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One idea I've always had would be to install a mob conversation editor. Doubtless if y'all are playing MUDs you have seen games like Ultima, where you can chat up an NPC, then go down certain conversational paths to find out about stuff, and there are always a bunch of token questions you can ask every NPC. I always felt this would add a little bit more of life to our players.
It's possible to do with scripts, but as you have no doubt noticed it's a real pain in the ass, especially when you have something speech triggered on "quest" and someone mentions questing, the NPC butts in like a drooling automaton telling you to go gather 3 mandrake roots and bark from the tree of arthritis so he can make some sort of potion and you get experience. Having players engage conversation with an NPC and then actually know what to say to them make it a lot less confusing, in my opinion.
Doubtless other MUDs have this, and I could probably import code, but who the hell wants to do that when you can write it yourself and make it better somehow? 8) These types of dialogue trees are actually pretty easy to implement for someone with a basic grasp of data structures (i.e. me) and would help add a little bit of flavor to the game and take a little bit of the dullness out.
Of course, this would demand the attentive vigilance of our builders, to actually use this thing once it's in. But I have a feeling if I provide a spiffy interface, it would actually help builders stay focused because they could stop fucking with tons of arbitrarily numbered mob scripts and provide conversation much easier. This could also cut down on some of those filler mobs with absolutely no sense of attitude or identity, reinforcing my quality over quantity ethic.
This is in the requests forum just because I guess its the most proper place for it.
I am not actually requesting anyone to code this in for me. All the dynamic memory management seems like too much fun.
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Well, I've suggested a set of triggers that revolve around directed speech (sayto for examplt) that requires that you TARGET the mobile in question. With those type triggers, there wouldn't be the scatterbrained autoresponses that you get with triggering off idle speech. Of course, the pattern matching would require properly matching on WORD boundaries. Perhaps there could be a regular expression module put in with flags for triggers to do regexp matching instead of plain text.
But a conversation editor would be nice. Maybe have it paceable and configurable to do different things besides SAY something…. :!: If this could be handled like I'm thinking it could, this could be made to do speech and scripts, paced out. Each step in the conversation would have a type: speech or a script to call. Maybe have a script command to initiate a conversation sequence and stop the current sequence. Also, have some if-checks to discern if they are doing one and how far along.
