[MUD-Dev] Re: Introductions and descriptions

[Derrick Jones]

On Tue, 18 Nov 1997, Richard Woolcock wrote:

> I do have eye/hair colour, as well as hair length and a choice of verb for
> both hair and eyes - however this is only used in the 'look at' description.
> I was considering working on some form of 'priority' to pull out features in
> order to create a short description.  I mean, you don't want to see:
> 
> A tall, ugly fat man with a bushy black beard, bald head, piercing blue eyes,
> heavily tanned skin dressed in expensive clothes says 'hello'.
> 
> However it would be nice if it picked for example 'fat' and 'piercing blue eyes'
> (your characters most outstanding two features) and displayed:
> 
> A fat man with piercing blue eyes says 'hello'.

Just a first thought...
How about listing those feature most contrasting to the observer, or those
features most deviant from the mean(of the race in question).

Using the contrast idea, you'd get a dwarf seeing _every_ human as 'an
extremely tall' man.  On the other hand, if the dwarf in question hadn't
had much contact with humans(or other tall creatures), the most striking
attribute whould be the human's height.

Maybe you could make the description a combination of a handful of
factors.  Some things to temper the description could be:
1.  Other creatures in the room (if you're in the room with a basketball
team, someone 6'2" would seem short.)
2.  The observer...people tend to notice those different from themselves.
3.  Observer knowledge...now this is character knowledge, not player
knowedge.  Perhaps keep a list of how many times a character encounters
different races, or if memory isn't a problem(if you're doing this on a
client), each character.  Note that if you work with the afforemeantioned
basketball team on a daily basis, that will tend to warp your perception
of average human height (you'll have a skewed average from the large
number of encounters with very tall players.) Not sure if this is a Good
Thing, because the mind tends to overcome those problems by classifying
basketball players as a separate entity from other people when judging
height (If I introduced a 6' tall boy to a talent scout, he would think
that he's talking to a tall boy.  If I then ask him to give the boy a
try-out, he would shift into basketball mode and conscider the boy short).
4.  Unusual attributes/ attribute combinations.  A human 6'10"+ is
unusual, and height is the first thing you would notice.  Blue eyes on a
dark-skinned person is also rare, but both blue-eyed and dark-skinned
people are common.  You have to be careful with this, otherwise you'd have
a dwarf being told 'The short guy smiles.' even though the 'short guy' is
a good foot taller than the dwarf.

One other detail.  I really dislike those descriptions that give you too
much information.  For example, 'He wields The Sword of Devistation in his
right hand.' gives you the proper name of the object (the sword) of which
the character has no knowledge.  Perhaps simular recognition code could be
written for objects as well as for people.


> Even my system at the moment (appearance+age) creates some interesting 
> interaction between players that I hadn't accounted for.  For example, when a
> very young character logged on, everyone started calling him 'boy' (hey, whats
> your name, boy?), whilst an ugly player got severely taunted.  The male 
> characters also paid a lot of attention when 'a stunningly gorgeous young
> woman' logged on...I think this itself could really start encouraging people
> to roleplay without them even realising it.

Hrm...this has the potential of creating a possible problem.  If player
appearances are automatically generated, there comes into possibility the
situation where a player receives a character that is a bit too much like
their RL description.  The chance is slim, but given enough characters
created, it will happen on occasion.  In the cases, the taunts directed
at a character with an abnormality (which happens to be shared by its
player) will create a potentially hostile environment for the _player_ as
well as the character.  Normally, I'd say such a situation is up to the
player to deal with, but in today's Politically Correct society, you've
almost have to cater to those few who may take offense.(sigh)

Is there some mechanism built in for overiding the automatic generation,
or the possibility to re-generate should an unplayable character be
generated?