[MUD-Dev] Circumstances & Situations

[Nathan Yospe]

On Wed, 24 Dec 1997, Travis Casey wrote:

:Personally, I always get the willies when someone talks about only
:showing what's in front of the character on a text-based mud.  This opens
:a large can of worms -- you have to have positions within rooms, an idea
:of how the character is facing, and an arc of vision for the character.

Well, yes. Also, attention to detail, sensory depth, alertness,
perceptiveness, environmental factors (lighting, perfumes, background noise)
and all the rest. 

So what's your point?

:This sort of thing has always seemed like too much work to me -- you 
:pretty much have to keep track of all the position and facing data that
:a graphical mud would need to draw what the character's seeing, and then
:you have to interpret that data and output it as text.  IMHO, if you want
:this sort of detail, it's probably easier to make a graphical mud -- the
:methods for drawing the world so that only things that are in the player's
:line of sight already exist and are fairly simple for the graphical case.

Yes and no. You cannot make a person as much a "part of the story" in a
graphical mud, at least in the current non-immersive proto-VR state of the
tech. The advantages of text are vast. The advantages of graphics likewise.
My solution? Make the IO (graphical or text, keyboard or joystick) a
seperate plugin element, and handle the 3D engine seperately. I even go so
far as to make the IO a client side issue, and ignore it from the perspective
of the (purely 3D, locally limitless degrees of freedom) mud engine.

:A simpler, but similar, idea would be this:  simply give players who are
:"walking through" a room on their way to somewhere else a briefer, less
:detailed description.  Those who are willing to move along one room at a 
:time the old way will get more description, but it will also take them
:longer to get where they're going.

I used to do this on a Diku I ran (The Singularity Project... the original
"physmud") and while it was nice (especially the "narrowed field of view"
from running, and the hypertextish conditional elements in the text...) it
doesn't even begin to compare to what I'm doing now.
--

"You? We can't take you," said the Dean, glaring at the Librarian.
"You don't know a thing about guerilla warfare." - Reaper Man,
Nathan F. Yospe  Registered Looney                   by Terry Pratchett
yospe at hawaii.edu   http://www2.hawaii.edu/~yospe           Meow