[MUD-Dev] Re: Introduction System

[J C Lawrence]

On Fri, 14 Jul 2000 00:46:22 -0500 
Ryan P <ixiterra at earthlink.net> wrote:

> At 05:29 PM 7/13/00 -0700, JCL wrote:
>> One of the aspects I liked in my approach was that there was no
>> concept of a "real name" as supported by code.  The name
>> something carried was the name the viewing cahracter had assigned
>> it, and that name had no necessary relation to any name that
>> other character preferred.
>> 
> [big example snip]

Aye, the example just showed a few permutations.

> Although this is trivial, I somehow know you've probably made
> something for this as well: a who command. 

Nahh, that's there, I do that too.

> Do you display real names of characters?

There is no such thing as a real name.  What is a real name?  The
name most people have assigned him?  The name he's asked most people
to assign to him?  None of those values need be constant or even
singular.  What's to say that a character can't ask different people
to assign him different names, or even ask the same person to assign
multiple names or different names at different times?  What's to say
that a character can't have multiple calling card decks each of
which introduces him with a different name?  (a simple route for
implementing disguises (map names to disguises))

There is no such thing as a "real name".

> Well obviously then a character could easily discover whether or
> not Bubba was really Boffo like he said he was by doing a simple
> who command.

Nope.  WHO (I have some implementation variance as discussed below)
returns the current player map as interpreted by the player's
namespace.  This is an aspect where storing the namespace on the
client becomes questionable as you then have to pass unique
objectID's to the client for name parsing and therefore cannot rely
on namespace corruption being realised in the client.

  Bubba has a name assignment of "Boffo" for object XXX.

  Bubba gets a namespace virus.  The namespace virus rewrite Boffo's
  name assignment to "Snurgle" -> XXX.  There is no "Boffo" name
  assignment any more.

  During any name resolution the value of XXX has to be sent to the
  client for interpretation.  Ergo, the client can be hacked to
  always reveal the "true" identity of all objects.

The result is that (other than the fact that I don't do this),
assuming all the player characters are in the same room as you WHO
will return exactly the same data as a LOOK would, merely formatted
differently.

> Or the more intelligent Bubba might claim to be another player who
> is logged in.

Absolutely.  I have no provision for a player to determine what
other player is controlling a given character or body at any
particular instant (this creates its own problems).

> Do you get rid of the who command altogether? 

Initially I did.  I put it back much later as an aid to
socialisation.

> Do you show short descriptions a/o player named descriptions? 

I don't really have a concept of short or long player descriptions.
Objects are queried for a text blob that describes them in their
current state.  What they return is entirely up to them, and more
often than not is dynamically generated as a function of their
environment (how much can you see, how well, proximity, etc).

> Or perhaps if there is an account system (you make an account,
> then you can make characters with that account) and you display
> each account name that is on? (That would also be nice for OOC
> type commands.)  

Yup.  A human player logs into an account, and then selects one or
more characters in that account to play.  Each of the characters may
be controlling one or more bodies, and each of those bodies may be
singular or a swarm body (think swarm of bees).  Further, during
play, a character may acquire and discard or lose bodies as a
regular course.

> Players liked to be assured that there are other human beings
> playing the game. So what is the almighty JCL's answer to this
> minor situation? =)

Almighty?  Hehn.  Hardly. 

There are aspects to the WHO command:

  1) lists logged in acccounts.

  2) lists logged in characters that you have assigned names 

Note that there is no way to get list or detect characters you have
not assigned a name to.

--
J C Lawrence                                 Home: claw at kanga.nu
---------(*)                               Other: coder at kanga.nu
http://www.kanga/nu/~claw/        Keys etc: finger claw at kanga.nu
--=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--


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