[MUD-Dev] Examine/Look

[Eamonn O'Brien]

Elia Morling wrote:

> Is there a standard for the order of examine/look? For example
> with syntax: look ring ;look 2.ring ;look 3.ring etc.

> In some muds the order is: equipment, inventory, room Others I've
> seen go: room, inventory, equipment

In many ways it doesnt matter, as long as you make it consistent. I
dont know if there is a standard, but personally I find room,
inventory, equipment works best.  The reasoning is that you will
generally want to look at the newest items most often, thus if you
enter a room with a sword on the floor, look sword is the command
you will type, if you are wielding 2 swords, with another in your
inventory it is annoying to have to type look sword, look 2.sword,
look 3.sword, look 4.sword etc to find the correct sword. Similarly
items in your inventory will change more often than your equipment,
corpse looting etc giving you new items that you may wish to look
at.

You can also consider implementing a smarter syntax for people who
want to be specific:

  look my sword (check inventory, then equipment)

  look held sword (check equipment)

  look carried sword (check inventory only)

And a command to list any items would also be helpful

  list sword
  A really sharp sword wielded as a weapon.
  A nice shiny sword wielded as an offhand weapon.
  A sword fish carried in your inventory.
  A pretty swish sword lying on the floor of the room.

Also if you make sure your items each have some relatively rare
identifier, then the colissions will not occur nearly as much as you
would imagine. Giving the above set of swords to look at, most
players will type look sharp, look fish, look shiny, look swish etc.

Also you are generally considered to be looking into the room by
default, if you stand in a shop, wearing a shirt, holding a shirt,
and there is a shirt on a rack in front of you, in the mud you are
assumed to have eyes front looking ahead of you, if your mate says
look at the shirt, you will first look at the one on the rack, if he
says "nope, the other shirt" you may check the one in your hand, if
he says "nope, the other shirt" you are likely to scan around for
another shirt and not think of the one you are wearing which pretty
much spoils my example, but happily a Mud avatar is smart enough to
realize what he means a lot faster :)

> Some muds also make a distinction between examine and look. Is
> there a standard in their meaning?

The general is that look shows an items description, while examine
shows some extra information, look sword might say "This is a shiny,
well made sword", but examine sword would say "It is made from
steel, it feels heavy and it needs repairing" though just making
examine a global alias for look works too. :) I have also seen
examine being usable only on items in your inventory or worn. It
being assumed you need to hold the item to get a closer look at
it. (Do not try this if you ever want to examine the Mona Lisa or
any other item in a museum or art gallery)

> I have similar questions as I'm working on a new codebase. Is
> there a document standardizing commands, perhaps a joint effort by
> multiple codebases or simply a research project looking for common
> denominators in muds?

The best would be to check some of the public codebases for the type
of mud you are creating, if your mud is a DIKU style hack and slash,
then check out the code for it and make your commands behave
similarly.

Eamonn
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