Mathew Earle Reuther wrote: > > I've installed the assemblies patch off the ftp site, and have it up and > working with some modifications to make it work for my purposes. However, > I've got one issue with the way things are done. I don't like the fact > that you can only use one word in your argument! <<snip>> Although you've already received two solutions to this which essentially work, this does bring up one small issue I've had with Circle: nearly everything is referenced by a single keyword. Myself, I've found this annoying in the past when there are three hundred different "red"s on a MUD, but only 3 "Red Monks". However, if I want to go to the first red monk, there was no easy solution. Or, for instance, if you are wearing a green ring, a blue ring, and have blue greaves on, and you wish to "remove blue ring". It's most notable in our old Circle 2.2 shops where there is a "small mace" and a "large mace" for sale along with a "large broadsword". Most newbies do not know to type "buy 2.large"; instead they instinctively "buy large mace" and glumly accept their brand new broadsword. There are many other places where I found matching for multiple aliases more desirable than matching a single alias. So, I recoded my isname()/isexactname()/isabbrname() to check for multiple aliases by attempting to match each space-separated alias in the input. If the input is just a single word, it operates the same as it did before. And many thing automatically work as expected since they use skip_spaces() and then immediately call generic_find() or isname(). Routines which use one_argument() need small rewrites. True, this is quite a bit slower than the original routines, and these are routines called repeatedly in a tight loop relatively often. But most of the time, the search list is composed of the items or mobs in a room, and as such is pretty small. The difference to me is not noticeable even when searching the whole world for "goto 3.red monk". It seems much more usable to me. The only problem I've found is when "more knowledgeable" players complain about being unable to do something that is easily facilitated by multiple alias matching -- they don't expect it because it's not stock. Of course, YMMV. -- +---------------------------------------------------------------+ | FAQ: http://qsilver.queensu.ca/~fletchra/Circle/list-faq.html | | Archives: http://post.queensu.ca/listserv/wwwarch/circle.html | | Newbie List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/circle-newbies/ | +---------------------------------------------------------------+
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