Improvements to look being discussed for handling exits
This page was imported from a forum post dated November 22, 2008 in the category World Building and Coding by Otter. Its content is likely to be out of date!
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Sat, 11/22/2008 - 18:53
We're talking about making some changes to the 'look' program.
One of the tasks that builders have in making places is providing exits. A lot of places have exits "neatly formatted" within descriptions, which causes problems. Some of the problems are:
1. Harder to maintain over time
2. Easy to mis-key details that get changed (such as the magic letters)
3. Prevents people from using custom client scripts to high-light the exits
As a side-effect, some people try to get past some of these problems by using MPI to read all the exits and show them. This also has problems:
1. Some exits have settings to hide them
2. Exits UNLESS over-ridden with +set only show if the invoker can use them
3. Some exits have @sdesc set to leave their names as much simpler invocation names
Granted, it's possible to work around many of these, but not all of them easily.
Also, some users use "look #horizontal" and some use "look #vertical". This affects the room contents, but not the exits. That should change.
However, if we put exit presentation in look, there should be a way to control exit ordering as well. That would remove the need for many of the hand-coding exits into the description need.
My current thought is that exits can have a "weight" associated (like the help-book in the web-site) so that "all exits of weight zero" show before "all exits of weight one" etc. By default, exits would be weight 128 (if nothing was set). Within the same weight, exits would be random (whatever natural order the server hands them to MUF).
For most cases, where you don't care about the order, you'd do nothing. For cases where you want some first or last, that's easy. For cases where you want total control, that's possible, but still less work than formatting them by hand in a room description.
Remember, a room description is narrative -- it might get yanked out and shown on the web-site logger, for instance, which shouldn't show exits. Or it might want to show exits as hyper-links, which means the exits need to be separate entities. So, not mixing things is helpful for many features as we're expanding as well.
So, I'm asking people what they'd like for syntax and features to update look and the exit presentation (and anything else related to look).
Thanks, and Keep the Light,
Otter
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