Crossfire Forum

How about e new command (or a modification of 'who') to show who is nearby?

I have a couple of times gone into a map, eg. training on Scorn harbour, looked at who, concluded that it was OK to go and whack out everything with a banishment, only to find that I disturbed someone else.

Now before you start on 'how hard can it be', let me say that this isn't about whether I can read a list of path names, which is basically what 'who' gives. But for one thing, that list looks very messy on my client (GTK, linux) - no columns, and the font is small, so it's not just a matter of a glance.

What would be very helpful would be a 'near' command, that tells you where other players are relative to yourself, like (if you're in the training centre main hall):

j.doe: below in goblins
turbo: below in skeletons
the_pope: above in harbour

- or whatever the right names are... It would only have to show 1 or two levels up or down.

Am I right in assuming that the maps are arranged in a strictly hierarchical manner, so you always go up or down, even when the maps seem to be next door from each other?

jan wrote: Am I right in assuming that the maps are arranged in a strictly hierarchical manner, so you always go up or down, even when the maps seem to be next door from each other?

Nope, maps can be connected anyway from Sunday and often are. Also some maps are not consistant - for example you go east from map A to Map B but going back west will take you to map C...
They are truly a new kind of space IMHO. That closet can be bigger than the whole house it sits in. Think more along the lines of Warner Brothers than Newton and Einstein (or even Dewy Decimal)...

I think it would be pretty hard to do this actually.

I can't believe it would be particularly hard even in this case. Each map must have a list of exits, surely? So the 'near' command would run through this list, look in each neighboring map and list who's there.

I don't think this command necessarily should tell which exit to use to get there - that would in effect give a list of all exits, which could make it too easy.

Or perhaps all we really need is a message indicating whether there are any other players in the same map; after all, the purpose is to make it easy to avoid bothering each other.

mapinfo returns <name of map> followed by <map path>.
maps <map path> returns number of players on the map after the map path.

I know this is not exeactly what you want, but it lets you know how many other people are on the same map as you.