Shattered Kingdoms

only posting in gd from now - thx and have a nice day

Sounds awesome, however if you are going to all that trouble perhaps collating all the code might enable D to make it client side similar to nospam. Although give D's time is a limited resource it might be better spent else where.

I making the assumption this is for combat round commands only so not things like headbutt, circle stab, dirt kicking etc. Also are you using nospam on misses already or do you want to have all the deflects and miss messages as well?

Im curious about how you plan to do this, do you need upper lower and mid attacks for each attack type, or trying to go for simple.
Ideally it would end up as something like,
A graceful female centaur attacks you. [2 hits] Uppper, mid
You attack a graceful female centaur. [3 hits] Lower, lower mid.

However that roughly triples the work.

Can you post a sample of what you are looking for because I have a feeling if I start pulling this stuff from logs Im going to end up with a lot of doubled up information. Are you looking for something like,
[Attacker] life drain starts to warp the [defender] chest.
or am I mistaken with how your code is looking to work. The main reason I ask is because its a lot easier to make sure I am not doubling up information if each different line is the same length regardless of who it is against.

It might be a good idea to open a Google doc so several people can edit it to save on lots of people giving you duplicate information as well. Im going to PM you a few I have, Im motivated now but I dont know how long it will last.

Wouldn't it be easiest to get this info strait from big D himself? Or is there some reason you cannot?

If not, I have 4Gb+ of logs (Thanks HTML for inflating that...) that likely contain encounters with the large majority of creatures I'm happy to donate to this cause.

only posting in gd from now - thx and have a nice day

For anyone that is interested, I was able to get a compact mode working but not stable. By not stable, I mean that it causes memory and buffer errors in zMUD and causes the client to crash.

I'd be interested in seeing what i can do with it in terms of handling the issues within the script. Let me know.

Id be interested in taking a look at it. Its been over 8 years since I have have done any serious programing but I like to remember I am better than I probably am.

The feature is functionally impossible.

There are roughly 95 weapon types and roughly 7 target areas and something like 3 or 4 different outcomes of a hit. Multiply this 21 by as many damage types as there are in the game. This number is a floor, not a ceiling. Consider kill messages, dismemberment, and so on.

You must potentially evaluate this many regular expressions per hit every three seconds without causing any lag. You must also store target names, detected by these regular expressions, in working memory to retain hits. You must also display this information within 150ms of receiving it. You must also intelligently deal with "Someone" being in the equation.

The MUD can sometimes run into packet errors common to the TCP stream where a packet cuts out and is detected as a false carriage return: this is more likely the worse your connection (phone players, I'm looking at you) is. You will have to either work with the latency introduced by packet patching or intelligently deal with broken packets on input.

The only conceivable way to do this is by first scrubbing out the names in each attack string and passing the result to a hash table. This will be difficult to do because names and attack strings follow no clear distinction rules. Some MUDs have implemented protocol systems to deal with this, such was wrapping XML style tags around important things, like <who>a lofty male elf</who> has been blemished until his atonement. I don't think approaching an API is something that would keep the MUD aligned with what its vision appears to be when it comes to scripts and plugin development. Anyway, the resulting tables will also need to be stored in working memory. The potential for this to run into buffer problems is worrisome... particularly if you're doing all of this with assembly language and no databases.

It would be several orders of magnitude easier for D to build this on the back-end and roll it into accessibility mode.

The core issue is that because we cannot efficiently extract names of targets, we have to search for a lot more than we would otherwise. Even the best tricks might not buy the speed we need owing to bottlenecked input. For more information, reference: Hume, A. and Sunday, D. (1991), Fast string searching. Softw: Pract. Exper., 21: 1221–1248. doi: 10.1002/spe.4380211105

There may be a few weapon types, but there are far less damage types.

And grep, telling someone you can't solve a problem is a sure way not to get hired.

There are some problems you just do not want to be hired to solve, Ardith.