[Divunal-devel] The Problem with Perspectives

[Michael Dartt]

(Note: I'm going to use "perspective" to mean "the way you see things"
rather than "focus", which I take as "the things you can see/manipulate")

I was talking about a table-like idea, but I still think we should have it
based on the perspectives that are present in the room, rather than the
players or the objects.  First of all, the number of different
perspectives will always be less than or equal to the number of players,
and will probably be less than the number of objects in most cases.  

A problem with putting perspective information on objects themselves is
that the effect of your perspective shrinks with every new thing that's
created.  If I have an "everything you see has a blue halo around it"
perspective, then I have to put that description on every object in the
game.  If it's a property or function of the perspective, though, I only
have to change one thing.  

The flip side of this, of course, is that putting perspective stuff on
specific objects allows for more specific changes.  (Or at least makes
them easier.)  I think we could probably work things by doing something
like:

	if (there's perspective info on the object) {get info}
	else if (the player's perspective makes some modification) {make
modifications}
	{load object into the table belonging to that perspective}


As you'll notice, even objects not affected by one's perspective get
loaded into the table for the perspective.  I'm suggesting this because 1)
it's faster just to cycle through one table and 2) some perspectives may
affect the view of an object and others may not, so it doesn't really work
to have an "unaffected things" table. To put it another way, characters
see everything filtered through their perspective, even if the perspective
doesn't make an object look any different to them.