[DGD] just out of curiosity

[Schmidt, Stephen]

This is a question possibly out of ignorance, I am not a serious computer
person, only an amateur. But it is a question relevant to using DGD for a
practical task (not necessarily a game, either) so I hope it's moving back
towards the theme of this list.

Generally speaking, in a MUD environment you'll have players, you'll have
objects, and you'll have "rooms" that contain those players and objects.
Your users need to get some kind of information about all three of those
things.

In a text-based game, you basically have long and short descriptions for
each of these three types of things. The long description of a room includes
the short description of the players and objects in it, and a player's long
description includes the list of the objects s/he's carrying. All of these things
are text strings, and can easily be stored or generated on the server and
sent to the client as text without causing any bandwidth issues. Character
data is easy to send around. Also, it's easy for a wizard (meaning: someone
who can create new game objects, but not necessarily an admin) to invent
new objects and type in short and long descriptions for them.

In a graphical game, you need images for these things as well. I would imagine
that bandwidth issues are going to prevent sending image files to a client each
time a user accesses an object, particularly if the image for a room needs to
somehow include the images of the players and objects in it, and the image
of a player needs to somehow include the objects s/he is carrying (or wearing
or what have you, which are basically forms of carrying).

I think there's two other options. One is to have a library of images stored in the
client software, and have the wizard pick images from that library for the objects
s/he creates. This'll be a problem if the wizard wants to create an object which
doesn't match any of the existing images. It might be necessary for wizards to
be able to add new images to a library that resides on the server, and one task
performed at login is to have the client update its image library to match what's
now on the server.

Another one is to come up with a simple set of instructions for rendering images,
probably by being able to instruct the client to draw various polygons and round
shapes in various colors and positions, and building up the images you want out
of the individual shapes. This lets you send instructions for creating that image to
the client without using too much more bandwidth than a text description would
take, but it limits you to images that look like combinations of polygons, which
may not be pleasing.

One could do both; have a standard library of "nice" images and the ability to
use a set of rendering instructions to create additional, crude images when the
library doesn't have anything appropriate.

Anyone given more thought to this problem than I have? Obviously people who
have coded graphical MUDs in the past have done. Is there some kind of standard
approach to solving this problem?

Steve