Today, JoeR uttered meekly:
> o movement sounds (adjacent rooms get 'you hear movement to the X')
SillyMUD did this, and CircleMUD does it to some small extent with the
death cry procedure. I would probably make it terrain, surrounding,
clothing, and skill dependent. That is, if you're on a paved road and the
person moving about is wearing a hard-heeled shoe, and it's quiet around
you, you can hear them move. Skill dependencies come in for modelling
hearing in situations where a thief may train his hearing to such an
extent that he can hear the approach of someone quite well. In addition,
for more accurate modelling, I would introduce habituation, sensitization,
and selective hearing.
The last is easiest to demonstrate and implement. The typical example of
selective hearing is a party setting, in which there's considerable
talking going on all around you. You can't understand much, if anything,
of what's being said around -- but if someone says your name from across
the room, you can usually pick it up. (Of course, if someone says
something that sounds like your name from across the room, you'll probably
pick that up as your name, too.)
The other two, habituation and sensitization can perhaps be implemented as
modifiers to the hearing sense/skill. Habituation is when you become
habituated to a particular thing (in this case, sound) and you, in
essence, ignore it. Sensitization is an increase in the sensitivity or
acuteness of a sense, usually caused by things such as fear.
Sensitization is the proper term to describe why people, watching a scary
movie, might jump if their leg brushes against something they weren't
expecting to be there. Or, if you just watched an alien abduction movie,
why you notice more airplanes, lights, sounds, etc., that you may then
associate with the movie. Basically, it's the reason why you find kids
cowering under their covers from a scary shadow after they watched a
horror movie.
> o automatic HIGHLIGHT of extra description keywords within description block
> for Level 1 players and Implementors.
I think this belongs with a general newbie mode that someone can be in.
The newbie mode would offer more extensive help when someone typed in a
command that isn't understood (perhaps even try a fuzzy string match),
periodic automated hints, the description highlighting you mention, etc.
If the newbie mode covers so many things, I would probably allow someone
to keep it on as long as they wanted (regardless of levels), but once they
turned it off, they could never turn it back on again.
-dak : 132x43...woooo!
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