[Divunal-devel] The Problem with Perspectives

[Glyph Lefkowitz]

On Tue, 20 Jul 1999, Michael Dartt wrote:

> (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")

That's really not a clear enough definition for the technical way in which
you refer to it here.

> 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.  

To clarify on what I meant, you refer to a "number" of perspectives, as if
there was a class of some sort.  Perspectives have a very simple count --
each player has one, and only one.  I'll explain the way the current
implementation works later, but even from a standpoint of a paradigm it
doesn't make sense.

A player's perspective is based on who they are.  This is taken into
account when they look at certain kinds of (unusual) objects.  James
addressed this with his response (which he banged out faster than I could
write this ^_^).

> 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.  

You can never have that kind of perspective.

I apologize for the vague way I worded bob's 'seeing green boxes as blue'
perspective.  I did not mean to say that he had a perspective which
somehow filtered green boxes.

A perspective which filters things like that is near useless.  It is much
more elegant to say "Everything appears to have a blue tinge to it" in the
happenings frame than to tack on a "It appears blue" message to every
object's description.

> 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.

The "table for perspective" as you put it, is *already* maintained by the
world.  Sometimes we will skip over an object because it is invisble to
the player, but that object is just not being observed because it requests
not to be.

I don't believe a player-side filter could ever do anything good (at least
in terms of game design) so I don't see any reason to support it in the
server software... in fact, *not* supporting it and presenting a better
(IMHO) way to do perceptions should encourage better and more consistent
world-design.

I think.  I would be willing to hear the merits of a player-side filter at
some other time ... but we should really have a more stringent priority
list:

	* get all the verbs using the new tellAll, etc

	* document the way EVERYTHING works (I mean EVERYTHING)

	* release TR and not worry about it for a while while we work on
	divunal and showcasing some of these features we've worked so long
	to build.

Anyway, I've got to get some sleep SOMEtime.  Later.

--glyph