Clothing / item messages, perspective and advanced pronouns

[Timegrinder]

Long ago I added some information regarding advanced substitutions and perspective substitution for item messages (clothing, weapons etc) that caused some problems for players.

This was due to some restrictions on what subs players were permitted to place in messages to prevent them abusing the MOO substitution code and see or cause things they weren't meant to be able to.

I have now updated the parser that checks through player changed messages when they're attempting to alter clothing, armour, weapons etc.

Previously the offending tokens would just be stripped (but still had the message updated) giving some weird results and causing players to not be able to use the advanced tokens at all - in some cases it didn't even really make sense as to why it was happening or what was/wasn't okay unless the player extensively tested, or was already familiar with MOO code.

Now the parser should support any tokens they would normally have access to, not permit the ones they shouldn't, and won't interfere with perspective tokens at all (they weren't abusable, but the code still sanitised them under imperfect conditions).

As a result of this, you should now be able to use the full set of sub tokens in the advanced pronouns and perspective substitution help files.

If you still submit an offending token when trying to change a message (usually via the @<msg> <item> is "blah blah" method) you will instead receive an error telling you exactly which word/token was disallowed and the message will NOT be updated until you fix the issue.

This should prevent clothing getting broken messages as well as be more informative to the player.

Also if you can, please start using the perspective hinting tokens wherever possible as it will enrich messages for any current use of perspective, and in future when it's rolled out more broadly.

(Perspective is just where the messages translate your characters tokens to 'you/your' and provide first/third perspective alternations to text depending on who's seeing them)