Help Standard

2 March 1995, email to lily-dev@rpi.edu

The new /help standard is as follows:

1. /help will first try to find the help in the standard index.
2. if the player is a programmer, admin, or consultant /help will look in each of those indexes.
3. if the player has given two arguments (poker deal or uno cards) /help will try to find (args[1]+"_obj") (ie poker_obj or uno_obj), and look in that object for an "hm_index" and an "hm_help" pair (just like $help_mgr does) it will utilize the help in that object to satisfy the user's request
4. if the player is participating in a cardgame (player.cardgame = #0) and the cardgame object has an "hm_index" and an "hm_help" pair (just like $help_mgr does) it will utilize the help in that object to satisfy the user's request.

So! If you have a game called "foo" and you want to bundle help with the module (the module the user loads into their server). You need to have the following:

$foo.hm_index

a LIST of words help can use to satisfy user requests

$foo.hm_help

a LIST of STRing LISTs which contain the actual help to print to the user

$help_mgr.foo_obj

an OBJect handle for the $foo object, this is used by /help when a user does the double-argument form of /help.

If the user types in a help that fails to find any matches, before an error is reported /help tries to match the word to (word+"_obj") in the $help_mgr. If the match is found the default help ("help" in hm_index) is displayed for that user.

So! /help uno will find the 'uno_obj', go to the hm_index for the OBJ in that property, find the "help" entry in the hm_index and print that for the user.

Thus, /help package_name is also supported.

We should remove the need to specify a $_obj property on the help object, and if someone asks for help on hearts, we should check to see if $hearts has help. -- CoKe - 16 Dec 2003
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