Targeting Pronouns

[DavidRieman]

A great suggestion was made to utilize targeting pronouns in the targeting system. These can be strong keywords recognized by the targeting system (#203) for the player to easily narrow down potential targets. For example, kick foe could target only entities marked as enemy combatants by the combat system. (If target disambiguation is enabled, you'd be prompted for a list of valid targets who are your active foes.) Here was the recommended list of Targeting Pronouns we can start with considering:

  me: your character
  him, her: the first male or female in the room
  them: the first being in the room
  it: the first being or item in the room or inventory
  this: the first item in inventory
  that: the first item in the room
  friend, member: the first group member in the room
  foe, enemy: your opponent in a fight, or the first non group member in the  room

In WheelMUD terms, we could expand the list with things that tie pretty directly to Behaviors. Like look mob could target Things in the room which have the MobileBehavior, get object might target Things in the room which have some other behavior (such as those that allow the player to pick them up or interact with the thing as other classes of "objects"). Would that include fountains and the like? IDK, we'll need to think more on that stuff, but the point is that we can assess each of the recommendations above and then go above and beyond from there.

Since we probably don't want physical gender to be a character selection choice out of the box (but rather pronoun set selection upon out of the box character creation steps)... Paired with possibly dubious value, targeting via him, her are probably something we can skip entirely or at least give thought first to hypothetical value of their utility. I'm leaning on skipping them.

We can reconsider what some of these mean too, and whether their meaning may be different depending on whether the game is configured for target disambiguation or not. For example, should it always refer to the "first" thing? Or maybe it should refer to "the last applicable thing you interacted with"? Like drop short sword, whoops, get it would pick the short sword back up since it was the last thing interacted with? (That can get messy for commands with multiple targets, like put short sword in chest, get it may be hard to know if it is the sword or the chest, and get it from chest and get short sword from it might also be things to type. Probably we shouldn't stress too much about these extreme edge cases though as they'll be very complex and hard to design for, for very little player gain. (Chances are such compound actions like put short sword in chest will have two rounds of code going through targeting system, and probably the last one to run would be the one that "changes the 'it' weak reference to the last resolved target" - and that's probably sufficient for our needs.)