From: Gary Barnett Subject: Adding the concept of 'IT' for object commands Last night I fired up my News Reader and read through the latest discussions on the rec.games.mud.diku group. After reading a huge thread on adding 'it' in object based commands; i.e. > get bread > eat it I figured I'd fire up my copy of Dev Studio and see what I could figure out. About an hour and half later I had fully implemented the concept into my mud.. Much easier than it would have seemed from reading the newgroups.. Details: In Utils.H #define GET_OBJ_IT(ch) ((ch)->player_specials->last_obj) #define GET_POS_IT(ch) ((ch)->player_specials->last_pos) In structs.h (player_specials) struct obj_data *last_obj; int last_pos; With those defines installed, it is just a matter of updating the player's GET_OBJ_IT and GET_POS_IT fields whenever they access an object (get, drop, wield, wear, et al).. A couple special checks need to be made as well. 1) You drop an item.. another PC/NPC gets it.. Needs to cycle through all the players in teh room to remove their if context if it matches the 'gotten' object 2) A test for moving.. if you leave the room, your 'IT' context is invalid. 3) The item being purged, the zone reset removes it, etc. In addition, a line such as this can be used to supply the object to the relevant routine that needs to know about it: if ( (!IS_NPC(ch)) && str_cmp(arg, "it") && (GET_OBJ_IT(ch) != 0) && GET_POS_IT(ch) == X)) { obj=GET_OBJ_IT(ch); } (I placed these checks before the usual get_obj_in_list_vis call for the relevant routines .. all object based commands) note: the above X can be 0 (ground) 1 (inventory) 2 (equipment) and is set whenever an object is accessed via a command (look at, drink, wield, wear, remove, etc) -- Used to supply the position of the object so that the test can fail for the 'current' object being out of position for the relevant action.. i.e. drinking an item on the ground. as in the following two commands: > drop barrel > drink it Just thought I'd post one method for doing this.. It's still early on, but from what I have been able to gather, the players LOVE it :-) I imagine that a lower level call could be used.. i.e. generic find. From looking at the code though, several routines would have to be updated to use that call.. This method seemed easy, straightforward and low overhead. (and easy to debug) --Mallory