#4 Post-processing

[Doug Couch]

As was suggested (and researched) by Alex Dudas, here is the
post processing concept in his quote from the Developers Forum

http://discworld.imaginary.com

> * Why?
> * What are its features?

Many and varied, Discworld is now a relatively successful mud
and we have survived many things. Including a few deliberate
sabotage attempts and loosing a place to actually run the mud
for up to 3 or 4 months at a time. Now we own the machine we run
on and everything is a lot happier :)

I would say the main features of Discworld is a surprisingly
unmangled object heirachy (considering the amount of time we
have been running), a consistant world theme and some quite
nice output post processing.

> * What does it do (will it do) differently than other things do?
> * Any neat concepts involved?
> * Any boring concepts being used in neat ways?

I was surprised by how effective fairly simple post processing of
output text could be. Discworld handles output messages with
specific trigger sequences in them to allow messages to be
printed in a neater fashion. For example, two messages of: 'Frog
waves to Bing.' and 'Gumboot waves to Bing.'
Would end up being post processed and be seen as: 'Frog and
Gumboot wave to Bing.' Also can get messages like: 'Frog and
Gumboot wave to Green and Blue.'

This does mean that all messages seen in the game are up to
two seconds delayed, but people do not appear to notice this
much. The messages which are printed in response to
commands and forced to be printed on the spot, so it is only
distant messages that get potentialy delayed and therefor it
is not as noticable.

I have not seen any other places which do this sort of post
processing? I could be wrong though :) I did it initally to handle
the problems with:
Frog leaves west.
Gumboot leaves west.
Hairy blob leaves west.

Which can be pretty spammy if following someone.
Frog, Gumboot and Hairy blob leaves west.
is much neater :)