Adding a feature: Climbing

This is a tutorial on how we could implement a climbing mechanic into RockMUD.

The wish-list for this feature is as follows:

• We need a consistent api to handle all climbing needs.
• Rooms that require climbing can be reached without the skill; however, a 'climb' check needs to be passed. Failure results in a wait state addition (time penalty).
• In one of our example rooms a 'critical failure' (when the player does not have the climb skill) should result in a fall resulting in death.

Lets jump right in.

###Prefance: Obtaining a Climb Skill### At this moment the climb skill is obtained via 'say yes' when in the starting training academy room. You can deconstruct that work to understand how to add a dynamic skill to a game entity -- but basically you just add a skill object to the entities skills array.

    Character.addSkill(entity, skillObj);

You can build an on-the-fly skill object if you feel confident enough, but the ideal way is to grab a skill from an entity that already has it. So for the sake of completion:

var skillObj = Character.getSkill(trainerMob, 'climb');

Character.addSkill(entity, skillObj);

###Goal One: Ensuring we can easily process room-to-room movement with a climb requirement### Luckily this is a pretty easy thing to implement -- we can use the base movement events available to rooms. In this case onEnter and beforeEnter.

NOTE: There are a couple of convenience properties on room objects that enable wait-state and movement increment without the need for scripting. They are waitMod and moveMod respectively.

First lets add a new room to an area. In this example we'll use the Mud School -- midgaard_academy.