Specifying things with more than one keyword

[Cindrak]

How about being able to specify people and objects with more than one keyword? For instance, "get small.jade-handled.dagger leather.backpack." There are cases in which I have found myself wanting this feature, and cases in which I can imagine it being pretty much necessary. Say you're in a tavern with a bunch of others, and you want to involve the lithe, blonde-haired woman in an emote? But wait! Also in the room are a blonde-haired, sausage-lipped half-giant woman and a lithe, powder-faced whore! You're really not interested in getting mixed up with either of those two, but using either 'lithe', 'blonde-haired' or 'woman' will key to one of them, because they're higher up in the room list. The only way around this that I can see is to find out through trial and error that the one you really want is 2.lithe, or 2.blonde or whatever. This strikes me as a really painstaking workaround, and one that could be better remedied in the code by allowing cross-referencing of keywords. It IS realistic to be able to refer to the person you meant to refer to, isn't it? What say you?

-Cindrak

(Please, please no posts about how the coders have enough on their hands. Let's talk about the merits of the idea itself, and leave the coders to decide what they have time to code. Just register that in the vote.)

[Cuusardo]

I think your poll needs an "I don't care" option.  I am pretty apathetic about this idea.

[Forest Junkie]

It's nice.

There are ways around such problems, but that would be a welcome addition. To me at least.

[Larrath]

What FJ said.

It's not something we have to have right away, but there are no downsides for this as far as I can see.

[Bestatte]

Currently we have the assess -v command, which lets you figure out WHICH blonde you're trying to target before any emotes. Unfortunately that only works if all the blondes in the room stay put, and no others show up the second that you hit the enter key.

I LOVE the idea of targetting specific things in rooms, in containers, 3 leagues away in combat..by combining keywords. I think it's awesome and can see great benefit to it, and zero fault.

FURTHERMORE! (you knew that was gonna happen right?)

I would also LOVE to see a multiple-combined-item capability.

Example:

l in box
In a green box you see:
a few blue stones
a few red stones
several green-flecked blue stones
a couple of blue-spotted stones
a few green-striped yellow stones
many yellow stones
a few orange-flecked blue stones
many blue-striped stones
several green stones
several orange stones
a blue-flecked green stone
many yellow-flecked blue stones
several yellow-flecked green stones

and you want to get all of the orange-flecked blue stones, but you don't want to get any of the others.

I'd like to be able to:

get all orange-flecked.blue box

and then I'd be able to get as many of that SPECIFIC type of stone as my inventory capacity will allow, without having to get all the wrong ones first just to get the right ones to show up at the top of the list..or have to deal with counting and subtracting and all that kind of shit.

[Cindrak]

I would also LOVE to see a multiple-combined-item capability.
<snip>
I'd like to be able to:

get all orange-flecked.blue box

This was going to be the second part of my suggestion, and I was witholding it to see how people reacted to the first part. But yeah, I think that would be very valuable as well, and have found myself missing that functionality on several occasions.

-Cindrak

[Marauder Moe]

I've always thought this was needed, but I have a feeling the targeting functionality is pretty deep in the DIKU code and maybe impossible or at least enormously impractical to add.  :?

[Cindrak]

I've always thought this was needed, but I have a feeling the targeting functionality is pretty deep in the DIKU code and maybe impossible or at least enormously impractical to add.  :?

I admin a DikuMUD which has had this functionality added, and I have personally added it to a CircleMUD from the ground up (please don't judge me for working on a CircleMUD ). It took a couple of hours of concerted effort to get it working and debugged. If any coder wants to contact me for code snippets, pseudo-code and/or suggestions, I would be more than happy to oblige.

-Cindrak

[Maybe42or54]

How many times do we have to beat the dead cow on this idea?
Most of the playerbase has agreed and agreed and agreed on this time and time again.

[EvilRoeSlade]

I couldn't do anything but endorse this idea.  And even if it has been mentioned before, I don't see why it can't be brought up again.

[Armaddict]

I like it, but it's not very high priority.

Like it was said...it's a welcome addition, but we can do without it until there's time for it to be done.

[Cindrak]

Just to demonstrate how easy it is, here is the function that would do most of the legwork for this idea. Then it's a simple matter of pasting in the function wherever keyword checks are made in the code. The keyw_list is a space-delimited list of keywords (although I don't know how they're stored for chars and objects on Armageddon, but modifying it to reflect this would be a simple matter.) str is a list of keywords separated by periods. The function returns true iff the keywords in str are a subset of the keywords in keyw_list, so for example

Code Select Expand

keys_to("dirty.bright-eyed.elf", "elf crusty mumbling bright eyed bright-eyed dirty rinther Dwight") returns true. Here's the full function, in C:

Code Select Expand

bool keys_to(const char* str, const char* keyw_list)
{
   register const char *p, *n;
   bool match = true;

   if (!keyw_list)
       match = false;

   while (*str && match)
   {
       n = keyw_list;
       match = false;

       while (*n && !match)
       {
           p = str;

           while (tolower(*p) == tolower(*n))
           {
               p++;
               n++;
               if ((!*p || (*p == '.')) && (!*n || (*n == ' ')))
               {
                   match = true;
                   break;
               }
           }

           if (!match)
           {
               for (; *n && !isspace(*n); n++);
               for (; isspace(*n); n++);
           }
       }

       for (; *str && (*str != '.'); str++);
       if (*str == '.')
           str++;
   }

   return match;
}


[The7DeadlyVenomz]

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