[MUD-Dev] Critique: Realms of Despair

[adam at treyarch.com]

On Tue, 16 May 2000, David Bennett wrote:
> Discworld post-processes all of it's text.  So any two messages which
> match printed by two different sources will munge together correctly.  It
> handles something like, me typing wave frog and someone else typing wave
> frog and frog sees:
> Pinkfish and Womble wave to you.
> 
> Works with all the enter/exit messages and things too, works with
> everything in fact :)  So any time two people do the same thing in the
> room it picks it up ;)
> Frog and Womble say: Fluff!

What's the delay you have on your output loop?  At typical update rates
the only thing you would catch are movement of groups and combat messages
(if you have traditional "rounds" and undynamic messages).

This all reminds me of the preliminary work that Orion and I did on a
free-flowing text system, largely inspired by Nathan's posts:

http://www.kanga.nu/archives/MUD-Dev-L/1997Q3/msg00107.html
http://www.kanga.nu/archives/MUD-Dev-L/1997Q2/msg00153.html

I can't find the exact one I was thinking of, which had your character
yelling at his platoon and rolling towards a bulkhead when a plasma grenade
gets tossed...

Anyhow, we eventually settled on a system whereby messages were not strings,
but rather nodes in a list, with a type (say, MSG_WAVE), an actor, a victim,
an indirect object, a direction, a location, and so forth.  At output time,
these could be sorted (throwing out low priority messages when the player
is getting swamped), modified ("wave" could become "wiggles a strange
appendage" for an alien race), or tacked together with similar messages.

Similar, of course, defined as one or more of the parameters as being the
same.  So you could get:

Frog and Womble say, "Fluff!"
(type and data are equal)

You could also get:

Frog says "Fluff!" and Womble says "Foof!"
(types are equal)

or:

Frog says "Fluff!" and leaves north.
(actors are equal)

As Frog picks up a sword, Womble tells him, "Fluff!"
(actor equal to victim)

Frog picks up a sword, and Womble leaves north.
(nothing equal, but they were short so we tacked them together)

Neat stuff.

Adam





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