Ideas and plans to improve the technical aspects of Ijirait.

Links (for commands)

We could add more command links to make some sorts of interaction easier. Here are some candidates that don’t require longer interactions:

say <something>

emote <something>

Output changes (for commands)

Some commands could do better, perhaps.

map – perhaps we need to limit the output to rooms that can be reached within a certain number of steps, like 3

who – on a command line client, the end of the output is more important, as that’s where the next prompt is; how about reversing the order of the people listed. In a browser, though, the top of the page is displyaed first.

Forgetting

Characters

How would we identify characters to be forgotten?

No command used in 60 days

Rooms

How would we identify rooms that are ready to be forgotten?

No activity in 60 days: no one entered the room

No (inactive) characters present

The paradox right now is that a character being in a room already counts as activity. In my mind, walking through a room means it’s being used. Conversely, a room that the system ought to forget is a room that hasn’t had a character visit it in many days. And that in turn would mean that nobody would see the warning. Or, if they saw the warning, the room would definitely not be erased.

Items present in an erased room should be erased too, regardless of their age.

If part of the world becomes disconnected from the rest after the destruction of a room, it should not get re-attached automatically. The world would fragment into disconnected islands. But the „connect“ command makes it easy enough to reconnect rooms.

Items

How would we identify items that are ready to be forgotten?

Only forget items with rooms, not on their own

If items are used as sign-posts, then many of them will get examined (looked at) a lot. Does that count as activity? it would seem to me that an item whose description is read often should not be forgotten automatically. Perhaps it’s better to only forget items together with the rooms they are in.

Suggestion: instead of forgetting old items automatically, a warning could be displayed after their description, and players would then be allowed to destroy them with an appropriate command.

Example warning:

> This item has been here for a while. You could easily destroy it if you wanted to.

Content deletion

Limiting deletion to connections created by the user would force the system to track who created what, and sometimes we want to delete things belonging to players that are no longer active. Is there potential for abuse? Yes there is, but it isn't any worse than the possibility of spamming new rooms or things, which is already the case.

Currently there are no plans to let players actively delete rooms. Instead, rooms are eventually forgotten, as described above.

Exit descriptions

Should exits have a description? Sometimes we mention them in the room description because that allows us to add some description, but ideally that wouldn't be necessary because people could “examine <exit>”.

Sadly, this presents us with a user interface problem for regular Gemini clients: if you click on a thing, you examine it; if you click on an exit, you take it. But now each exit needs two clicks, right? Perhaps the first click would examine the exit, and there it would have an extra link to take that exit.

For command line client users, the same problem poses itself. Right now you can type the direction of the exit and thereby take it; or you can type the short name of a thing and thereby examine it. With this change, players wanting to examine an exit before taking it, would have to actually type “examine <exit>”.

The current workaround is to have both an exit and a thing with the same shortcut in their name in a room. Then you can “examine <thing>” and you can “go <thing>”, and just typing the shortcut will take the exit.

Technical Info

All the objects have a numeric ID. Should we list them somewhere?

“who” could list character IDs

“rooms” could list room IDs

“map” already lists room IDs!

“forget” already lists room and thing IDs!

“id” is a command to give you the id of things and the id of the room you’re in

We could then add ID handling to all the commands that refer to things by name (“name”, “describe”, “examine”, “go”, “connect”, “hide”, “reveal”, “delete”). Then again, I do feel that these situations being awkward pushes us all to make better decisions regarding usability. Having multiple things in a room with the same name, or having multiple rooms with the same name, confuses players. This should be fixed, not worked around using ids.

A Sense of Activity

How can we it easy to get a sense of activity?

a “shout” command that everybody hears?

a notification when people connect or disconnect

Who else is using a streaming client? I guess we could send such notifications to the streaming clients only, but my suspicion is that I’m the only one using them (this is Alex/Didia writing).