[MUD-Dev] i got's a question for yall on the best way to do something..

[PartyG2816 at aol.com]

Actually i'm doing a bit of both.. Re-writing from scratch, and hacking away 
at another ROM at the same time.. I get bored with one, i hop over to the 
other for a while.. keeps me nice and occupied, without me getting burnt out 
*chuckle* My plans are rather large... and like most very big plans, i doubt 
most of it will ever get fully completed, nor the way i want them to *shrug* 
Just seems to be the way things turn out :-P  Right now I'm at the point 
where I'm just setting up my basicly classes like Player Object Mobile and 
possibly Room, but i may not do a Room class, because i'm thinking of going 
about this a whole different way.. Everything being a container. Therefore a 
room would just be another object.  What i mean by container is that 
everything would be able to have a "mini-area" i guess is what you would call 
it. I think i'm gonna follow an idea by phLUID.. Paste follows of idea:

You can ENTER and LEAVE objects that have those flags
set, and objects have their own 'inside' description and flags.
Once you are inside of an object, you are basically inside of a
room. Objects can also have exits inside of them leading to other
rooms or objects. This would allow for a ship object to be made of
many rooms, or a horse object that actually puts you in a different
place when you enter it. The horse object could broadcast what you
say like "From atop a horse, phlUID says, 'Foof' ". The horse
object could have programming on it to allow it to change it's
name to "phIUID, mounted upon a great white steed.". The object can
also have a flag that would make it so that when you LOOK, you
could see "Looking down at the area around you, you see:" and then
the room description that the object is in. To get even crazier,
you could ride your horse into an encampment (which would be
another object), and then ride it into a tent (yet another), and
then dismount, leave through a hole in the ground (an exit to a
room somewhere), and go adventuring.

While this shows some finer points of MUSHes, a more basic system for
MUD design would be the ability to do something completely nuts:
Have Container derive from entity, and have room, object, and player
derive from Container. Then you can add another unheard of Entity
called Exit. Exits can be held by Rooms, Objects, and (gasp)
Players. This would make it so that you could be swallowed by a
Great Worm and walk all around inside of him. You can then add flags
to players/objects/rooms such as 'leave' and 'enter'. You might even
skip the Container class altogether, and put the ability to enter
and leave stuff on the Entity, and make our new Exit class just 
override these so that you can't enter/leave exits.

What ya think of that?  Heh, before I can get to that I still have to figure 
out my area file format and how i wanna dot he reading and writing... do it 
with something like xml tags? or what *shrug* any input there would be 
appreciated also ;-)

JD



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