Fw: [MUD-Dev] Importance of User Documentation

[Stephen Newby]

On Sat, 30 Sep 2000, Jon Morrow wrote:

> 1) Has anyone encountered a MUD with a good documentation model?  What
makes
> it good?  How can it be improved?

I've done a bit of thinking about this, as I am writing a new, from-scratch,
codebase.
My main goal, is to make all commands that do not take arguments, and all
commands
that take them, but do not REQUIRE them (look, score, who, etc.) have help
pages
that are similiarly formatted, accessable by typing help followed by the
command name,
and commands that REQUIRE arguments (get, say, give, kill, etc.) will spit
out a standard
usage message when typed without arguments, or improper arguments.
So, say a player types:

get

What that player would then see would be something similar to this:

Command: get
Description: Gets an object, and adds it to the player's inventory.
Syntax: get <what> [from <who>]
    <what> - The item wanted, with a numerical prefix to specify which
    one, if more than one. So, 2.sword will get the second object named
    sword in the current room.
    <who> - If the item is on a PC or NPC, this is the PC or NPC the
    item is on. Note, getting an item from a PC is considered stealing!
Also See: get give put objects steal

This would, in my opinion, greatly reduce the time required to learn what
every command
does, as all one would need to do would be to type the command with no
arguments to
be reminded of exactly how it works (like commands in Unix or DOS).

Just my two cents.

Stephen Newby




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