[MUD-Dev] Text Parsing

[Matthew Mihaly]

At 09:32 PM 6/2/99 -0600, you wrote:
>[Ben Greear:]
>

>The use of the object indices here is another issue. Having them available
>for disambiguation is good, but I much prefer adjectives. Again, in real
>life, if I had a pair of swords in a bag, and told someone
>"get the second sword from the bag", they wouldn't know which one I meant,
>since the positions are not clear. Instead, I would describe the sword
>using adjectives (e.g. the rusty one). Not being able to do that in the
>game would also be annoying, simply because it is the natural thing an
>English speaker would do.

I agree. If you were looking at a bag, even if every sword appeared to be
exactly identical, you'd be able to focus on a particular sword and get
that one from the bag. One way to give that capability is for every item to
have a unique number. For instance, you could GET SWORD3743, or just GET
3743. Of course, GET SWORD works too. That will just take the first one it
finds. We use this system and have never received any complaints from users
about it, and never gotten any suggestions to change it. (I'm not implying
it's the best or it's perfect, just that users are, as far as I can tell,
satisfied with it).

--matt




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