Phantasmal Site > Design > Mobile Actions

Player and Mobile Actions

In a game where you have players, mobiles and objects separated as Phantasmal separates them, there is necessarily a heirarchy of action types. There are 'actions' in the sense of events, as described elsewhere. There are also voluntary player and mobile actions.

Some commands that a player enters change the MUD's interface to the player. For instance, setting the preferred output language, or the number of columns or rows on the player's display, has no analog in the MUD world. It simply alters the player's interface. These will be called "pure player commands".

Commands that can conceivably be executed by any mobile are more common. For instance, movement, gossip or chat, combat, or manipulating items are all quite well-defined even if done by a non-player character, though not all of these actions may be possible for all non-player characters. Phantasmal should have the ability to execute any of these actions for any mobile, though the result may be an irate message in the system log.

There should be a command structure to encapsulate a request for such a mobile action, so that a character may go through a string of such requests, in order, possibly with scripts running in between. The command structure can be instantiated by the command parser (if a player types a text command) or by a script or other interface, which need not use the same syntax. Having this queue of mobile actions for a given mobile also makes it reasonable to add delays or other side effects to prevent players (or mobiles) from being able to execute commands as quickly as they can type.

Note that pure player commands do not have an entry in the queue of mobile actions. Pure player commands are executed instantly, but they should also have no significant effect on the game world. The player can change from having a display in English to one in Spanish as many times per second as he likes without it being in any way exploitable.