Subject: Maas-Neotek Robots in MOO?

From: Tim Keanini <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Nov 1993 05:02:36 -0800

Has anyone heard of a port to MOO with the robot class Maas-Neotek?

Maas-Neotek is a version of a robot that runs externally to some MU*.
I have found it to work for MUCKs adn MUSEs but I don't know if anyone 
has brought it over to MOO yet.  It is a matter of getting this bot to 
handle the MOO syntax.

If no one has heard of this flavor of bot on a MOO then I will start to 
port it on over.
If someone has heard of it, please mail me and I will still port it but I 
would like to keep a dialogue going with you.

Because these bots sit external to the MOO server it does not tax the 
server anymore than a player would.  I have already started the design 
document and the port of Michael Mauldin's code for Colin (a Mass-Neotek 
Bot).  She is called Rachel and she will be a good "agent" for our MOO.

kill -9,
blast

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From: Greg Hudson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Nov 1993 05:40:01 -0800

> If no one has heard of this flavor of bot on a MOO then I will start
> to port it on over.

You may have trouble; Maas-Neotek expects to be able to use prefixes
and suffixes to determine the output of commands.  MOO has prefix and
suffix commands, but they don't deal well with the task-forking which
is common in the Lambda core.  For instance, typing '@who' tends to
yield the prefix, the first section of the who list, the suffix, and
then the rest of the list.

In my opinion, this should be dealt with through a more general task
output labeling mechanism, or perhaps by buffering other output when
commands such as @who are preempted.

--GBH

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 1 Nov 1993 06:05:57 -0800

> Has anyone heard of a port to MOO with the robot class Maas-Neotek?

I tried the Maas-Neotek robot, but eventually went on to write my own.
It needed a little tweaking to deal with the differences in listing
exists and multi-line descriptions.

> If no one has heard of this flavor of bot on a MOO then I will start to 

Well, I have my Perlic robots, but they are not "clean" releases. I use
them to do floating point arithmetic on Empire of the MOOns.

--JRP [Shirgall@various places]

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 1 Nov 1993 06:08:38 -0800

> then the rest of the list.

Gettign around this problem is not too difficult. By buffering up a list
of lines in a variable, like msg, you can make sure prefix and suffix
directives work. For example:

msg = {};
msg = {@msg, "Some text."};
msg = {@msg, "Some more text."};
player:tell_lines(msg);