Re: QUESTION: More versatile exits?

From: Barid Bel Medar (icarus@berkshire.net)
Date: 07/04/96


On Thu, 4 Jul 1996, Edge wrote:

> 	I dont quite get what you're saying. Chances are, when you leave
> the room you are going to go north, south, east or west (possibly
> intermediate dirs) to get to the next one, which is why i dont see how its
> not done well. What do you mean the exit can be anything? Are you saying i
> can leave 'goat' and go into a room to the left of me? And its pretty
> hard, well impossible to do something like that without modifying source
> at all. If you are more specific perhaps people can help.. and say what
> the different uncompat 'thing' was.

On an unmodified CircleMUD, you have six possible directions: north, 
south, east, west, up, and down.  With modifications, that expands to 
ten: northeast, northwest, southeast, and southwest, plus all the 
others.  However, in many cases, there will be three doors to your east, 
two to the west, and a main road going north and south, plus an alley 
which veers off northeast and a side-road which parallels it farther up 
the street.  When you count in the fact that if you lift up a grate, you 
can go down, too, or when you kick a wall you get another exit to the 
east, or any number of possibilities, you can have a huge number of 
exits, some of them in the same direction.  Thus, for realism, an 
entrance to one room might be done by typing "enter weaponshop" and an 
exit from the same room either "west" or "enter street" or "exit shop."  
You see how it can be more fun that way?  Not only that, what person 
knows immediately which direction is north, south, east or west?  
Sometimes, using a system like that can give away something that you want 
to be a surprise.  (For example, if you follow that alley across 
thousands of twists and turns, you might discover the back entrance to 
the bank, or something; it's a much better surprise if the player loses 
his or her sense of direction along the way and just has to "go right" or 
whatever.)

If I'm not mistaken, Nick is thinking of LPC MUDs.  At least, that's 
where *I* saw that sort of exit structure.

Anyway...  north, south, east, west, ne, se, nw, sw would be aliased to 
"exit n/s/e..." so you could still have regular MUD functionality, 
particularly in the newbie areas.  After the players are used to it, 
though, you could eliminate the boring old directions entirely.  And even 
if you don't like that, you can use it to put more than one room in each 
direction, which I, at least, have wanted to do a number of times.  It 
also makes it easier to create the directions (i.e., you don't have vnum 
4000 go east to 4001 and 4001 north to 4000, which I do way too much).

> On Thu, 4 Jul 1996, Nick wrote:
> 
> > 
> > Right now, IMHO, exits are not done very well in stock Circle.  We are bound
> > to the use of 'n,s,e,w' (and ne,nw,se,sw if you add that in) for the
> most
> > part.  On some other muds, exits are so versatile that an exit can be called
> > anything you want (and you don't have to modify the source, it just allows
> > exits to be anything).  Has anyone implemented this on Circle?  If so, send
> > the code snippets to the list - I'm sure some of us would appreciate it.  I
> > did something like it myself, but it was for a different thing which isn't at 
> > all compatible. :)

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Barid Bel Medar                               icarus@berkshire.net
Knights of the Cosmos            Shayol Ghul Resort and Health Spa
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"I  am  returning  this otherwise good typing paper to you because
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