SpeakTo me

Today, I was trying to add some polish to newconverse. At one point, I started trying to modify its SpeakTo replacement so it was more like the one I put in roodylib, as I have become rather fond of most of my roodylib replacements. Eventually, I decided it might be altogether better to just drop the SpeakTo replacement in newconverse and alter newconverse to work with regular old SpeakTo.

This presented some interesting problems. If a player only types <character name> at the prompt, the engine calls SpeakTo directly so there wasn't an obvious way to redirect things with a before property. I ended up putting some code in the parse_rank property (since FindObject is called a couple times before SpeakTo) to change the verbroutine global if need be. Knowing what verbroutines to expect helped me write an order_response for the character class that could interpret things properly.

As if that wasn't all a big enough pain, I wanted to give the player a "You are already speaking." line if you do >TALK TO CHARACTER repeatedly (instead of an endless barrage of "<character> is listening."). While this was easy enough to trap for a regular TALK TO command, this turned out to be a pain for things like CHARACTER, HELLO what with the way that SpeakTo is always clearing or setting the speaking global. I had to change it yet again (hopefully for the last time) so it only clears and sets the speaking global when absolutely necessary (like, it only sets the global after order_response has been run, so your order_response code can correctly gauge whether or not the character was given his first command of the conversation).

Newconverse still has a ways to go before perfection; some of the messages could be tailored for multiple player persons (right now, it's all written in second player person) and just some general polishing, but hey, we're getting there.