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

[quzah]

From: Koster, Raph <rkoster at origin.ea.com>
Date: Wednesday, January 13, 1999 10:02 AM
Subject: [MUD-Dev] Re: MUD Design doc - Combat 


>
>It would be worth debating whether speech should need a command at all;
>just typing talks, and all other commands require a prefixed symbol
>instead. Graphical muds seem to be following this path--EverQuest for
>example requires a slash / in front of its commands, as in /who, /con,
>etc. It would be interesting to see how this would manifest in a text
>mud, and what environments it would be suited for. I considered once
>adding a "converse" mode to Legend, wherein whatever you typed was
>assumed to just be speech until you changed modes back to normal
>(possibly a "locked tell", since tell conversations entail typing "tell
>bubba" over and over--and you can only abbreviate names so far in a
>populated playerbase before you run into conflicts).


Enter 'TeleArena' for worldgroup bbs... All text is parsed and if not
found to be a valid command, then they default to speech. Example:

attack Boffo

The first word is the command, each extra is an argument. Similar to the
commands system in Diku (often I wonder if the game was not a hack or
rip off of diku, though its combat and such differed greatly, it has a
lot of similarity) However, if you botch it and type:

attak Boffo

Everyone in the room will see something like

Biff says, "attak Boffo".

As such, you have just alerted everyone to your would-be action by your
error. In addition, it made it a tiny bit harder to tell someone what
to type. You couldn't just say "kill Joe" and expect it to come out as
spoken text. For that matter, there was no way possible to simply say
"kill Joe". You would have to do something like "...kill joe". Shrug.

At any rate, that's the game that comes to mind when thinking of 'what
you type is what you speak'.

Quzah.