[Reality] Markov/Probability tables added

[Glyph Lefkowitz]

2 notes; our DNS was down AGAIN and so we are still recieving lots of
email that was sent to the list.  SORRY for these delays.  We will be
moving Zaibach's DNS onto Zaibach from now on.



On Sun, 26 Dec 1999, Ben Sunshine-Hill wrote:

> Actually, I had put the finishing touches on the weather system on my
> game about 15 minutes before I read the Markov tables announcement.
> (Moral: I should've procrastinated.) While the system I developed is
> probably pretty singular to my game ("raining", "wet", and "dry"), I
> think one of the first ways I'll play with Markovs is to redo the
> weather. What I'm really interested in is criticism over my system for
> distribting the weather.

I love you, man.  I'd love to see the Markov'd implementation before we do
anything "real" with it, but this sounds great.  One thing you MAY want to
consider is making the weather actually have an effect on characters
(sending them a "you are cold","you are wet" event or somesuch...)

> In my game, there is a special room, called "Outside". All rooms that
> are outside are actually <I>things in that room</I>. While this is
> probably a pretty evil bit of hackery on my part, it hasn't caused any
> problems yet (except when I accidentally put "Outside" in itself...bad
> craziness).

This is not "evil hackery", in fact, it's the correct and appropriate way
of doing this!  We had originally designed weather to work this way but we
never got around to doing it. 

> All outside rooms also extend Class_Outside, which is not itself in
> Outside. Class_Outside has handlers called "UpdateDescHandler" tied to
> event "motif".

Sounds interesting.  This is the only part of your design which sounds
slightly erroneous.  Why do you need to extend them AND place them into a
super-location?  ("Zone" is what we called them in our proposal).  It
seems to me like UpdateDescHandler should be MetaUpdateDescHandler and it
should be handled on the zone only (outdoors).  It should cascade down
into each room and set the 'weather' description element on them, not call
event handlers (since, when does 'motif' ever do ANYTHING but update this
particular description?  Since you'd never want to handle another event or
do something different there, you might as well embed all the code in the
one toplevel event handler.

> So (for those of you who are still awake and with me), what do you
> find wrong with this system? Are any of my techniques going to bite me
> in the arse later on?

I like it.  Sounds good, but it could probably be a bit simpler.  I am
THRILLED that somebody else implemented this though =).  I wish I could
write more on it now, but I'm catching up on email on sunday night, so
I've gotta keep this relatively brief.

> P.S. Merry Christmas, everyone!

And a happy new year.

----
The Tao is like a glob pattern:             It is masked but always present.
used but never used up.                     I don't know who built to it.
It is like the extern void:                 It came before the first kernel.
filled with infinite possibilities.         [glyph@twistedmatrix.com]