From: guddt@uniwa.uwa.edu.au (David Bennett)
Subject: Re: Hack'n'slash not for me
Organization: University of Western Australia
Date: Sun, 23 Aug 1992 19:01:26 GMT

anipa@cs.tut.fi (Niilo Neuvo) writes:
>You obviously haven't thought of this enough, let us take an example:

No...  Obviously not.

>Ghosts don't need a score command. You either put a check in the
>player.c (if(ghost)return), or you just don't inherit the score
>command. The check is fine as long as the mud is simple, what happens
>when a player is something else (dragon, frog, gas-cloud, bug, stone
>statue), do I need to write n+1 if()'s into the score command?

Are you saying that they do or dont have a score command in these
states?  What exactly do you DO with races?  Adding in extra commands is
easily dont in other ways and handling minor changes of the player
object to how you want it to act is also easy enough to handle.  Sure,
inheritance gets around a lot of this.  Handling number of limbs/number
of things they can wield/wear is also easily done in other ways.  The
main thing I used exec for was security.  You exec into a different
object if you are a lord or a creator or a a player.  Exec has its uses
too.  And I think that here is amore a case of conflicting mudlib
designs as opposed to anything else.

>Ever heard of inheriting? Beginning of bug.c (gridwars bug, comments
>added while writing article):

Nahh.  I have never heard of inheriting.  Is that something like getting
nasty diseases from other people?

[Header code deleted]

>Yes you can code all this into the player object, only ending up with
>a huge player.c, but what is the point?

Player.c's are huge.  Its something that happens with them.  Even if you
are handling things with exec I bet your player object is still huge.

>Shadow is good for things that modify the player during the game, like
>armours, spell effects and such (as it is used on BatMUD). You can do
>all sorts of nice things with shadow, but it simply is intended for
>things you can 'wear'.

Wear?????  No...  shadow is intended for run time modification and
changeing of objects.  There is very little you could not do with the
right shadow.  The other nice thing with shadow is you do not need to
limit is as much, so you can actually allow other people to code
some things.  I do not see my player object code as amazingly huge and
unweildly, it is still fairly easy to change and maintain, I have used
that inherit thingy you metioned somewhere to modularise it.  Most of
the changes that a different race implies are cosmetic anyway, its not
as if they fight differently, sure they fight with different legs and
thingys but thats not the point.  Its a change of description with a few
attribute twiddles and different body.  The rest of the game is going to
act the same in respect to your monster.  You might also have a
different size idea.  You could also add languages....

Hope this was nicely incoherent.

David.
[DDT] Pink fish forever.
-- 
  David Bennett,  guddt@uniwa.uwa.oz.au | University Computer Club
     Where Pink fish swim backwards.    | c/o Guild of Undergraduates
These words I am singing now mean nothing more than meow to an animal - TMBG
Disclaimer: Any spelling mistakes in this article are all entirly my fault.  Any grammer errors spotted in this article were put there because I could.
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