Attributes give me a headache...

Man oh man...

You wouldn't think a simple program to allow players to set their hair and eye color would be such a big deal. It's a fairly straightforward situation in theory. Ask the player, "What is your hair color?" and set their answer as the appropriate property, right? Right. Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.

Not Quite.

Our players -- especially new players, who will be dealing with this program fresh out of the box -- tend to be a little too human, and therefore tend to reach to be a little too UNIQUE. As I'm writing this, I'm picturing puce-colored unicorns, purple-and-yellow striped tigers, beavers with blue eyes. You laugh, but mark my words... we'll run into it, sure as shootin'. We already run into it regularly with descriptions.

MUF is a powerful language in the MUCK world, as NarniaMUCK itself serves to signify. I could actually use this program to curb a bit of what we run into with descriptions by simply programming this Attribute mess so that it doesn't PERMIT players to set inappropriate colors for their characters. With the new request system, player species is autoset, so the program can just check the species, provide a list of appropriate choices, and force players to pick only from what is appropriate.

Of course, that means I need to set up 42 different sets of options, as we have 42 species categories. Granted, some (like Unicorns) are easy, as they only come in one color, but still. All lions are tawny-colored, but some of ours are lighter and some are darker. And to REALLY complicate things, we have many creatures whose coverings consist of two equally-represented colors, like Zebras and Tigers.

MEH.

I had really hoped to have this program available this week, but I'm doubting now whether or not it'll get there.