On Thu, 14 Dec 1995, Pink Floyd wrote:
> The second way is to use commands such as medit, oedit, etc. Every facet of
> building an object would be some subcommand of the oedit command, and the
> builder is in the game, playing, whatever, and uses the command at his
> convenience. I kinda like this method a lot more, it seems like it would
> make building more fun, but less productive. It doesn't seem like it would
> be as fast as the menu method, and since I couldn't have a series of
> questions and answers, its possible that they could forget to set something,
> whatever. (I could probably put in safeguards for that, though.)
>
> Does anyone have any suggestions or experience for what makes a successful,
> appealing OLC?
I really have to say I like the way I've done the OLC interface for
a mud that I'm no longer running. I set a new variable for the player to
one of several predefined values, OLC_MEDIT, OLC_OEDIT, OLC_NONE, etc,
for the mode that the player is in (rather than in the connected
variable) so that the builder can still interact while OLCing. When in a
mode like that, I first send the builders input to another interpreter
function, say, medit_interpreter for example, which and if it returns
TRUE then interpreter isn't called. medit_interpreter looks at the
player's input and first checks number of characters typed. A single
character is assumed to be a direction and so the function immediatly
returns FALSE. If there are any more characters, then I parse the
command similarly to the way do_set does, and if the command is a valid
medit command the function returns TRUE, otherwise FALSE so the command
interpreter can get to it.
If anyone wants my olc.c, I'll be happy to send it. I do lots of
funny things though, like my whole mob prototype table is now on a hash
(NO friggin RNUMs!! YEAH!!). I only completed the mob editing portion
before I stopped working on it, but there's also part of zedit there too.
It's a rather large file as it is, so I didn't want to post it here unless
several people are interested. In fact, I can't believe I actually typed
that much in way back when... it's a scary feeling.
Michael Buselli
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