Well, I was just dabbling a bit in DM, and decided to make one of those nifty things that sit in place, and give you a verb when you're near them. I didn't want to use something like set src in oview(1), because that works for diagonals. So I tried to compile set src in get_step(usr,NORTH), which I figured should logically work out. The object's verb would only be accessible when it was one step NORTH of usr.
...Unfortunately, I got this nagging little error:
error:get_step :unsupported src setting
Is there any chance we could get more src settings, like get_step()...locate()...and things of that nature?
Hiead
ID:134675
 Jan 21 2006, 3:48 am
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The problem with the set src settings is that, by their very nature, they must be compile-time-only settings with constant inputs. Conditions like locate() and get_step() do not work too well with constants -- for instance, you would have to use "set src in locate(1,1,1)" for it to be a constant, and you can't really ever give get_step() a constant object as an argument. Even then, they don't produce consistent results depending on changing game situations, while conditions such as oview() always produce a list, even if that list is empty.
src settings are for the client, not the server. Thus, any kind of statement that the client can't resolve on its own means a complicated set of architecture for the client and server, so the client retains memory and can do the processing needed to resolve the setting on its own.
In short, we probably won't see improvement in this area until/unless client-side architecture is introduced.