Post:Tapping My and someone is in the room whose name starts with My - 10/05/2016 - 17:49

Re: Tapping My and someone is in the room whose name starts with My · on 10/05/2016 05:49 PM CDT	12758
The LOOK verb uses its own custom parsing; most of the verbs in game are parsed by the engine, though. And when I say custom, I don't mean it's nice an modular and we could just call out to it and reuse it for TAP, I mean that it's unique to LOOK and not usable in other contexts. So of course I had a gander at TAP. It turns out that TAP has its own parsing subscript, written more than 15 years ago, that handles parsing only (this is pretty unusual for a verb). This parsing code is twice as long as the entire Regen spell. It is longer than the vanilla transference system for Empaths. I know lines of code isn't always a useful metric of complexity, but I hope to communicate that making changes to it isn't as simple as flipping a switch or copy and pasting some existing code into the TAP verb script. In general, though we can't change this on a system-level (e.g. just make all verbs check for items on the player then other players) without either changing the engine (non-onsite GMs can't do this) or manually changing the parsing of every script, with zillions of consequences that we probably won't foresee which probably break zillions of other things. Melete
This message was originally posted in Discussions with DragonRealms Staff and Players \ General Discussions, by DR-MELETE on the play.net forums.