[MUD-Dev] Introductions and

[Adam Wiggins]

[Matt Chatterley:]
> On Tue, 18 Nov 1997, Mike Sellers wrote:
> Heh. This reminds me of what you might consider the 'cardinal rules' of
> descing, in all aspects (descing objects, rooms, and players). Personally
> I find the biggest rule is:
> 
> Do not tell a player what their character is feeling, doing, or
> thinking, unless you are *absolutely sure* they they will be
> feeling/doing/thinking this.

It's funny - we used to have longish object/NPC descs typical of muds,
but as we started to create routines to actually create descriptions the
ones we wrote ourselves dwindled to nothing.  Mainly I'd write a
description like:

This towering figure is built of solid muscle and has an evil gleam in
his eye.  He is garbed in dark, worn leathers and carries a tarnished
broadsword.  A livid white scar runs down his cheek.

Naturally the description of what they were wearing and wielding went
away as soon as we made it mandatory for all characters to actually
*have* the equipment that their desc says they do, along with code
to make the description come off a little nicer than just a static list
of what is in their equipment list.  Then we did scars, so that part went
away.  Then we started doing varied sizes on races, plus spells that
change your size quite a bit, so we had to code relative descriptions,
causing things like 'towering' to be completely subjective.  And of
course the whole evil gleam bit is bad from any perspective - what if
he's asleep and his eyes are closed?

This is the tradeoff you make between dynamic and static descs.
At one extreme you've got a completely static object, which is how it's
usually handled nowadays, except perhaps for some simple descriptions about
wound level, equipment or inventory, race or gender, age, etc.  On the
other end you've got a completely dynamic description, which means never
creating object descs at all - they are all generated from the object's
actual state.  We gravitated towards the later, which I much prefer.
But at times I do miss being able to actually *write* the descriptions
myself.  Now I try to funnel that same creative energy into improving
the desc-generating algorithms, but it's not quite the same.

> A good example is making a statement like '.. and you find her very
> attractive.'. The character who is looking at said attractive female thing
> of undescribed qualities and nature may be a gay man, or a straight woman
> (although this *does not* mean they can't find a woman attractive!), but
> may also be a member of another race who finds her race repulsive and so
> on. Such statements must either change dynamically to suit the situation,
> or not be put in at all.

I find using the word 'you' or 'your' or otherwise making statements about
the person who is viewing the desc to be abhorent.  Even when I was
writing areas for other muds, I made it a rule to avoid this.   It was
difficult at first, but now that I'm in the habbit of it it's quite easy,
and I think the overall quality of the descriptions in improved 100% by
using this style.

> > While we're talking about names, how do you propose to deal with
> > name-collision?  I've never really liked the fact that all names in typical
> > MUDs must be unique.  It seems like you could easily allow for multiple
> > name instances by keying off the combo of character name and player name
> > internally.  The only problem comes up in areas where, for example, I want
> > to talk to "Joe" or send game-mail to "Joe."  If there are a dozen Joes out
> > there, how do I know which one I want?  Even in the scheme described above,
> > you could have several "Joe Doe" characters.  I suppose you could list
> > further, publicly known information for each, such as occupation, general
> > area where they live ("Joe Doe of Tos, who is a merchant"), or in a
> > graphical environment, a picture of them -- anything to help other players
> > differentiate their Joe from all other Joes.
> 
> Hmm. Interesting. I suspect I'd answer this thusly:
> 
> Out of character communiques must go c/o the account name, which solves a
> huge problem.

We have message boards, mudmail, a 'who' list, and a chatroom all
outside the game proper, in the account mode.  This is a nice way for
people to socialize without worrying about the restrictions of the
game itself, and in the meantime I don't feel bad for putting in those
restrictions.  That is to say - I never felt bad in the first place, but
now when people bitch I can say 'Hey, if you want a global channel, go
to the chat room.'