From: lonachon@anu.edu.au (andrew longhorn )
Subject: Re: TECH: My standard is better than your stand
Date: Wed, 1 Jul 92 03:15:12 GMT
Organization: Australian National University


Have any of you bothered to connect to the BSXMUD? (ARGH! a game)
it has "clients" available for the interested people from lysator.liu.se
for IBM, X and AMIGA i think.

Anyway, the idea here (I have become a wizard, or schepper as they are
known, and have started creating some worlds) is that each room,
person, object are all programmed in an interpreted C-type language
called LPC (?) And it is very OO.  To define an object, you make it a
subclass of a treasure or room to identify it's inherent traits. You
then override methods to control it's behaviour. i.e:

graph() {
  return("information on displaying this object");  <- tells the client what to draw
}

get() {
  return 1;       <- true, you can get this object.
}

read() {
  cat("/descriptions/objects/small_ring");    <- gives the user the description
}

kick() {
  write("You stub your toe on the small_stone.\n");  <- tells the user what happened
  say( this_person()->query_name() + " stubbed his toe trying to kick the rock.\n");
                ^- which tells everyone else in the room what they saw.
}

etc....

This system allows each object to define actions that can be performed
on it, and more importantly let's the object add functions to the
holder of the object!  so the holder of a drill now has a command
"drill <object>" added to his verb list.

I believe the bsxmud is a research project into aspects like this to
do with VR and it is quite worth looking into if you have some spare
time.

----

Andrew Longhorn

lonachon@mehta.anu.edu.au