Be smarter about cardinal-direction exits?

[relsqui]

Using N/S/E/W etc. as exits is likely to be so common that it should be easy and not require as much boilerplate to make work as it currently does. Things we can automate away:

• Set messages to include the appropriate opposite direction (i.e. "arrives from the east" and "goes west" or similar).
• Add aliases (pending Object aliases. #109) for northwest, southeast, etc. so you can trigger them with nw, se.

I can think of two ways to spot the instances when we want to do this:

• When an exit is named one of the cardinal directions, half-cardinal directions, or "up" or "down," do it automatically. This is cute magic but runs the risk of false positives (although all it's changing is defaults which the user can still fiddle with).
• Probably better, make a subclass of exit which has this behavior, and a different command for creating them. What would the command be, though? autodig, maybe?

[relsqui]

Reuven noted, out of band, two other advantages to the first method: it's more discoverable, and it doesn't result in two things which appear to be the same type of object actually not being so.

[rlazarus]

Another UI I've seen for this is a "dig mode" where you can move around normally, but walking through a cardinal exit that doesn't exist digs a room and opens exits both ways, then drops you into the new room. So you can walk around your map creating it as you go.

We may or may not want to implement that exactly, but maybe take it as design inspiration.

[relsqui]

Yeah, I've used that too -- Circle has it -- and I think we've talked about it. It's useful for digging out a big area before you begin writing it (or, more charitably, when you've already written it and are just going to be pasting descriptions in). I don't feel strongly either way about implementing it, except in that it's a fair bit of work to do for something nobody feels strongly about. :P

Upon reflection, what about a mix of these suggestions: use a special command for this, but one room at a time, e.g. adig north (or cdig, for cardinal dig, maybe?) will create a new room with a pair of appropriately clever exits, and then you can go into it and adig west etc.