NPC communication, was Re: [CF-Devel] Re: Info for Gods.

[Mark Wedel]

Andreas Vogl wrote:
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      What we really need to do is highliting the NPC's keywords as they
     
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      appear in his speech. Make them bold or underlined, so that the player
     
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      knows how to continue the conversation. And if a certain keyword is
     
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      supposed to be "secret", the NPC simply doesn't mention it before -
     
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      the latter is already the case in all maps that I can recall.
     
     
 Now this is a good idea.  It doesn't require much work (the communication
interface with the client at least remains the same), yet it makes communication
much easier.

 The way to do this would be to insert a tag or other special character into the
messagein the map itself.  The server wouldn't care about it, and would just
pass the message along to the client untouched.  It is then up to the client to
do something 'intelligent' with that message.

 My preliminary idea would be to use underscore (_).  If the client finds an
underscore in the message, all information until the next underscore are
highlighted.  So in the following message:
Can't you see I'm in pain?

 If pain is the keyword, the message would be:

Can't you see I'm in _pain_?

 And then the client would underscore, highlight, bold, color change, or do
whatever else special it wants with pain.

 The nice thing with the above scheme at least is that even if the client
doesn't do anything with those underscores, the message is still readable and it
still conveys the necessary information to the client.

 The only harder part on this (at least for the x11 client) is that if that
bold/underscore needs to remain in the scrollback buffer, more work needs to be
done to contain specials on that.  Right now, color text has a resolution of one
line for example.