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Drealoth · 04-09-2006, 06:22 AM

I think you're missing the point here. The idea is to make it verbose enough that the player doesn't have to worry about getting bogged down in the syntax and can accomplish their goals without having to refer to help files.

Suppose that there are three leather bags. In bag number two, there are two cool swords, the second of which you want to get.

In most muds you end up typing something like get 2.'cool sword' 3.'leather bag'. However, suppose a player doesn't know this - it's not exactly the most intuitive expression out there. They try get second cool sword from third leather bag. That fails on a lot of muds, and I don't think it should. The interface should be intuitive. That doesn't mean that get 2.'cool sword' 3.'leather bag' won't work either - in fact, as I said in an implimentation I would probably pass a hint saying that "You can condense this command to <blah>." My philosphy is verbosity as an option for the player, not a necessity. Or suppose you want to get all of the cool swords from the bag, but you don't want to get the uncool swords or the "sorta cool sword" - is that even possible on most muds in a single command?

In addition, verbosity can allow for more complex commands, giving the player even more freedom to interact with the world in the way that they see fit. I don't know of any mud parsers that would let you specify multiple verbs within a command, or that let you get more than one of a different type of object.

EDIT: So... Ikonboard doesn't support nested quote tags apparently...

04-09-2006, 06:22 AM	#13
Drealoth Member Join Date: Jan 2006 Location: Japan Posts: 74	I think you're missing the point here. The idea is to make it verbose enough that the player doesn't have to worry about getting bogged down in the syntax and can accomplish their goals without having to refer to help files. Suppose that there are three leather bags. In bag number two, there are two cool swords, the second of which you want to get. In most muds you end up typing something like get 2.'cool sword' 3.'leather bag'. However, suppose a player doesn't know this - it's not exactly the most intuitive expression out there. They try get second cool sword from third leather bag. That fails on a lot of muds, and I don't think it should. The interface should be intuitive. That doesn't mean that get 2.'cool sword' 3.'leather bag' won't work either - in fact, as I said in an implimentation I would probably pass a hint saying that "You can condense this command to <blah>." My philosphy is verbosity as an option for the player, not a necessity. Or suppose you want to get all of the cool swords from the bag, but you don't want to get the uncool swords or the "sorta cool sword" - is that even possible on most muds in a single command? In addition, verbosity can allow for more complex commands, giving the player even more freedom to interact with the world in the way that they see fit. I don't know of any mud parsers that would let you specify multiple verbs within a command, or that let you get more than one of a different type of object. EDIT: So... Ikonboard doesn't support nested quote tags apparently...