If you knew exactly which item you wanted to drop and wanted to avoid the ambiguity, don't allow it - 'drop worthless sword' in the first place (or 'drop worth' or some such). Or allow the system to still accept the traditional style of specification, so if you know where it is in your inventory list you can still 'drop 2.sword' without a worry.

I was merely giving my opinion as long term heavy PKer.

It was very common to not know what item exactly I was dropping, but needing extra space in my inventory to get something out of my backpack. I knew the items at the top of my inventory were disposable and less important, so typing "drop 1." was very functional.

Or I knew if I picked something up I didn't want I could just as easily type "drop 1." right after I got it, or give it to someone else. *shrug*

Yes. But we can contrive an endless number of situations that just don't work. The point is that you still get around these problems. Obviously, not providing information you need won't work. :smile: So I'm not sure it's interesting to talk much about solutions where you don't request clarification for ambiguity, without giving people a means to not be ambiguous. That's kind of like building a ship with holes in it…

I don't think it was contrived. A lot of us have already said we wouldn't want to by default display idn's. I'd much rather see the system that stops ambiguity when it's particularly destructive. Like "junk sword", "donate sword" whatever. It may be contrived that a game would even give players access to idns. In any event, configurable makes it more reasonable. I don't necessarily disagree with you, but I do see how some people are gonna want it off if your game is consistent in how it pushes things to lists.

Sounds like you want to have your cake and eat it too. You don't want IDs, but you want ways to uniquely identify objects. You don't like lists, but you think they're a way to resolve ambiguity. You say everything can be resolved with config anyhow, but that somehow the problem isn't resolved yet. :wink:

Basically if you have it be config-based, you're done: you (as a player) can choose if you like IDs, list order, keyword matching, ambiguity prompting, whatever. What problem is left at this point?

Achaea has a specific INFO HERE command that lists items in the rooms along with their IDs. My INFO INV is actually what Retnur posted in the OP. I've never had a problem with it, I actually rather like it: you have one stylized output that reads well, and one more informative output that's also easily parsed by a script.

What the defaults should be. :)

It seems pretty clear to me that the defaults should be what is reasonable for the average user; those who are likely to really care about identifying objects very precisely are also the most likely to be willing to reconfigure to optimize. So, anything that exhibits surprising behavior should be disfavored for the default.

Of course, a lot of these problems go away too with a somewhat more intelligent clients, where you can point and click in an inventory list…

Surprising to whom?

Who else than those new players who don't yet know how to customize their options to get very high precision? That seems like a no-brainer: you don't want to cause confusion for the people who are trying to learn your game.

Ultimately it depends on how important this precision is in the game in the first place. I wager that for many people, most certainly in the beginning at least, keyword matching is more than precise enough. You only start really caring if:
a) you can't designate the items you want to interact with as you explore and learn the world
b) you know exactly what you want to do, and need to do it very fast

A game that fails on point (a) is one that isn't providing a good interface for newer players. A game that fails on point (b) is one that doesn't give power-users a way to tweak their interface to suit their preferences.

In many games, it's quite possible that there is simply no use at all for all this, because the objects are set up such that you just don't have the problem.

So yes: it depends…

Practically speaking, a new player may run into this problem sooner than you would think – on muds with player crafting for example, many items are identical (and yes you can have the system modify the item names somewhat, but I think you'll still end up with a fair degree of duplication).

Interfaces like MXP are nice for this issue, but that doesn't help with scripting or blind players.

I'm on the unique ids are immersion-breaking side of the fence, which I admit is somewhat tenuous ground, because there are probably loads of other immersion-breaking things in a typical mud, but for some reason unique ids especially jump out. Sure, I can turn it off if it's a config option, but I feel like there should be a better interface solution than 'you have to sacrifice this functionality for that interface'. I admit I don't have a clue what that solution might be – maybe keywords and enumeration is the best we've got.

edit: well, and tries – Barm's work sounds promising here, but haven't looked at it yet.

A definition of equality between X and Y is that all of their properties are the same. In other words, two objects are different if and only if they have some different property.

If you want to uniquely identify objects in the general case, without referring to a unique identifier, then you must be able to, ultimately, specify objects using some distinguishing property or properties.

Honestly, I don't understand at all why a unique ID is less immersion-breaking than an entirely arbitrary ordering of objects and having to fumble through 1.sword, 4.sword, 3.sword, oh ok it's 2.sword. (Of course, as I said, with a decent client interface you don't have to be aware that the unique IDs even exist.)
(Well, also to be honest, I don't understand why people speak so much about immersion in the first place, when every single command is subjected to a funky text parser. An immersive environment is one where the interface truly disappears; text-based games do not lend themselves well to immersion in the slightest!)

Regardless, no matter how you look at it the input system must be able to accept a method of specifying objects that is consistent, relatively unsurprising and accident-free ("oops, I just gave away my awesome sword"), while not getting in the way.

MXP and things like MXP in fact help immensely for scripting, because, presumably, the MXP functions by using unique identifiers that scripts can recycle. I'm not sure what you had in mind when you said that it doesn't help. I'm not sure I agree that it doesn't help for blind players either, but then again I have little idea how MXP (and hyperlinks, etc.) might be implemented for a blind player.

Me either. I don't understand why people even name items when you could refer to them by internal indexing numbers.
"Omg, vnum 20393 finally dropped."

You guys wouldn't be having a problem if you didn't give out too much loot all the time. It should be a rare occasion that a useable item drops, and because everything has weight and volume, it's not like you should be able to cart around 12 swords anyways. If you guys would quite being so soft and keep the loot tables lean and abusively mean, it wouldn't be an issue in the first place.

*poker face*

I don't really disagree. I actually never used the number of equipment slots most muds do. I went the more modest route of a mere 7 slots.
(which in turn made me use dramatically less items in the game overall.)

It's not about memory, it's about context. If I type "get sword" immediately followed by "wield sword", then I expect to wield the sword I've just picked up, not the one I've been carrying around for the last week.

A better example of this is typing "remove all" followed by "wear all". Most players expect to rewear whatever they were wearing previously. Likewise if they "wear ring" and it's the wrong one, having to type "remove ring" and then "wear ring" again (as opposed to "wear 2.ring" or whatever) is pretty confusing IMO, and if they have more than two rings it gets even worse. On the other hand, if the removed item is pushed to the front then you can literally go through 2.ring, 3.ring, 4.ring, 5.ring, etc until you get the right one.


Well you should have typed his name out in full. Unlike objects, players almost always have unique names, so there shouldn't be any ambiguity.


The order of processing (and lists processed) depends on the command, and I don't recall seeing any mud that did otherwise. If you type "remove sword" or "drop dagger" there's no point looking for the item in the room.


The concept of vnums is very Diku-centric, not all muds use them - and even those that do will often vary the bonuses for different items with the same vnum. In GodWars1 for example, there was a single vnum for a "ball of protoplasm" that served as the basis for craftable/customisable gear - top players often had their full equipment set made from the vnum. There was also a "brew" spell that allows players to brew their own potions, choosing which spell affects they should hold.

Providing a unique ID clearly has uses for scripting, but revealing vnums would be of limited use for many muds, and giving players two different IDs (one for the item and one for the vnum) would most likely just confuse them.

That was a good point there. Different commands use different sets of lists to evaluate from.

Nice straw man.
Anyhow, if you believe that fumbling through list orders is immersion-preserving, I suppose that's your prerogative…

For it to be a straw man I would have had to misrepresented your position. You seem to think that something like 'get 2039223' is no less "immersion-breaking" than 'get the second sword'. Sorry, I don't see it. So that may or may not be a straw man—But you must be living on a different planet than myself.

I spoke pretty specifically of fumbling through list orderings, so yes, you did misrepresent my position. We've already said several times that list orderings can be surprising and cause confusion. So yes, I think it is quite immersion breaking to not be able to easily say what you want to say and have to fumble through arbitrary list orderings.

In real life, when looking at things in front of you, you don't have to fumble through some arbitrary ordering, you can simply point to the thing you want or describe it by its defining characteristics (the big one, the small one, the one on the left, etc.). In a text-based game it's far harder to do all that and we must use syntax to get around it. I don't see how anybody could possibly argue that having to deal with some occasionally clumsy syntax is possibly immersion-preserving compared to how we normally operate.