[Divunal-devel] darkness...

[Glyph Lefkowitz]

On Mon, 23 Aug 1999, Tenth wrote:

> On Mon, 23 Aug 1999, Phil Christensen wrote:
> 
> > 1.) When (in RL) you're in a dark room, you may not be able to see
> > anything, but you can still pick up object in the room, if you know
> > where it is.
> > 2.) Given that in TR, you "know where an object is" by knowing it's
> > name, you should still be able to take/use something in a dark room,
> > providing you know it's name (which would not be supplied by a dark
> > version of look). After all, you can exit a dark room, even though you
> > can't see any of the exits.
> 
>      Hmm... Well, it does stand to reason that (for example) if you
> just put something on the floor, or a nearby piece of furniture, and the
> lights go out, you should be able to find it again. And if you know your
> trusty old brass lantern is nearby somewhere, you should be able to find
> it eventually.

IMHO, this could be implemented using a 

>      However, note that word "eventually".  :-)  While it is sort of
> unfair to be totally unable to do anything if it's dark, it also makes
> dark a lot less interesting if you're totally uninhibited by it. I guess a
> middle ground (not being able to see, but still being able to refer to
> things by name) would be nice, but I think it might be more interesting
> (and not too terribly much more complicated, assuming you can get darkness
> to work in the first place) if there was a chance that any attempts to
> interact with other Things in the room might fail, and that the failure
> was something along the lines of "You blunder around in the dark." If you
> _think_ you know where an object is, it might still take you a few
> attempts to find it, and you wouldn't know immediately if it was gone.
> 
>     And while combat isn't a big part of the game, darkness does make life
> interesting. Ideally, like the interaction described above, you could
> attempt to attack a specific person, but there would be a chance that you
> would totally miss them in the dark, and wouldn't necessarily know if they
> were still in the room or not. (You could even go as far as having a
> chance of randomly attacking someone else by accident, but that's leaning
> towards the much sillier and more complex side of things.)
> 
>     And on this topic (sorry, this has gotten a lot longer than I wanted),
> isn't it going to be difficult to distinguish between "visible" and
> "audible" actions? Our newly working perspectives feature could change
> player names to "someone" in the dark, we can use the "hidden" boolean on
> socials to determine if they work in the dark or not... But that still
> leaves a lot of other miscellaneous effects. It would be safer just to say
> that things other than non-hidden socials, speech, and special effects
> that are directed at the player (being attacked, hearing telepathic
> messages, etc.) don't show up in the dark, but that doesn't always work,
> either. (You can't see Gates in the dark, but can you still hear the sound
> of fabric rending?)  It's certainly a lot easier just to say that you
> can't do much of anything in the dark...
> 
>      Any ideas?
> 
> - Tenth
> 
> 
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