I'm thinking that perhaps the room vnum should appear at the top of the "look" data in case clients want to capture more information. Something like:
Room Vnum: 8000
West Gate
This is the west gate of the port city of Bal Harbor. A wide dirt
roadway leads in between a pair of squarish-looking guard towers into the
city to the east, and to west disappears into a flat grassy plain. Visible
to the far west is what appears to be a forest or jungle that rims the
entire western horizon. To the east, the roadway can be seen to lead into
a distant town square.
Exits: East West Up
It seems like that would allow clients to grab the vnum and then the title, description, and exits if desired. Does that work? Does it really help you guys to have brackets and such around the values?
Teker is there a central teleport function, which could trigger a msdp room vnum update? I know currently all the variables spit out on a timer, but how hard would it be to have it update when it changes, i.e. when player teleports (i.e. tranfers via any method)?
There is a function for adding a player/mobile to a room where it would make sense to refresh that information in MSDP. I'm barely familiar with MSDP but I can look into it further to see if I could add something that doesn't break the clients. I don't like the current structure of the MSDP data - I would prefer that we send down tables of data instead of lots of little pieces. Instead of having ROOM_VNUM and ROOM_NAME, for example, we would have a single table called ROOM that would contain both values (and probably more). Similar to how the GROUP table works now.
There will be a couple of text changes coming in the next reboot (not today's) to help in syncing the client.
1) After entering a correct password:
Old: Password accepted. Press return to continue...
New: Welcome back [Character Name]! Press return to continue...
2) After creating a new character:
Old: New character creation complete!
New: New character creation complete! Welcome [Character_Name]!
These will allow us to get the character name ahead of time so that we can load character specific settings into the client.
3) When attempting to cast a spell that we don't know.
Old: Sorry, you can't do that.
New: Sorry, you don't know how to [cast|play|sing] '[spell/song name]'.
This will allow for the client to notify the group if the player can't cast 'visage' or other spells requested by the leader.
Off topic, but given splork's anxiety about displaying damage as part of the game, could they invisibly msdp it instead?
We've discussed allowing players to see this data in some form but I don't think any progress has been made in that direction. I'll see if I can remove an obstacle or two.