Peering into a lit room from a dark room

[Kent]

I know if you peer into a room with no light, you shouldn't be able to see anything...but currently the codebase won't let you peer into it if the peered-into room is lit but the room you're standing in is dark.

It seems it would be an easy thing to look towards the lit room and see what's there. Imagine yourself groping through the woods at night with no light in hand. You come to the edge of the woods to a place where you can see a clearing with a campfire roaring and people sitting around the campfire. Even though you see only blackness behind you and to your left and right, you can easily see the people sitting next to the campfire and the tent nearby them. Conversely, those people cannot see your face peeking at them when they try to look to the treeline...there is a 'fog wall' of blackness perhaps some 25 feet in radius from the centre of the campfire.

So my request is that the Peer command factor in only the lighting of the room peered into.

[Jaster]

Yea, but what happens when they make a campfire in a tree?

[jilliana]

That was a very unsettling image.

[Rias]

You can assume that if the light is far enough away that it's not illuminating the area you're currently in enough for you to see at all, then you're not close enough to peer into the lit area and see it in any detail. It's just one of those limitations of having areas split up into large chunks (rooms).

[Jaster]

But, "on a mud I used to play, for instance", Rias!

[TwistedAkai]

I -have- seen this before, actually. It was in DIKU based MUD, so you could peer several rooms away. If any room it would display is lit, it shows the rooms with dark ones being "It's too dark to see here". It's not a very common thing though. What CLOK presently does is very much the common theme and what people coming from other MUDs will probably expect. So on one hand, since it's the trend, it's not a huge negative the way it is. On the other hand, it could be a significant plus to change it.

[Noctere]

Also keep in mind that the distance between rooms varies from area to area. We have tried to keep the wilderness pretty standard but some smaller areas might take 4 sections to describe one large room while others describe each section as leagues apart. I have even seen some older areas that go back n forth between small and large for each section. Long story short, it makes it difficult to standardize an adjacent room lighting system.

So as Rias said, please just assume that whatever light you have is not bright enough to reach beyond where you are or that a light in the distance is too dark to reach you.