Introductions and descriptions

[Matt Chatterley]

[This message being CC'ed to mud-dev as Richard said I could, and he is
back on the list - and it may be of some interest to many of you!]

On Tue, 18 Nov 1997, Richard Woolcock wrote:

> I posted this via email because I'm sick of getting flamed.  If you
> think this would be a valid thread, please feel free to forward this
> on to mud-dev (I am back on it now).

I fully appreciate this - many people feel this way. Personally I'm fairly
flame proof, and just ignore nasty people. That, and I like to stir things
up. ;)
 
> Matt Chatterley wrote:
> > 
> > Player-written descriptions are a 'feature' of almost all games running on
> > Tiny-derived servers, such as PennMUSH, and TinyMUSH. Interestingly, the
> > majority of these games also require a sort of admin-check before allowing
> > you to play in earnest.
> > 
> > I personally do not plan to have this - although this intention may
> > change; I currently intend to generate a living object's description based
> > on its condition, and suchlike. Perhaps a player-written addendum to this,
> > since NPCs will have both this section (a few lines), and a
> > creator-written piece (or optionally just the latter).
> 
> Hi there, thought you might be interested to know that I had a go at the
> player recognition system I was talking about before I lost access.

Oo..
 
> Description is currently determined by gender and age - so you might be
> 'a handsome elderly gentleman' or a 'pretty young teenage girl', etc.
> However, to get around the problem of 'silly names', each player gets a
> random first and surname when they connect (over 100 first names for
> each gender and almost 1000 surnames means duplicates are unlikely).

Now this, is a VERY interesting twist! Does the player get to choose a
'connection' or 'account' name to log in under, and then have the 'game
name' assigned, or is the 'game name' synonymous(sp?) with the 'account'
name?

> I plan to have people get a new name if they die, and have to remeet
> everyone again, although I also intend to try and make death less
> common.  Another interesting side affect is that you can introduce
> just your first name - or surname - if you want to (Hi, I'm Mr Smith...).
> I've also added 'first impressions', which is dependant on your 
> Appearance and Etiquette, so some people make take an instant dislike
> to you, whilst others might like you.  I intend to work on this so that
> if you see someone killing all your friends, you'll start to hate them
> more and more.  Killing people you like, on the other hand, would be
> very bad for your humanity.

This is good too - its starting to pull the concept of 'introductions'
away from the very static thing that it tends to be, into something far
more dynamic and more involved in the game. How are you coping with 'out
of character' communications and such? Eg: Who lists, tells, and such?
 
> Players descriptions are also determined automatically, although players
> can chose their eye/hair colour when they create their character, and 
> these basically sum-up the appearance.  Character descriptions are still
> a long way from completion though.
> 
> I'd be interested to hear any of your player-recognition ideas - 
> particularly on how you intend to generate descriptions.

This is another interesting area actually, and the first point I'd keep in
mind, is that if you are aiming at a very rp-centric game, fully automated
descriptions are probably a bad idea (note: for the benefit of anyone in
the audience, rp-centric mainly refers to Tiny-derivs, but could
technically be anything. Most tiny-derivs have player-written descs, but I
know at least one which does not).

With this auto-desc in an RP environment, you take away the player's
freedom to embelish upon his character, and risk 'identical copies'
cropping up unless you do it very well. Even then, there are probably
going to be circumstances when the player will wish to add small details
to his description, which the code cannot account for without being
'overridden' in some way - for instance, the colour of makeup (although
you could have *useable* makeup to change this of course).

One way around this is to give the player some control over elements of
the description, or the power to write a short addendum to the description
itself (one or two personal paragraphs).

In a less rp-centric (I shall refer to them hereon as 'adventure' games,
on the strength of my previous 'types of game' speech/es, and on the basis
that h/s games will probably not care much about descriptions) adventure
games, the player-written addendum is probably not needed, and you can
probably feel free to automate more, since players are not into such
*intense* characterisation.

Firstly, consider what you might modify the description based on. Some
possible elements are: Hair/eye/skin colours, Height, weight/mass, build
(we will determine this from strength/dexterity statistics in my
examples), overall attractiveness (charisma), clothing (outer layer only).

>From this list, we produce a 'data bank' of message parts (perhaps just
pairs of verbs and adverbs), with a text parser capable of assembling said
parts. Each element has descriptions written for several states, perhaps
in the form 'element - condition:result,condition:result' etc (an LPC
mapping type even), so if we take a subject:

Hair: Blonde
Eyes: Hazel
Skin: Ebony
Height: 170 (cm)
Weight: 85 (kgs)
Build: ((str + (dex/2))/10) = 7.5 = 8
Attractiveness: Charisma/10 = 6
Outer clothing: Gold-threaded tabard, leather gloves, chain coif, tartan
		kilt, leather boots.

The system feeds this information into the data bank, and retries the
'hair:blonde' description, and so on. In the case of build/attractiveness,
the numbers are used to retrieve the descriptive data referring to that
value. So now the system has:

Hair: blonde
Eyes: hazel
Skin: ebony
Height: 170 (cm)
Weight: 85 (kgs)
Build: thickly set
Attractiveness: fairly
Outer clothing: Gold-threaded tabard, leather gloves, chain coif, tartan
		kilt, leather boots.

And can thread them together, some conditionally:

This thickly set man is (compare height to lookers, and produce suitable
comparative phrase.. in this case we are roughly equal.. so..) about your
height, with (check for special case between hair/eyes/skin.. blonde and
ebony is a special case..) shocking blonde hair, a direct contrast to his
ebony skin and hazel eyes. He sports a gold-threaded tabard and tartan
kilt on his body, with a chain coif on his head, and leather gloves upon
his hands, his feet covered by leather boots.

This is still relatively simplistic, I'm sure - the above can be produced
with a sort of 'marking language' with relatively little hassle, once a
good databank system is worked out.

Regards,
	-Matt Chatterley
	http://user.itl.net/~neddy/index.html
"I shall never believe that God plays dice with the world." -Einstein