Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Huh ?? Did you SAY something ??

As CAM goes forward, I am defining user permissions, channel permissions, guild structures and user levels which go from guest to game developer with each level having unique commands, which of course brings us to the point of what the final command structure will look like, I believe it's going to be something like: {CHANNEL:REQ:PARAMS} where each REQ that comes from the socket is seen as a request for action by the CC component before being sent to its Action handler (AH) and from there to the channel controlling NPC (let's call it CNPC for future reference). Only the CNPC's can return commands that need to be applied to each CC. Some commands will need to take into account distances, which will be done in the CC, commands like "SAY", movement and position data or Area of Effect spells, Thor gives in his book an example on how to do that kind of calculation easily and without spending much on calculations. Apocalyx will need to translate the server packages from {CHANNEL:WHO:{CMD1:PARAMS}{CMD2:PARAMS}{CMD3:PARAMS}} into action on the client and WHO is obviously derived from the CC.

Note to self: Commands are better off as binary structures or at least send the commands list with a number to the client and have the client use a number to shorten sent IP packets. Maybe SOX will translate and package this at some point into a binary format.

Once again I find that prototyping takes so much longer than actual coding, because it really pays off to think before you program and avoid conventional code at all cost !! Erlang rewards those who create the application logic by pattern matching.

Which reminds me, a nice little Eliza implementation for a CNPC might be fun to start with, for those who don't know Eliza, it was invented as a program that would apparently answer with AI to a sentence by analyzing the sentence structure, recognizing certain words and answer with premanufactured phrases, making people think they were talking to a person, well, in the 70's it was surprising, that is. It's still fun though and with little modifications, KVS could provide a short term memory for Eliza to keep track of what users talked about. You may notice that pattern matching is precisely what makes Eliza strong ;) and hence should be trivial to implement in Erlang.

One last side note, I have not yet replaced Mnesia in SMASH given that I am still debugging KVS*.

That's all for now folks,

Sunweaver

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