[vworld-tech] Verb/action handling

[Brian Hook]

> What is your world model?  

Can you be more specific?

> While you say rooms, are things going to
> happen that cross room boundaries?  

Yes.

> What sort of scalability requirements do you have?

Ideally I want to be scalable to a very large degree, I'd hate to 
implement something with a hard cap on users, rooms, mobs, etc.

> What is the scope of a single room?

As in?

> How much ability do you need to modify the world for scripters/GM
> staff?

A lot.

> Do you allow user programming at all?

No.

> Do you trust everyone that has access to writing code?

Yes (but bugs are bugs, so we're still going to have to solve the 
out-of-control-script problem with Lua).

> Will someone doing extension work be actually writing code, filling
> out a set of rules, or what?

There are two parts to the editing process (at least, as I envision it 
right now, but this is all fluid).  The first is data definition, done 
using standard DB tools.

So you make a new room, assign it basic properties like name, 
description, exits, etc.  It has no intrinsic special behaviour, but 
then again, very few rooms do.

But, say you want to make a room with special case behaviour, I dunno, 
like it heals everyone standing in it every 10 seconds.  To do this, 
I'm thinking that the database author sets the "OnTick" field to 
"HealingRoom:OnTick".

At room load time, its OnTick function is redirected to 
HealingRoom:OnTick (i.e. it's a function pointer).

Which means that someone, at some time, needs to write 
HealingRoom:OnTick.  The larger ramification is that it's a hybrid 
data-driven/procedurally-driven system, and that's a kind of 
uncomfortable place to be.

A purely procedural system is going to have a lot of overhead and 
suffer from all the myriad problems that inheritance/sub-classing have 
but a data driven system is going to have a lot of bloat and spaghetti 
code.

Blah

Brian