[MUD-Dev] The MLI Project

[Vadim Tkachenko]

coder at ibm.net wrote:
> 
> On 17/02/98 at 09:04 PM, Travis Casey <efindel at polaris.net> said:
> 
> >In area descriptions, a markup language along the lines of HTML could be
> >used, indicating special text seen only by those with certain abilities.
> >For objects, extra properties could hold alternative descriptions.  For
> >example, a room description:
> 
> >  The stone walls and floor here are antiseptically clean, in stark
> >  contrast to the rest of the castle. <SMELL 2>There's a faint smell
> >  of ammonia in the air<SMELL 5>, and an undertone of blood beneath
> >  it</SMELL>.</SMELL>  A brass brazier stands in the back left corner.
> >  <INFRAVISION>It still glows with leftover heat, as if it's been used
> >  recently.</INFRAVISION>  <MAGIC>A sudden queasy chill indicates the
> >  remains of a necromantic spell in the center of the room.</MAGIC>
> 
> A problem which has been bugging me in this regard is that while it is
> very easy to handle gradated levels of awareness (such as the increasing
> levels of smell sense in the example), its much more difficult to cleanly
> handle scales where the percieved/reacted-to item is has just such a
> gradated description but which also changes utterly at certain points.
> 
> Consider the simple case of a second order balance scale which describes
> the character's vision visa-vis two variables: minimum perceived frequency
> and visible spectrum width.  How could you use such a tagged descritption
> to handle a character the majority of whose visible spectrum lies in the
> infra-red band and who has very little to no visible spectrum in what we
> consider "visible light"?
> 
> This alligns with the lense concept raised recently -- I like the idea of
> adding perceptics to characters -- but what if those perceptics overwhelm,
> devalue, alter-emphasise or otherwise mutate the perceptions priorities of
> the character away from the norm?
> 
> Bubba may see a normal room lit by a guttering candle, but Boffo with his
> ultra-sonic echo-location and near total myopia outside of the infra-red
> band is nearly blinded by the heat flaring off the candle and searing his
> retinas, buthas an utterly detailed awareness of the spatial
> characteristics of the room.
> 
> Want something a little more "normal".  Boffo now has "magic-vision" which
> displays the magical potentials of all objects in such strength and
> overwhelming detail that their mere visual characteristics are effectively
> lost.

Original concept (which may use lenses as an excellent graphical tool)
was: There is no sight, hearing, <you-name-it> as one used to
understand. There is a concept of a generic sense, though, and there's
no way to predict how exactly that's gonna be percepted by any given
individual.

Getting back to MVC (Model-View-Controller), if I use the infra-red
goggles, I see the outside world, surprisingly, in shades of green...
This is all about visualization, or V in MVC. Graphical representation
is probably the most uniform method of visualization (pseudo-colors,
etc.), so it may be that the perfectly functionally-complete interface
may be achieved with the minimal number of interface concepts

... Boffo ... is blinded ... so what? This is just his inability to
adopt to the changing environment conditions. Say, the nuclear reactor
is a living organizm which tries to see you by exposing you to the
powerful radiation - this is its sense, and would it feel different if
it knew that you're gonna die given just a bit too much attention?

Getting back, I still don't see how to apply the concept of lense to any
media other than a graphical _elegantly_. While it's perfectly easy to
make the visual image of Boffo's perception, say, white, as with visual
sensor over the threshold, how would you describe it as a text?

One of possible solutions is to weigh the perception units, and make
adjustmenst, keeping the perception depth fixed - say, if the candle's
sound is 50 and its light is 199, and the perception window depth is
150, it's obvious that all other perception units (say, the owl with a
sound weight 0.5) will be imperceptible.


Also, it's possible that new 'lenses', or senses, become available to
you as a devices which you can turn on and off and/or shift the
concentration focus, so they wouldn't interfere with each other (like
the dragon-fly vision, which is greyscale above the horizon and color
below, or is it otherwise?).

> J C Lawrence

--
Still alive and smile stays on,
Vadim Tkachenko <VadimT at 4CS.Com>
--
UNIX _is_ user friendly, he's just very picky about who his friends are