on
> the server to cutdown on the ammount of data being sent - sending
> 5K of conditional descriptions and only presenting 1K to the
> average player is not very efficient.

True, if the computation occurs remotely (in network terms), which
is not the case for me (character clients are local in the DB).
Even with intelligent network clients you can reduce this overhead
by splitting the client with a proxy object running on the server
which does the gross data filtering before passing it back to the
real client for full processing.
 
>> For me names are not global (there are a very few exceptions).
>> As such objects don't have default names.  The character you ran
>> into at the castle is only "Bubba" to you because that is what
>> you explicitly named him.  You have no idea what he calls you.

> That must make conversation between different players somewhat
> comlicated...
>
>  >look
>  You are outside the moshpit.
>  Sucker is here.
>  Mik shouts; Where are you?
>  >shout I'm at the moshpit 
>  You shout: I'm at the moshpit
>  Mik shouts: Ummm. Where's that?
>  >look
>  You are outside the moshpit.
>  Sucker is here. 
>  >shout It's an eating place. Sucker lives outside it.
>  You shout: It's an eating place. Sucker lives outside it.
>  Mik shouts: Is it the Golden Ribs in Honbar? Who's sucker?
>  ...

Sort of -- you can always 'examine' the local area to get an
alias-free expansion of the local description.  Really what it does
however is to create a norming force in alias assignments as well as 
encouraging a logical divide between private and public aliases.  

  I may think of Bubba as a twit, and call and refer to him as
"Twit" in my own internal conversations, but I don't call him "Twit"
to his face...

ObStory: I used to work with a guy who limped badly.  As I didn't
know his name (just saw him about) I referred to him to others as
the "limping guy" (they didn't know him either).  This quickly
contracted to "limper" in our conversations.  Later he had cause to
work directly with our group and we discovered that his name was
"Dave".  It took a long time for the "limper" name to die out.

--
J C Lawrence                              Internet: claw at kanga.nu
(Contractor)                             Internet: coder at kanga.nu
---------(*)                    Internet: claw at under.engr.sgi.com
...Honorary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...