[MUD-Dev] The MLI Project

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On 11:04 PM 2/24/98 +0000, I personally witnessed Chris Gray jumping up to
say:
>[Caliban:]
>
>:The room is rather dark%INFRA% and uniformly cold%INFRA%, with only a
>:slight glow spilling over from a light source to the south which%INFRA%
>:gives off no discernible light and %INFRA% pulsates slowly.
>
>I admit to be amused here that both of us were able to talk about the
>ideas of separate versus combined windows, and it all seemed to make sense.
>Even though I was thinking about graphics output windows, and Caliban is
>thinking text output windows! Just goes to show that paradigms are often
>more general than the original suggester might imagine.

Well, it would have been a lot more confusing and bandwidth intensive to
try and explain the problem with graphics... ;)

One of the things I've been enamored with lately is a throwback to Ultima
1. If anyone remembers that game, the way it worked was that you wandered
around in a tile-based graphic world until you got to a dungeon, and then
it went to a 3D first person view. So I got to thinking... 

Imagine a Warcraft-style graphic construction for the overworld, obviously
with a less annoying movement interface and whatnot, and then when you go
into a dungeon/castle/ruin/whatever... you gate into a Quake-style first
person view. The advantages to this are numerous, but the most obvious is
that the world itself could be much less memory-intensive and take up less
drive space; everyone seems to want huge worlds, but doing the WHOLE world
in a tremendous Quake level would be prohibitive. Those with slower
computers and such could stay in the upper worlds, assuming of course that
the MUD admins -- who always seem to have much bigger and better computers
than the majority of the playerbase -- actually put things in the overworld
which are roughly equivalent to things in the underworld. 


The social butterflies can likewise stay in the overworld, and chat and
goof off and such. This allows them to worry about what they're doing
instead of how to do it... basically, get a bunch of people on the screen
and they can chat and stuff without feeling left out of the game. The PKers
can go into deathmatch type dungeons and have a great time killing each
other off, while the rest of the dungeon crawlers can use some of those
puzzle-style elements of the traditional single player first-person
shooter. You could even have four levels of dungeon in three colors, the
intensity of the color over the doorway into the specific dungeon being a
factor... you could have levels which are mostly abandoned, signified by a
green overlay; levels which are puzzle-based, signified by a blue overlay
(some monsters, but not many and not too hard); levels which are straight
combat-based, signified by a yellow overlay; and PK levels, bearing a red
overlay. This would allow people to look at it and see that this is a very
easy level (very light) or a very hard level (very dark). Similar to this
layering concept, except it's not really a sense as much as a general game
aid.

Actually, if you can live with the restrictions (which aren't really that
bad when you consider the restrictions under which many MUD builders
labor), you could even just use Doom for the 3D aspect. Hell, the source
has been released, so why not? I still say Quake II is *the* engine for 3D
(at least until Trinity hits), since some of the levels are positively
gorgeous, but Doom is certainly adequate.

Okay, so I harp too much on Quake being viable for MUD development. So
what? All of us in here harp on *something* people think is a dumb idea. ;)

>With graphics output, the position of the items in the displays would
>correspond, so figuring out which went with which is fairly easy. My
>thinking on layering is something like this:
>
>    - display a normal graphics view of what the player sees
>    - for an extra sense, there are some options:
>	- display a transparent blob over things which are triggering
>	    the sense. The size, colour and density of the blob are
>	    available to display parameters of the sensed data. A very
>	    large and dense blob could effectively be blinding the player
>	    to what is responsible for it - an interesting effect.

How realistic is this? Let's say I have a great sense of smell. That blob
is supposed to represent the pile of horse manure in the corner? What if I
go into some location and there's a bucket of spoiled milk? Would I be able
to see anything in the room at all? ;)

This is a fantastic idea for "detect magic" or the like, though.

>	- display a numeric value, with an indicator pointing to the
>	    center of the location the sense is triggered from. Additional
>	    clues, like the size of a bullseye indicator, colour of the
>	    text, etc., could be used as visual cues.

Ugh. I hate numeric values in displays. "There is a rank 14 magic aura over
THERE." Uhhhh... what the hell does that mean? ;)

>    - multiple extra senses could be displayed at once, using variations
>	on the above, but too many would definitely get hard to handle.

That's for sure, but color is certainly an option to make it a little easier.