[Divunal-devel] Problem and obstructions

[Glyph Lefkowitz]

On Wed, 30 Jun 1999, Michael Dartt wrote:

> 1) The Solid Steel Doorway in the Grand History Book Room is acting
> strangely: I've run "reference solid steel doorway to steel door", and
> that synonym is showing up when I "scrutinize solid steel doorway", but I
> can't actually refer to the object by the name "steel door".  It works
> once, and then doesn't work thereafter. However, the door I created in the
> room (solid oak door) works just fine when referred to as "oak door". 
> I've tried rerunning the reference command, but it doesn't change
> anything.  Anyone have any clue as to what's causing this or how to fix
> it?  (I'll be happy to take care of it then.) 

This is due to the fact that the dual-placement of an object's exit is a
rather hacky bit of work.

I will hopefully figure out some way to fix this, but until that time,
here's what you should do -- *finish your door* before you obstruct
anything with it.  Synonyms will only propogate to the room in which the
door is located.

> 2) How about having obstructedBy "tags" in room descriptions, so that if,
> e.g. a door is opened or closed, the descriptive text would change?  In
> the Grand History Book Room, part of the description reads like: "To the
> south stands a large archway with a steel door.  You see several shelves
> of books in the room beyond the arch."  Thing is, if you close the door,
> you can still see the shelves.  Using an HTML-like tag, we could see
> whether something described in the room can be obscured by an
> open-/closeable thing and display it (or not) based on the thing's state,
> so that when entering the GHBR's description, you'd have, e.g.:

You have either been hitting that crackrock a little too hard lately, or
you've been doing too much with HTML :-).  I won't even discuss the
performance problems with parsing out HTML in a massively multiplayer
environment -- they should be obvious.

Walk around Tenth's house (especially the Science Fiction Room entrance)
and take a look at how the doors work there.  There is no generalized way
to do this yet, but (as you can see from the Tenth example) there are so
many things beyond a general "obscured" message that you might want that
it didn't seem useful to have a generalized version at the time.