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                    JOURNAL FOR SUNDAY 14TH NOVEMBER, 2021
______________________________________________________________________________

SUBJECT: Barriers, stop words, prompts and other changes
   DATE: Sun 14 Nov 17:47:29 GMT 2021

The release of v0.0.19-beta.1 seems to have been received well, which is quite
a relief. Since then I’ve been working on the known bugs and issues detailed
in the release notes. The changes I’ve made so far include:


  • Barriers are now implemented.
  • Stop word removal is now implemented.
  • Implemented new prompt handling (foundation for dynamic prompts showing
    player statistics)
  • The player’s output when entering/leaving the front-end or game has been
    cleaned up. Uses new prompt handling.
  • The order the #DUMP command uses to identify items has been switched to
    location first then actor. Items the actor has can be specifically
    targeted using the ‘MY’ qualifier.
  • Notifications have been fixed for the OPEN/CLOSE commands when the
    location is crowded.


I’ve had to be extra careful with a few of these changes. Stop words are
checked for and removed from every command parsed. The new prompt handling
touches every message sent out to players. The MOVE command needs to check for
barriers every time a player or mobile moves. Each of these incur additional
processing and it all starts adding up.

While tidying up the messages sent to the player, when entering/leaving the
front-end or entering/leaving the game, I included an implementation for
dynamic prompts. This sets the groundwork for display the player’s statistics
such as health in the prompt.

The removal of stop words is a small thing that can make quite a difference to
the player experience. For example, without stop word removal we are limited
to a very basic syntax for commands:


  >EXAMINE GLASS BALL
  You examine the glass ball.
  As you pear into it you see a small twinkle of light right at its centre.
  >PUT GLASS BALL SACK
  You put the glass ball into the small sack.
  >TAKE GLASS BALL SACK
  You take the glass ball out of the small sack.
  >


With stop word removal we can be a little more fluid and natural:


  >EXAMINE THE GLASS BALL
  You examine the glass ball.
  As you pear into it you see a small twinkle of light right at its centre.
  >PUT THE GLASS BALL INTO THE SACK
  You put the glass ball into the small sack.
  >TAKE THE GLASS BALL FROM THE SACK
  You take the glass ball out of the small sack.
  >


Current stop words are: a, an, from, in, into, of, out, some, the, to, with.

I plan on releasing v0.0.19-beta.2 in the next few days. Next I’m going to
tackle the configuration file and server statistics logging. In the meantime
I’ve pushed out the updates to the public Git dev branch.

--
Diddymus


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