Zugg Software :: View topic

Posted: Tue Dec 09, 2008 2:00 pm

I am trying to improve the old sailing system I had in zMUD. The goals of the new system are:

1) Be able to select a location from a menu or type an alias with the location name as a parameter to view the sailing coordinates for that location.
2) To have a list of destinations that sailing rules are defined for so that another menu can be populated with just the list of valid destinations based on the current location. A trigger would take care of populating this list when you boarded the boat and of disabling this list when you got off the boat.
3) To have a set of rules defined for each source/destination location pair somewhere so that triggers can automatically be created from them to set the new direction that we need to sail when that coordinate is reached. The existing system simply continues sailing in the @curdir direction automatically. The @curdir variable is updated when one of these coordinate rules is triggered to change our current sailing direction. The triggers used are currently just hard coded into class folders that are enabled/disabled based on the alias used to start sailing.

I had started down the path of using a database at least for item 1 and possibly item 2, but it didn't seem like the database features offered are a good fit for item 3. I was considering just a set of flat files containing the scripts to create the triggers for item 3 instead. Is this enough information for someone to advise if I'm going in the right direction or to suggest a better way?

Thanks!

Wizard Joined: 14 Oct 2000 Posts: 1368

Your description is not really that detailed, so it is a bit difficult to give advice on it. However from your description, I assume this is a pathfinding problem. Have you considered representing the sailing coordinate system using the zMUD mapper? Then you could do, "#walk vnum" to have the mapper find how to reach the destination.