Hugo's >GET ALL behavior

 I've been doing a lot of Hugo poking and prodding in the months since my last post, and I'll soon be releasing an update to Roodylib and talk about all of the improvements.  One thing that came up in this time is particularly useful to authors, though, so I wanted to give it its own post.

In the last post, I mentioned how I gave a Roodylib-ized version of Kent Tessman's Spur to someone.  Since he quickly uncovered a daemon bug due to changes in the official Hugo library over the years (I talk about this a bit in the previous post), he switched over the original version at some point.

He noticed that the >GET ALL responses were different in the two games.  Now, Roodylib intentionally skips some items from >GET ALL as I personally feel a long list of objects you can't grab makes a game feel shoddier-coded.  On the other hand, I have some sympathy for the way that >GET ALL can sometimes be used as a sledgehammer to list as many of the objects in the room that can be interacted with as possible.

This got me thinking that maybe Roodylib should have an optional "kleptomaniac" mode where the >GET ALL rules are looser, something akin to verbosity settings.

While researching this idea, though, I found that Roodylib's behavior wasn't as different from the old behavior as I thought;  hidden objects were ignored in both (which is for the best as authors might use hidden objects just for scope purposes).  Roodylib normally skips over trying to get other characters, but turning that behavior off didn't result in the multiple lines of "You can't pick that up." that I had envisioned.

Roodylib also had some code borrowed from Future Boy! that disallowed >GET ALL from being applied to the belongings of other characters, unless the player mentioned them specifically (>GET ALL FROM BOB), but even after I took away that code, belongings of the character I was testing with were being ignored.

In my "kleptomania" test game, >GET ALL only added the ability to try to pick up characters, and that seemed more like a case of being grabby than the kleptomania that I was shooting for.

I eventually figured out the following rules:

• If a parent object (character or not) has a false exclude_from_all property, >GET ALL only attempts to get the parent, skipping all of the children.  This is why when I turned on the ability to try to get characters, the other code became irrelevant.
• If a parent object (character or not) has a true exclude_from_all property (which is Roodylib's default), all of its unhidden children are available to >GET ALL (which the Future Boy! code stops if it's being used).

I just think this is good for authors to know.   Say your game has a coffee table with some stuff on it the player may want to pick up.  Better to make the coffee table's exclude_from_all property true so a >GET ALL automatically tries to get all of its children instead of making players type >GET ALL FROM COFFEE TABLE.  If you don't want the children of an object to show up in >GET ALL, giving the parent a false exclude_from_all property is a quick way to stop that.

Additionally, the ExcludeFromAll routine is what you'll want to edit if you want more control over how the children of objects are handled.  This is where that aforementioned Future Boy! code is.

In the end, "kleptomania mode" was a bust since I don't think I can provide a "kleptomania mode" experience satisfyingly different enough from normal behavior without breaking everything.   Still, I learned something.