[DGD]Re:Rooms with views

[Neil McBride]

John West McKenna wrote:
> 
> This will require making a 'description engine' that can walk the object
> graph and write a description of what the player can see.  That's going
> to be quite a challenge.  But that's what this whole project is about :-)
> (making my life unnecessarily difficult, and also breaking as many of the
> standard MUD assumptions as I can find).
> 
I see this as being the most difficult part of anything that goes beyond
the stanard static description of a room.  The ability to create a
system based on coordinates or relative locations is there, and wouldn't
be all that difficult to create.

The method of creating a description for the location you are in,
regardless of the method used, is where the biggest problem lies, IMO. 
The reason for this is simple. If you place two people in exactly the
same position in a room, although what they see will be the same, what
they notice will almost always be different.  This may simply be because
one person has become accustomed to one or more of the things they see,
while the other person may be seeing these same things for the first
time, and would therefore take notice of them.  To take it further,
consider three people standing in the middle of the main street of
Bugsville.  A regular visitor to the area may see: -

"Once again, you find yourself in the middle of the main road in
Bugsville"

On the other hand, a local who rarely travels far from the area may see:
-

"You're in the main street again.  Someone really needs to do something
about that big hole in the street over there."

And finally, someone new to town who has never been there before may see
descriptions from a mixture of completely new things, or other similar
things they have seen elsewhere. Such as: -

"This large street has many people bustling around, somewhat like Busy
Street back home.  Towering over them all is the largest building you've
ever seen."

Further on in the third character's life, they will more than likely
find a larger building, and the one they see now may be used in a
reference then.

As you can see, to be able to create an environment capable of
supporting these sort of dynamic descriptions would take quite a lot of
work, and some damn smart coding.  Although the objects stay the same,
the descriptions can change.

To achieve this would take some sort journaling system to record where a
character has been, and what they saw there.  Then some sort of method
to cross-reference these journal entries with what they see when
something new appears so the description can then be based on the
characters prior experiences.

This is not a trivial task. Anyone done it yet ;)

Cheers,

Neil.

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