Re: Triggers / Actions

From: Lord Kyu (Sythrel@Adelphia.net)
Date: 10/17/00


Blaize Imperator wrote:
> Was there a time before people used clients?

   Indeed, there was a time when raw telnet, or Ripterm was the best you
were going to get as far as a client went, with the closest thing to
alias saves was using macro's from your computer itself.  Though that
time was long ago, and with it died the respect and honor code of the
old realms.  We move forever forward into a "point & click" generation
who doesn't wish to learn the realm, or how things work, but rather the
quickest way from point a to point b to kill that huge mob to get the
most experience and gains levels.  The same players who idle in a couple
of zones and then complain that there is nothing to do when they have
reached the maximum level.

   Trailing off on a tangent, I am working on making it so players must
travel.  There have been many ideas for this.  Anything from mob
experience limits, that when a person kills the same mob over and over
it loses battle worth (experience gain), from making travel points, or
quests between certain level intervals.

   Something I was thinking about doing along with mob experience limits
based on how often a specific character killed a mob, was also to check
how often a specific mob was targeted by everyone in the realm.  If
everyone always goes to kill "the ancient trees" then each time someone
does, the mob saves info from each time they were killed, and every
handful of ticks, or zone resets, it lowers the number.  So the
experience rate would always be fluctuating.

> This is a pretty good idea...one way to implement this would be to have
> a "no_trig" function that randomly inserts a blank ascii character into the
> string, then returns the result.  You don't want to use this on all output,
> only on things that players can/will abuse, such as track, people entering the
> room, etc.
>
> ***
> send_to_char(no_trig("You sense a trail west of here"), ch);
> ***

   Indeed again, though the function ideal is not the hard part, but
rather finding an ascii character that will work for all of the
clients.  A lot of the clients ignore a lot of the ascii character by
default, unless set to character mode, or something like that.  So, my
search through ascii character maps over and over, while testing several
client types remains, and it grows tiresome.

> For the ascii character, you could use a random character, in the same color
> as the background instead of a space.  It would be detectable if the player
> looked for it, but if it was a random character in a random part of the
> string, they could not set up triggers for all the combinations.  And normal
> players, not trying to abuse the system, would never know that space is really a
> black "@".

   Yes, using black on black is great, though again, some backgrounds
that mudders use are not black, such as the raw telnet from Windows.
Through, then, you can always select color normal, or default, for
backgrounds, which would work okay.  But then, it becomes a matter of
them seeing it when the highlight.  Even if it is random, I would prefer
that the method I use is almost completely untraceable.  Thank you for
your suggestions, I have been saving them all to a file and maybe a
combination of the ideas will work in the long run.

--

«¥» Lord Kyu «¥»


     +------------------------------------------------------------+
     | Ensure that you have read the CircleMUD Mailing List FAQ:  |
     |  http://qsilver.queensu.ca/~fletchra/Circle/list-faq.html  |
     +------------------------------------------------------------+



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : 04/10/01 PDT