CLOK BBS

I used to play many muds, including one called Legend of the Jedi, which also has a serious devision between IC an OOC interactions. One of the things they did to make this more pronounced was to show a brief character description in place of the name of a character you hadn't met IC.

So for example, if your character hadn't met mine yet, you might see something like "You see a tall woman with long red hair" or something. You could let each person set there own anonymous string, or just choose two factrs from the character description and apply them across the board. After you formally introduce yourself IC, (the command 'greet' was used in LOTJ for this purpose) the anonymous string was replaced with the character's name.

I'd love to see something like this here to make the divide between IC and OOC interactions an information more pronounced.

What do you all think?

I really like this idea, would be much easier to distinguish between those I have met and those I haven't met. Probably wouldn't be to hard to code in either.

I have similar experience from other MUDs that I have played, though the command for it was 'introduce', and you could set pretitles, surnames and suffix titles. I don't mean preset titles like there are here on CLOK for OOC purpose only, but what your character felt to call themselves. Such as if they studied herbalism, they might call themselves a herbalist.

Similarly, there were some adjectives you could use to define your character before it was replaced with it's first name of the introduce string. I'm pretty sure that it's been pretty well decided that the idea of not having the name hidden in any way was how CLOK would work though, as nice as it would be for a mask to conceal your identity in more measures than (face-covered).

This has been suggested before. And while I am firmly in favor of this being implemented, the GMs don't seem to like it all that much every time it's been suggested.

Personally, I think it really helps keep the IC environment IC, and it helps reinforce when you have and haven't met people. Some muds (like the one Tangela mentioned) even have it so that if you don't see someone for long enough, you forget them and that was always really neat to me.

I've actually pondered how to do this many times over the last yearish. I'd like to make it work somehow. Adjusting the code to accommodate would actually be a nightmare, though. Alterations would have to be made all over the place, and the code is varied enough that a simple mass find/replace wouldn't be possible.

Outside of the coding difficulties, there appear to be a number of people that can provide a great number of suggestions to help flesh it out. Of course that also increases the already sizable workload that you're all already graciously doing for all of us. Speaking of that service, I've never really noticed any option to donate to our lovely devs. Am I just blind, or is that something you're trying to avoid?

You can donate to Jirato to help cover server fees! There's a post somewhere on the BBS, Dakhal.

I think that if it manages to get created it'd be great. Perhaps you can do something similar to what's done with Animates, Rias, and simply restring players as "A man/woman" until they've been added to the Friends or Enemies list?

I think there are easier systems that the majority of the playerbase can utilize to keep these separate such as notes/string highlights or even just using the friend system. In fact, I would like to see the friend system become a bit more robust which seems like an easier and less time-consuming solution.

Avedri wrote:I think there are easier systems that the majority of the playerbase can utilize to keep these separate such as notes/string highlights or even just using the friend system. In fact, I would like to see the friend system become a bit more robust which seems like an easier and less time-consuming solution.

That could work well. I don't use the friend or enemy list because they change RP verbs, and not always as one might intend. I'd love to see an 'acquaintance' list added to work with the friend list and enemy list.

I also think it's a cool idea. It's just a coding nightmare.

Implementing this just for stuff like the Also here: lines and say is simple, however, the billion other verbs and functions we have that have output messaging and especially stuff like people using emotes with people's names makes this much more complex. I'd have to say if the MUD wasn't designed for this kind of system from the ground up, it's not really going to happen until we see flying pigs.


Maybe I'll have a flash of inspiration some day and come up with a solution to implement this without having to sift through tens of thousands of lines of code. For now though, it's going to remain at the back of my mind. Sorry.

I can't remember the character creation process exactly, but if those values are saved in the player files, I'd suggest utilizing those values to set a character string instead of a name, like "a $age $gender with $hair and $eyes stands here" and have the introduce system be separate, such as "remember $keyword as She Who Will Not Be Named". Could still be a coding nightmare though.

sona wrote:I can't remember the character creation process exactly, but if those values are saved in the player files, I'd suggest utilizing those values to set a character string instead of a name, like "a $age $gender with $hair and $eyes stands here" and have the introduce system be separate, such as "remember $keyword as She Who Will Not Be Named". Could still be a coding nightmare though.

Yeah, that's the easy part. It's updating and rewriting the message output for everywhere we use someone's name in almost 3500 different places that's the hard part.
I'm fairly sure that's not a comprehensive list either. And as Rias said, we can't do a simple find/replace, each one of those will need to have conditional checks added to see if the name is known or not.

yeah, that's a big number, it'd take some serious doing and probably hand picking through most of it. Likely not worth the time/energy investment for the results, but it'd be cool if we could have it. Just super low priority though.

There was something wrong with my grep expression... whoops.

Thought it seemed a bit high. Still a lot of places though.

Here's a bit of trivia. CLOK has over 110,000 lInes of code in verbs and standard functions only. That's not including spells, modules, or the core server code. Yikes! We're not quite in the millions yet though. :-)