[Reality] Exits

[Christopher Armstrong]

>>>>> "Jp" == Jp Calderone <exarkun@meson.dyndns.org> writes:

    Jp> On 17 Jun 2002, Christopher Armstrong wrote:
    >> >>>>> "Jp" == Jp Calderone <exarkun@meson.dyndns.org> writes:
    >> 
    Jp> On 17 Jun 2002, Christopher Armstrong wrote:
    >> Is that all you meant? how about going a bit more in depth for these
    >> cases?

    Jp>    Um, yea, mostly I was just listing some more examples.  The only
    Jp> real difference most of these would have from ships is they'd be one
    Jp> room areas.  They also demonstrate why being able to look through an
    Jp> entrance might be nice.  eg, "look through flap on tent" after you
    Jp> "open flap on tent" to see if anyone is inside (and of course, don't
    Jp> show anyone inside the oil drum if the top is on).

    Jp>   Hmmm.  One room areas.  Would it be worth it to specialize on that
    Jp> case?  Nah, probably not...

See, we wouldn't necessarily need them to be Areas. They can just be _any_
Thing with an 'entrances' attribute. i.e., a Tent object might have
self.entrances = [Exit(from=OUTSIDE, to=self)], or something like that.

    >> That's what the 'entrances' attribute would be (A list of Exit objects
    >> meant to be exposed to the containing room). adding and removing stuff
    >> from "entrances" can probably be implicit -- that's the point of having
    >> Exit objects track what their 'source' and 'dest' properties are. Unless
    >> you can come up with another reason for an explicit API :)

    Jp>   Arg, implicit.  Okay, it fits with the rest of Reality, I guess I'll
    Jp> just have to get used to it. :)

IMO, it's not too bad at all, because the (defined!) behavior seems pretty
simplistic, and there aren't any whacky cases that I can see that will confuse
people.

    Jp>   Going back to the case of ships, say we have a hangar with 10
    Jp> freighters prepping for launch.  "go hatch" just doesn't cut it.  "go
    Jp> hatch on Sunrise II" works a little better, though "go through the
    Jp> hatch on the Sunrise II" is nicest ;) Syntax aside, a way to
    Jp> disambiguate entrances is a must.  You can't count on the names being
    Jp> unique since creators will have no way of knowing in what company their
    Jp> ship will eventually end up.  Extending ambient_go to recognize

Probably verb_go/enter, if we do end up going with first class Exits.

    Jp> "through" and/or "on" and then passing the Thing that is matched by
    Jp> those prepositions to findExit() or findDirection() makes sense to me.

Yeah, I agree. This is why sentence needs to be flexible enough to allow
completely "non-conformant" commands, and being able to override object
lookup... or something. I'm tired.

-- 
                                Chris Armstrong
                         << radix@twistedmatrix.com >>
                http://twistedmatrix.com/users/carmstro.twistd/