[DGD] Persistance

[Shevek]

At 12:16 28/12/01 -0500, you wrote:
>On Fri, 28 Dec 2001, Kevin N. Carpenter wrote:
> > > It's exciting to think what persistence could bring to a MUD.  Players
> > > could be allowed to change the landscape - but wisdom tells us that
> > > players aren't always going to be thematically correct, and sometimes
> > > they are going to be sloppy, poorly described, with typos and
> > > grammatical errors.

Letting players build directly is always going to lead to complications 
like this. I'm thinking they should be allowed to build indirectly though, 
as one means of helping maintain the interest of any long term players you 
might have.
Does anyone think it might be possible to have a blueprint type thing? What 
I mean is an object the player can use to design a set of rooms for 
themselves as a series of string outputs/command inputs etc without any 
objects ever being created within the game environment itself. Then once 
the player is happy with the look/feel of their blueprint they could hand 
it over to one of the wizards/admins for approval. Then if approved throw 
it over to a wizard for coding.

It would be a fairly complicated object to go about coding, but it could be 
extremely useful not only for vetting player designs but also to help 
introduce a different tier of wizard, the non-coding builder. Any design 
made with the blueprint object is liable to need only standard objects so a 
couple of coders could keep up with a larger number of builder's rooms. 
Only problem there is that using standard objects the non-coding builders' 
areas would get fairly similar unless you also give them the opportunity to 
throw in some non-standard objects, which means assigning a couple more 
coders to  producing objects on demand. That being said, is it better to 
have 3-4 folks who actually know how to produce tight, safe code on demand 
for people who don't, or let everyone produce code even though what most 
actually want to do is imagineer. I'd say the former would give you a 
better model, but that's just personal opinion.

Cheers,
         Shevek

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