Stupid MUCK tricks

So one of the things that I’ve always disliked about TinyMUCK-based systems is the parser. Even Scott Adams’ adventure games, written for TRS-80s with 16K of RAM in 1978, had a (marginally) better grasp of action and direct object. In TinyMUCK, if you wanted to implement just a small set of commands that weren’t built-ins, like (say) “eat,” “sit,” and “listen,” it’d be a fair amount of work: make a listen @action with the appropriate lock and messages in a high-level environment room as a default, then have separate @actions everywhere that needed to be overridden. And suppose you have a room with background music playing, and you’re carrying an MP3 player: make sure your actions are all named right, because native actions don’t actually have objects from the parser’s standpoint.

( But, with some creative MPI... )