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With regards to stealth:

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As stealth and sneaking and hiding is now, it doesn't matter -where- you try to hide (or at least it doesn't seem so).

So here is what I suggest: Give different areas a 'concealment rating', which would effectively be a skill cap for the area. For examples I'll rely on a percentage model as I'm not sure how Sindome's skill engine works.
For instance, if I am standing in a well-lit, almost bare, tiny room with one egress, chances are I -will- notice anyone sneaking in, or hiding in the area, whether they're a super magical ninja master or street trash. So a skill cap of 10-15% would be adequate.
However, in a large, badly lit area with many hiding places, like a warehouse or street, there should be no cap, thus 100% would be the concealment rating - i would depend exclusively on the person's skill, as the area is perfect for hiding. This would also help to represent how being sneaky and stealthy in small, indoor places is difficult.

By Murphy at Dec 14, 2001, 11:44 AM | 0
And you should be able to peek around corner. But we can already do that, so let's add "listen". You could put your ear to the wall of a direction, and try to hear activity, even through a closed door. And maybe type it by itself, and you'd just listen to all the rooms around you, but at a reduced chance to hear someone.

This could really help thieves and spies. And add another of those little details that makes a game great.

By Jadael at Dec 14, 2001, 1:56 PM | 0
There is already some rooms you can't hide in.
- New Rose Cubes: Can't hide in em.

As for listening you can already hear if there are people talking in some directions…which needs some more looking at anyway.

Standing in a busy street:
You hear someone talking to the west
(duh...)
But same goes with seeing someone standing...

By Stonemonk at Dec 15, 2001, 9:36 AM | 0
The problem with -any- code that involves setting different 'ratings' in different rooms is the fact that someone has to manually walk through the entire MOO, read the locations descriptions and assign the appropriate values.

There's several examples of values that should be set on various rooms that at the moment aren't fully set up through the entire MOO. TV's. At the moment you can see TV's in -almost- every room in the MOO, except those ones we've already decided to remove them from. Ambient population (the yellow 'people' messages you see on the streets.) is set up on all the streets, but alot of indoor public locations need setting up also, a process that would also involve setting up appropriate messages for each room.

Code is already in place to assign a room as unhidable in. Small and featureless rooms. Part of my recent movement recode involved fixing a loophole that allowed you to sneak -into- these rooms and be hidden.

What I've always planned to do, and still will, is to tweak stealth to be modded by ambient population. So, if you'll find it easier to hide in a location -full- of people and slightly harder to hide if you're pretty much alone in a location. This'll mostly apply to moving while hidden, since static hide just involves finding a spot and sitting in it.

Other than that, the last thing anyone has the time to be doing is walking round assigning a new value to every room in the MOO.

And incidentally… if you find a room you can hide in that you think you -shouldn't- be able to hide in, let us know.

The ability to sneak through doorways incredibly easily bothers me somewhat, being that the nature of a doorway restricts your stealthy movements to a focal point at which you'd be very noticable... but hacking that would pretty much render sneaking useless, so I doubt any changes will be made.

Stealth in general needs some tweaking. It's come to my attention that the awareness of people being sneaked passed is very hit an miss. Frequently, characters with very low awareness will have no problem spotting someone with a very high stealth, over and over. I'll be looking into that.

By Rastus at Dec 15, 2001, 10:23 AM | 0
Wouldn't it be possible to do a sort of 'keyword search' of all the room titles and aribitrarily assign a value to a whole class of rooms?

I'm no coder (I used to know -some- BASIC, and a useless basic-like language known as HyperTalk, and some HTML. Like I said, I'm no coder.) , so I'm just hypothesizing and being a real pain in the ass here, but wouldn't it be possible to do something along the lines of 'search *hallway*'  (the asterisks being wildcard-like characters)

-result list appears-

Assign stealth value 50 to all *hallway*

or something equally fast n' simple, and then tweak as (if) the bitching comes in?

Or would that be too messy?

By Murphy at Dec 15, 2001, 3:35 PM | 0
Yep, that'd be possible, and rooms can also be group modified by their parent. eg: modify the generic sewer room and all sewer rooms will inherit the modification. The problem is still making sure the change is consistent for -all- rooms rather than having half the MOO set up for the new code and half, or even just a handful of rooms, unset.

We also have to look into the usefulness of the modification as a trade-off to how much it's going to add to the MOO size. While a numerical property isn't going to be a huge factor, if all it's going to be used for is a slight modification to one single coded aspect and serve no purpose in other code, it's really not worth it, unfortunately.

Also, there's not likely to be a great deal of consistency in the dimensions and reletive stealth potential of two "hallway" locations. Differing light conditions, building design, decor and such would render most locations unique.

That said, lighting does have a variable room value, I can tie that into stealth. Personally I think ambient population modifiers will be enough to sufficiently simulate the differences in terrain.

By Rastus at Dec 15, 2001, 3:46 PM | 0
Reading back a little to Jadael's post, there's actually already support code in place for cybernetically enhanced hearing and telescopic sight. Enhanced hearing will allow you to clearly hear conversations from adjacent rooms, telescopic sight will allow you to look at adjacent rooms as if you were actually standing in them.
By Rastus at Dec 15, 2001, 3:50 PM | 0
There's one /major/ problem with that theory.
Searching through every room in the MOO multiple times searching for one word /would/ cause some major major lag. Which is probably the reason they don't do it.
Just think about it
SD has(IIRC) Approximately 3000 rooms.
And then 60 words per desc.
The MOO has to check 180,000 pieces of different info.
And that's on a per eval basis
By Lujan at Dec 15, 2001, 3:50 PM | 0
I do searches for rooms all the time.

Sometimes when I need to find a room # I do a room search. It's really not that big of a deal.

By Stonemonk at Dec 16, 2001, 7:00 AM | 0
Yes, room searching is easy as pie… and the lag factor is nil. Theres no problem with that... the problem is what Ras said.

Every room is unique, you can't run a search on "hallways" and then make them all un-hideable. Or change the generic to make it "unhideable". Right not I can think of small rooms that would be hard to spot ANYONE in, regardless of if they are hiding. Same goes the other way, I think I can remember a few LARGE rooms that would be hard to hide in.

By Wren at Dec 16, 2001, 8:18 AM | 0
I was talking about listening through closed doors. Just for any sounds at all, not just talking (breathing, footsteps, etc).

And the idea comes up that you could "listen" through open doors, to hear snitchets of converstaion (even without cyber gear), like you can with cell phones.

By Jadael at Dec 17, 2001, 5:08 PM | 0
Um… doesn't anyone like/dislike my idea?
By Jadael at Dec 27, 2001, 8:12 PM | 0
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