[Divunal-devel] The Problem with Perspectives

[Glyph Lefkowitz]

Quick answer: efficiency problem.

Long answer: the game right now uses a 'Dictionary' structure to find what
you're looking for.  It looks up the object by the key of whatever you've
specified.  Reconstructing that entire dictionary structure each time a
player requests and object would be a HUGE efficiency hit.

Personally, I think there's a better way to do it, such as auto-adding the
synonyms when they're first sent to the player... that's kinda kludgy
though, and seems like it might have a very, very bad 'worst case
scenario'.

On Tue, 20 Jul 1999, Michael Dartt wrote:

> Since the game already knows how to make something look a certain way to a
> certain player, why not do a similar thing with whatever looks at the room
> to get an object?  That is, when someone says, "get blue box", the game
> "thinks", "Okay, based on his perspective and what's in the room, what the
> hell is he talking about?"  To put it another way, rather than just
> returning the straight list of objects in the room for the verb to sort
> through, you return the list of objects as filtered by the player's
> perspective.