Design

Design

Design goals for the project. This is less about implementation and more about theory.

Goals

Create a world more interactive than Skyrim by trading presentation layer for higher levels of interaction.

Design Pillars

• Least effort possible for content creation
  • Content should be as concise as possible without losing clarity
  • Everything should have a reasonable default
  • Content creators should only need to specify what makes an item etc unique
• Command/Event/Listener model
  • Commands simply parse / understand user input and then create events
  • Commands do not handle or change state
  • Commands should be unknown to game state, events, and logic
  • Commands can do state checks for convenience / clarification, but actual validation (can a player rest) should be done by listeners. If needbe, make the command's event an 'attempt event'
  • All intents and actions are created through events
  • Listeners subscribe to individual events, update gamestate and print to console.

General Design Notes

Any time an activator adds a new triggered event, it needs to be added to the triggered event when statement

Location positions are always relative to their parent. The parent is always (0,0,0). If a location is compared with a location outside the parent, the parent locations are compared.

An event, command and listener should share a package. Event should end in Event, command in Command, and listener without a suffix, with the same main name. If a listener is player only etc, prefix it with player Ex:

• LookCommand
• LookEvent
• Look
• PlayerLook

Design note

• If a keyword is parsed without args, always show response request
• If an alias is parsed without args, use a reasonable default if it exists, otherwise response request
• A user that knows what he is doing will want the default to be used and will use an alias. A user that doen’t know what he wants will probably use the full default keyword, and will want to know his options
• All print statements should end in a period
• Commands' main keyword is capitalized. Aliases are lower case

Testing

If tests are running slow, make sure that json parsing and reflection are not happening as part of unit tests. An easy check is to place a debug point in getImplementation to catch any time a default implementation is being used in a unit test.