Re: [Aime-devel] More Suggestions (AIME)

[George a. R. N. <no...@ac...>]

> -> Realism. I was in warguild1@courtland and found the south door
> closed. Kishon tells me to leave it alone, not letting me open it. Which
> is silly, I should be able to ignore orders. So, I slay Kishon. I try to
> open the door. Somebody shouts through the door 'Leave that alone!'. I
> repeatedly try to open it. Then suddenly it gives in and I open it and
> enter, and nobody's in there. I leave and reload the area, and try again,
> this time goto'ing into warguild2@courtland. Nobody's in there. Maybe
> because you're not supposed to enter there, but realistically you can push
> anyone out of the way if you want (see statement on moods). It should be
> locked (not just in description) as a physical deterrent.

The reason it took several tries to open the door was a bug.  If the corpse
of Kishon is still there, it won't let you open the door.  Eventually either
me or someone else will get around to fixing this.  Maybe someday a push
feature that causes the mobiles to attack may be a good feature...as if the
mobile is guarding something, he won't just say "oh well, you pushed me out
of the way, in that case I'll let you by."

> -> Moods. Players and NPCs can be in various degrees of various states
> such as happiness, anger, envy, loyalty, etc. They start off at a fixed
> value and fluctuate over time. An NPC might refuse to fight you ( flee
> when you attack ) unless you do something to anger them ( taunt, attack a
> friend, steal something they're guarding ), etc. For players, moods can
> affect what people can/cannot do. If you're feeling relatively normal,
> you'll do what people tell you ( as in Kishon's demands ), but if you're
> impatient or angry you may be able to disregard them with appropriate
> consequences. Moods also affect your fighting performance ( feeling lucky,
> drunk & rowdy, overly agressive, etc ).

   Moods for mobiles would be a good feature (I would have issues with moods
for players as players should be able to determine what mood they want to
roleplay without the code interfering).

> -> Are there any working boats? All the ones I've tried won't let me enter
> ( I won't fit? ) In my opinion, there should be a general class for any
> type of vehicle with boat being a subclass.

Yep, we should have a vehicle object.  The boats have a capacity and if you
are larger than the capacity, you can't enter.  The boats used to work but I
haven't tried them in ages so they may have broken recently.

> -> Is there support for nested rooms? TADS ( text adventure development
> system, which is great for writing single-player adventure games like the
> classic Zork or Adventure; it uses a very easy to learn interpreted OO
> language of its own similar to Python; the command parser takes
> natural-language user input and converts it to a function call to
> functions defined by your script, and the rest is handled by interpreted
> libraries ) has such as system, which lets you have things like 'On the
> deck of the boat, on the Styx river'. From the deck of the boat, you can
> see everything that happens on the Styx river, but not always interact
> with them. And from the Styx, you can see but not touch items on the boat.
> Enter and exit are used to board and disembark. And is there support for
> transparent closed objects (also used in TADS)? For example,  you can see
> that there is a pair of teeth in the closed jar, but you can't touch or
> manipulate it unless you take off the lid.

Good ideas.  Definately something for down the road.

> -> Where-do-*I*-want-to-go-today? Microsoft can't provide a way, but the
> point is that NPCs are wandering somewhat randomly at times. So my
> proposal is a task/state system for what a NPC is doing, abeit a rather
> simple one. Normally, the NPC is 'idle', not particularly doing anything.
> Events such as hunger will trigger the NPC to obtain food, and the NPC
> will try various sub-tasks to get the food. First on the list is to check
> if any food is nearby that can be obtained reasonably (such as not trying
> to spend 900 gold for a piece of bread from an idiot vendor just because
> the NPC is hungry.) If that fails it tries other things.
> So; one important task would be movement. If the subject was beginning to
> get tired, he would set a destination for 'home', figure out the easiest
> way, and start walking. For this I propose a path. Every few seconds, the
> NPC moves a particular direction. If all goes well, it will reach its
> destination and continue the original task, which will spawn a 'go-to-bed'
> task. If interrupted, it will handle whatever the problem is, then go back
> to the path if possible. The path may need to be recalculated if the
> player got off track, or the original destination is unreachable (
> washed-out road, sleep in an inn instead ). When all tasks are complete,
> the NPC goes back into idle mode. Players can have tasks too if you wish
> to provide built-in speedwalking ( 'walk to temple' ) or maybe an
> insanity/hypnotism/etc spell that gives the computer control of your
> character for a while?
>
*nod* another good idea.  Of course for me, grad school is sucking me dry of
free time and if what people say is the truth, the first two quarters are
both pretty intense but it calms down after that so I may have time to code
in like 4-5 months.  If you can find some coders with free time, they could
work on these features.  Seems this is a busy time of year for many though.
Oh well, this gives the folks creating worlds time to build the areas so
that we can do some hard core testing in an almost-ready-for-gameplay
environment.

George