[MUD-Dev] Dealing with cloned NPCs

[Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes]

Fri, May 30, 2003 at 07:23:27AM -0700 in
<20030530142327.22473.qmail at web40304.mail.yahoo.com>, Thomas
Sullivan <one4k4 at yahoo.com> spake:

> How do you coders deal with NPCs?

> Sounds like an easy one, and it may be that I'm overlooking the
> simple facts.. But if I'm in a room and the "look" results are as
> follows:

>  You stand in the desert, with a wal-mart to your south.

>  People here: Jum Jum Joey, a desert rat, a desert rat, an orc
>  medic.

> I want the user to be able to attack "a desert rat" and be able to
> tell his friends to attack *the same* rat.. (grouping, etc..)

While it's a little strange[0], and it provides information not
strictly available to the player[1], I've found in my CRPGs that
giving creatures individual randomly-generated names is a good
solution.  Even random "consonant (vowel consonant)+" patterns give
them more personality than a mere letter ID.  In reality, we
identify individuals by appearance and position, but that's not
practical in most MUDs.

  You see here: Jum Jum Joey; Nim, a desert rat; Mik, a desert rat;
  Raban, an orc medic.
  > say Kill Mik first!
  > kill mik

[0] But you're already calling rats "people", and have Wal-Marts in
your setting, so you can't get much stranger.

[1] You're probably already doing that by identifying Jum Jum Joey,
and most MUDs don't do information hiding anyway.

--
 <a href="http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/"> Mark Hughes </a>
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