[DGD] Persistance

[Shevek]

> > 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.
>
>I would not want to be in charge of recruiting wizards to work
>under this system. It's hard enough to find wizards willing to
>devote the time/effort to produce quality, theme-consistent
>areas when they're working from their own ideas. Finding ones
>willing to do it from someone else's ideas would seem a
>difficult chore.
>
>It would be easier if only small systems of rooms could be
>constructed this way, so that the wizard(s) would do this
>only part-time, and work on their own projects most of the
>time.
>
>Steve

True, but if the blueprint technique was implemented simply enough then 
once a room was approved it should be possible to have the entire blueprint 
produced automatically including standard objects. So the user could set 
long descriptions, short descriptions, exits, standard objects only (I like 
Par's flowchart idea). Non-standard objects would of course require someone 
to sit down and actually code them, but all the rest could just be thrown 
into a creation object that produces the entire set of rooms without any help.

The point is that there are plenty of people on virtually every mud that 
have solid ideas for areas, but lack the required skills to put them into 
code. Having a system of standard rooms/objects with a small number of 
skilled coders providing the non-standard objects lets you use a wider set 
of people to produce good areas without limiting yourself to using only 
those people who can code.

The blueprint idea is there to eliminate the situation of people producing 
buggy/unsafe objects when they are starting out. Having an entire area held 
in a single blueprint object as strings totally eliminates that problem. 
The blueprint objects themselves might get fairly large, but the tradeoff 
between a blueprint object taking up space against trying to get a 
non-programmer to code (Imagine a windows non-programmer trying to get to 
grips with even the editor) well is worthwhile I think. Of course in the 
end they should learn to code if they are going to continue building (To 
make sure areas are sufficiently different/interesting), but think how much 
easier that would be with a set of rooms they built via blueprint. They 
know exactly what's in them and can now see from the code exactly how to do 
it in LPC. They can produce large areas very quickly and then go back 
through and play around with inserting objects they've created themselves.

I see what you're saying about the extra workload of creating non-standard 
objects for someone else. However, I'm not suggesting these coding wizards 
do everything from scratch, just those objects that don't already exist. 
This should be a reasonably small number of objects if the standard object 
library is both broad enough, and configurable enough. Coding well to 
someone else's design is a pretty invaluable skill and is probably not too 
unfamiliar to most coders anyway. These would in any case be the same 
wizards a different system would have to assign to teaching new non-coders LPC.

Cheers,
         Shevek

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