Feature Request: MMP (Map export) support #1678
Comments
Griatch
added
feature-request
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For what it's worth, the pathfinder contrib already provides a framework for collecting and exporting this data in JSON Graph format. This MMP thing looks like a reinvention of GraphML, so it shouldn't be difficult to export to. The graph can also be made to return only explored and adjacent unexplored nodes (similar to the lock-checking, but the logic would have to be standardized though) to handle the exploration concern. My own concern is how to handle mapping to their idea of what constitutes an "area" and "environment" (or if those are even necessary? The spec is quite undeveloped). |
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Environment's purpose is to colour rooms, area is a logical area in the game, typically rendered as a set of rooms while excluding rooms outside of the area. |
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It's easy enough to create an XML tree based on rooms/exits but to really make the most of this I think we're lacking some other core functionality:
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Description of requested feature:
MMP (I think it would mean Mud Map Protocol, maybe?) is a "standard" published by Iron Realms for exporting map data from server to client in the form of an XML document. This format is also supported by the Mudlet client.
Exporting map data would be interesting to us in order to serve as the dual purpose of passing the same to our web client. In this respect, using XML is not very useful - It'd be a lot better for us to use JSON. So an idea here would be to represent maps as Python dicts internally and convert them at the protocol level - to XML over the Telnet+GMCP bridge and JSON for the webclient / other connections.
Reasons for adding feature:
Map representation is a good feature to have and one commonly asked about. Whereas the client can already send a formatted map as-is, this implementation has the advantage of leaving it up to the client how to actually visibly represent the map data depending on its capabilities.
Expected result of feature
The ability of Evennia to prepare protocol-agnostic map data in Python-dict form and pass it to the client as XML/JSON depending on the protocol.
Extra information, such as Evennia revision/repo/branch, operating system and ideas for how to solve / implement:
A problem/limitation with the MMP which IRE acknowledges is that (in their own implementation) they send the entire map of a region all at once. This makes it less interesting to explore the map. They suggest it should be up to the client to cordon of parts of the map and only show parts of it as the user moves around ... but this appears to go against all rules of sane game server/client relationships. The way to do this would seem to be for the server to only pass the visible/discovered parts of the map to the client and show stub exits to locations not yet explored. It would need to be explored how well MMP would work for this kind of gradual presentation.
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