[MUD-Dev] Critique: Realms of Despair

[adam at treyarch.com]

Yes, I'm replying to my own message.

On Wed, 17 May 2000 adam at treyarch.com wrote:
> 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.

The last thing I forgot was that it makes internationalization very easy,
since all your output strings are in one giant table.  It also makes it
easy to scan for spelling and grammar errors, consistency issues (which
messages do '!' get used for?) and so forth.

The downside, of course, is that the simplicity of just sending a string
to the user is lost, increasing development time on new game functionality
by a small amount.

Adam





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