[Divunal-devel] darkness...

[Glyph Lefkowitz]

On Mon, 23 Aug 1999, Phil Christensen wrote:

> I think i'd like to defend my idea that darkness should be dealt with
> by look. I understand the complications involved, but still, I think
> this is the way to to it. Here's why:

I don't think that you really understand the complications involved.  It
would mean making a verb a part of the basic way the client/server
protocol works.  This seems like an obviously bad design decision to me,
and I think I'm probably missing your point ...

I have neglected to respond to 1. and 2. because I think those are mostly
game-design issues and have more to do with the way that darkness should
work.  I think it should be *possible* for darkness to work either way, so
I'm going to respond to the technical point based on that ...

> 3.) I dare to think that the TR codebase is suffering from additive
> design. I think we should make a conscious effort to try to abstract
> things as much as possible. If something like darkness deals only with
> the way people see things (which i think it should), then look should
> be the verb affected.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by an "additive" design ... TR's design
is supposed to be modular, with as little as possible handled in the core
for a full featureset.  Given the way that we're handling the
item/description/happening display, though, focus is one of those things
that has to be maintained in the core.

There are many other things which can shift your focus besides 'look'.  
For example, movement, manipulating complex objects, loud sounds,
etcetera.

I don't think that hard-coding a verb into the core server is going to
make the design any cleaner, or allow us to abstract away from anything at
all.  It *will* establish a hard requirement for one of the things in
.plugin, which will be a bad idea.  "Passwd" and "God" are requirements
like this, except that it would be possible to construct a map manually
without using them -- they're only required to exploit the full feature
set of the authoring tools, not to actually run the server.

That's not to say that look should not be overridden in dark places --
it's not easy to look around if there's no light to look by.  A flash of
light or other similiar event would give you something to fix your vision
on, but normally if you tried to 'look' it should say 'sorry, it's too
dark to do that'.

Although I don't fully understand James's property listener stuff yet, I
think it would probably be a better idea to do that than to change
setFocus to load a verb and call that instead...

> Anyways, that's how I see it...(um, pun not intended)...

:-)

--glyph