Inconsistent movement failure messages.

Posted by Magnum on Tue 22 Oct 2002 05:55 AM — 3 posts, 16,295 views.

Canada #0
It finally dawned on me today... Why I get inconsistent failure messages for movement on the mud I play, Ages of Despair.

Simply, the keypad does not use a consistent method for issueing directional commands. That is, the diagonal directions use a short form, like "NE, SE", while the other directions use a full word like "north, south".

If this is the case for you, consider changing your keypad configuration so that all of the directions are either in the long form, or all in the short form.

For Ages of Despair, an LPC-Type mud, it appears the short form will consistently result in "You can't go that way!" error messages, while full-word directions will simply fail with the generic message of "What?".

A tad annoying that the MUD server makes a distinction between the two... Ah well.

Finally, if your MUD supports it (as Ages of Despair does), you may want to issue full "go _____" commands, which should always result in a proper failure message. For example, "go enter village" should send you "You can't go that way!" if there is no such exit from your location.
Australia Forum Administrator #1
Hey, this is a throwback to the days of the Original Adventure by Crowther and Woods. Because character strings were stored in memory as 5-byte strings (for some reason, maybe it was a 40-bit machine), you were instructed to enter: north, south, east, west, however the other directions (like northeast) which were the same as "north" in the first 5 characters, had to be entered as "ne".
Canada #2
Magnum laughs.

Since posting above, I purposely tried "go enter hole" for a hidden exit, and it failed, while "enter hole" alone worked. Sigh. Not all muds are perfect, and do what you expect. :(