[MUD-Dev] Re: Eye movement.

[S. Patrick Gallaty]

Some of the things we are talking about have been done on the Nightmare
mudlib, and Xyllomir (spelling?) mud and on After the Plague which I reported
on earlier.

Nightmare has a 'sensing' system, and it's possible due to light levels and
perception to not notice something... but hear it.  Messages I have seen
in these muds are like this :

A tan-skinned dark-haired elf enters.
>Remember elf as Myron
Elf remembered as Myron
Myron looks at you.

Once when a kobold thief was hiding near me and trying to steal from me :

You hear the rustling of armor.
You smell something strange.
You hear the tinking of coins.

And messages one often sees are :

You hear someone shouting nearby.
You hear a male voice shouting to the east.
You hear Goofus shouting in Eltherian to the east.
Goofus shouts "I am over here, dog!" from the east.

All in all I think it's a pretty good compromise.  I've never played on Xyllomir
but I think I probably should at some point if it's still around.
Amazing the cool hacks I find on some of these european muds and they
have user populations of 1-3 people on average.


-----Original Message-----
From: quzah <quzah at geocities.com>
To: mud-dev at kanga.nu <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
Date: Thursday, August 13, 1998 6:35 AM
Subject: [MUD-Dev] Re: Eye movement.


|
|-----Original Message-----
|From: James Wilson <jwilson at rochester.rr.com>
|To: mud-dev at kanga.nu <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
|Date: Thursday, August 13, 1998 5:52 AM
|Subject: [MUD-Dev] Re: Eye movement.
|
|[Snip my first blurb on eye movement]
|
|[Snip reply about varying social aspects due to viewer's state
| and abilities. +example]
|
|>One could also construct misperceptions between races, nations, and
|economic
|>classes of humans, of course. Members of a clan might notice details
|significant
|>only to their clan (or perhaps to an opposing clan).
|
|Yes, it seems like you could come up with some really good examples
|of this, automatic renaming and such, as opposed to long blurbs would
|be good. Also, I guess you would want to save the 'last known state'
|of the character. So you could end up with something like:
|
|Boffo enters the room, you notice something a bit odd about his
|appearance, but you don't imediatly place it. Then it hits you,
|Boffo is missing his right arm! Now that you think about it, he
|seems to be limping, and is nearly naked, scratched and beaten
|to a pulp.
|
|Yeah, it's a poor example, but I thought it was funny ;)
|
|[Snip my poor example of clinking armor.]
|
|>this sort of automatic perception would be good, but one must also consider
|that
|>we 'see' things differently as we are exposed to them once, twice, many
|times.
|>That is, if 'the stranger' comes through here several times in ten minutes,
|the
|>viewer doesn't need the full description that she got the first time she
|saw
|>him, AND should probably not call him 'the stranger' after she's seen him
|>several times. 'The little bug-eyed man' would be more apropos.
|
|Agreed on this.
|
|>There is also a fuzzy distinction here between perception ("clink!") and
|>interpretation ("clinks are probably the sound of heavy armor"). Some
|>interpretation is a Good Thing in order to make people bigots (which is
|only
|>realistic) and make the environment a richer, but too much interpretation
|is a
|>Bad Thing when it gets in the way of the player using their
|imagination/wits.
|>Maybe you just report the clink and let the hearer decide if they think
|that's
|>armor or not. However, there are clinks and there are clinks; presumably a
|>dime-dropping clink would sound different from an armor-hitting-chain
|clink,
|>and the character (as opposed to the user) would be able to make that
|>distinction. So maybe you report it as above. This will be an important
|area
|>aesthetically, as the amount of interpretation provided will color every
|user's
|>experience.
|
|Yeah, I was just throwing out an example, and I agree on the fact
|that you'd just want sounds to be sounds, and not necessarily put
|a strict designation on them.
|
|>
|>James (using kmail now, hopefully my lines are wrapping properly... death
|to
|>Outlook!)
|
|Heh, yeah, outlook is hell. What you need to do is just force
|a return on your lines, so they're shorter than what you are
|quoting. That's what I do anyway, and it seems to work ok for
|the most part.
|
|>p.s. isn't 'quzah!' what the zulus yell out in battle? ;)
|
|I'm not sure. I don't know any Zulus. It stems from the mid-
|east (of the globe, where all the oil is from and such) and is
|a god from there abouts, as far as I remember anyway ;)
|-Q-
|
|
|
|--
|MUD-Dev: Advancing an unrealised future.
|
|