The lookout

A script check is something out of the ordinary that asks you to answer: proof that someone is at the keyboard. Mid-hunt it is one line among hundreds, and no trigger can be written for it, since nobody knows its words before it comes.

The lookout learns what is ordinary instead. Every line your characters read is noted, and a line it has seen five times is learned and shown no more. Everything it has not learned goes to a stream of its own, lookout. Once the routine is learned the stream is almost silent, and a line that has never come before stands out in it.

Nothing is ever sent to the game.

Watching it

Add the stream’s window from the play window’s Menu › Layout › Add a widget, under Streams, or a tab of it beside another window. The story keeps every line as it was; the lookout’s window gets a copy.

The Lookout trigger comes with it, switched off: a sound and a banner for each line that reaches the stream, at most one every ten seconds. Switch it on with Sound and banner on the lookout’s settings page, once the lookout has learned your routine; its sound and words are changed in Menu › Editors › Triggers. Any trigger can do the same: give it the stream lookout and no words to look for, and it acts on every line put there.

How a line is judged

• The sentence. Each thing the game links in the line – a creature, a person, an item – stands as a placeholder, and your own characters’ names are taken out, so Nisugi picks up a gold coin and Dicate picks up a bronze ring are one sentence, learned together.
• Each thing in it. The words the game named it by are learned too, apart. A sentence learned long ago still shows when what is in it has never been seen: You pick up a softly glowing token comes through.
• The same moment. A line every character of a group hears at once is one occasion, not five: the group does not learn a line the first time it comes.
• Left out. A room’s description, channels, and the lines the ignore list takes: the exits, room titles, what a merchant says to a sale.
• The stat floor. A combat line giving an AS, DS, CS, TD, UAF, UDF, AvD or CvA of 1500 or more is always shown, however often its line has come, and marked in the lookout’s colour: no character reaches it, and a check can hide in one.
• Quiet after login. For the first minute a character is in the game its lines are learned and not shown: the login’s lines come once a day.

Teaching it your routine

A new lookout shows nearly everything for its first days. Teach it from the player logs Hydra has already kept: shut Hydra down, then run

hydra lookout seed

in Hydra’s folder. Every day of every character’s log is read, in the order the lines came, and learned; today is left for next time, being still played. Run it again later and it starts after the last day it read: no day is learned twice. Three weeks of a seven-character group’s logs is about fifteen seconds’ work.

Its settings

Menu › Settings › Lookout.

• Paused: nothing is read, learned or shown.
• Sound and banner: the Lookout trigger, on or off. Off unless you switch it on.
• Mark in the story: each new line is coloured in the story as well, where it came, in the theme’s lookout colour. Best left off while the lookout is still learning most lines.
• Characters not read: names, apart by commas.
• Occasions to learn a line: 5 unless you change it.
• Same moment: the seconds in which one line heard by several of your characters is one occasion.
• Forget one still learning after: a line seen once or twice and never again is dropped after this many days, which keeps the file small.
• Quiet after login and Stat floor, as above.

The lines it leaves out are Menu › Editors › Lookout: one pattern a line, the commonest first. The built-in list brings back the one Hydra comes with.

A line you do not want, or one you always do

Right-click a line in the lookout’s window:

• Forget this line: learned now, never shown again.
• Always show this line: shown however often it comes.

Or type it, with words from the line:

.lookout forget squirrel
.lookout always town crier

.lookout alone says how much it has learned; .lookout help lists the rest, including .lookout clear yes, which forgets everything and starts again.

Where it is kept

What it has learned is in Hydra’s data folder, one file a game: lookout_prime.bin. It holds a fingerprint of each learned line, not the lines: about 200 KB after three weeks. Its choices are lookout.toml, beside it, for every game.