Just a bit of musing

[Carter T Shock]

[snip] 
> I think that's my main objection to these schemes - they produce output
> which is hard for the player to interpret. Text doesn't distinguish what
> is important and new from what is unimportant detail or is repetition.
[snip] 
> Anyway, a co-ordinate system can probably be used in a text MUD, but
> you have to be very careful to hide it from the user, and avoid a lot
> of description duplication.
> 

Not necessarily.. seems to me the real reason to preserve spatial integrity
at low cost is two-fold: first ranged and area stuff works correctly and is
easy to calculate, second, it allows you to define a world and only fill in
the interesting bits. If the "You are in a forest" lines were too much spam
(likely) one could simply include terrain type in the prompt. Undescribed
rooms get the default "You see nothing special". As far as distant objects
are concerned, you could report "there's a building to the west" only when
the user does a scan or some such. No reason the level of detail can't be
configurable. One could also include the clue about the building in the
distance as descriptions in specific rooms. In this arrangement the simple
presence of a description is a key to items/places of interest (rooms with
road signs start to make sense... jolly implementors can lie on the signs
etc.)

On the contrary, I would not hide the coordinate system from the user. It's
one way to allow a user to remember places, and can lead one to alternative
routes to the same place. You could make it a skill if you chose. You could
also have great fun... if someone is "lost" or "confused" they get bad or
no coordinate info. Store a second location field in the player struct that
is an offset and all of a sudden magical doors get interesting (if they
don't know they were teleported you can set the new location and offset
their reported coordinates.. as far as they know they moved next door, not
accross the world). While all of this is required for a graphical mud, I
see no reason to limit the techniques to graphical muds. While endless spam
can be confusing, going east a dozen times and ending up west (because your
builder put the zone in a stupid place) makes navigation both unusual and
difficult.

	-Todd
	(not that I feel strongly about this or anything...)