[MUD-Dev] The MLI Project

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On 05:02 AM 2/25/98 +0000, I personally witnessed Ling jumping up to say:
>On Wed, 25 Feb 1998, Caliban Tiresias Darklock wrote:
>> On 11:04 PM 2/24/98 +0000, I personally witnessed Chris Gray jumping up to
>> say:
>> >[Caliban:]
>> >
>> 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. ;)
>
>I get reverse motion sickness on Quakey games so I can't comment much but
>I do think Syndicate style is a great concept for mud development. :P (I
>actually do)

There are entire research papers devoted to the subject of Doom (and Quake)
motion sickness, so you're not alone. It's been alternately explained as
the movement being too realistic and your sense of balance being unable to
reconcile the visual and tactile input, the movement being too unrealistic
(intriguing contrast), the ballistics of stopping and starting being
improperly displayed (movement starts and ends too abruptly rather than
moving in a proper exponential curve), and all sorts of things which all
come down to your mind anticipating certain visual input which it doesn't
get. Instead it gets something which is reasonable, but not what it was
looking for, and it's in a constant state of stress trying to reconcile the
visual cortex with the natural movement reflex it was following up on. It's
amazing how much of the time we spend reacting not to what is happening
around us, but to what we *expect* is going to happen. I've heard it
described by a guy I knew in the military as 'living on bar time', which
refers to the timekeeping practices of bars in California -- they set the
clocks ten minutes fast, so they have time to clear off the drinks from
tables by the legal deadline (I think it's like 2 or 3 AM, not sure), which
means that people in bars actually experience a given clock time ten
minutes before it occurs. (It's surprising how many people think the
television station is actually running ten minutes slow because it has
never occurred to them that the bar might be running fast.)

But I digress widely from the point.


>The above is pretty much what I was thinking when I suggested the layers
>system.  Didn't go into detail at the time coz I had been up mudding too
>long. :P  Except the blob (technical term) shouldn't change in size, just
>transparency to represent magnitude.  Layers/senses could be switched on
>and off for clarity if things become too much.  Very strong stimulus
>can be emphasised by having the normal description/view invaded by a blob
>even if the sense has been switched off.

My major problem with this is that smelling something very powerful (the
previous owner of my new car was evidently a dope smoker, as there is this
horrendous miasma of air freshener in it and the ashtray was positively
spotless... not hard to figure out what he's trying to cover up there, is
it?) doesn't generally impact my sense of SIGHT. However...

What about momentary buttons on the toolbar? As long as you hold the
'sniff' button, you get the 'scent' layers. Let go of it, and the scent
layers go away. Boom. You could still flash or pulsate the button to
indicate there's something to smell there, as I suggested earlier.

>> This is a fantastic idea for "detect magic" or the like, though.
>
>I admit, I was thinking along the lines of detect magic and very little
>else.

*LAUGH* That's almost exactly what I expected. My own AD&D campaign world
gives all wizards the ability to detect magic, and all priests the ability
to detect evil... which puts something of a damper on tricking the party,
much of the time. If you have a magical deathtrap in the next room that
summons a demon, the priest and wizard are getting alarm bells going off in
their heads before they ever get close. I like the end result because it
not only gives the party an edge, it also makes me think a lot harder as
the DM about how exactly I'm going to slip things past the party. Now
everybody's happy. ;)

>> Ugh. I hate numeric values in displays. "There is a rank 14 magic aura over
>> THERE." Uhhhh... what the hell does that mean? ;)
>
>Agreed.  I do like the bit about a little arrow though.  Admittedly, it's
>confusing/distracting in games to have more than 2 arrows pointing to
>stuff off the screen.  So how about a threshold and even then only show
>the top two strongest directional senses triggered?

Why not modulate the brightness and size of the arrow based on how strong
it is relative to other things in the room? Given a powerful smell or aura,
while you can still detect other ones -- it's a little tougher. Imagine
having a bucket of spoiled milk next to a flower bed. The milk would have a
BIG BRIGHT ARROW, while the flower bed would have a little teeny almost
transparent one. 

>I like to point out that I can't tell where a smell originates except by
>associating smells with experience and poking my nose around.  (which
>stops dead upon finding household ammonia.) 


My dad's the same way. Ammonia takes him right to the edge of being
physically ill in less than a second. I've always wondered why.

>Well... if each sense was assigned a colour and the transparent blob
>altered in colour depending on the 'smell' of the object...  Hmm.. Okay,
>I just hit a brick wall.  The colourmap needs an extra dimension. :P
>Uh, lemme 'redo from start'.

Ahh, but there are SO many dimensions, you could have a bumpmap and a
series of surface properties for the blob, as one example; shiny and smooth
as opposed to dull and rough. This would take time to render, but then you
could leave these components out at first until the user pays attention to
them... gradually refine the rendering until it reaches highest quality, to
indicate that the more time you spend trying to analyse a sense, the better
the picture you end up with is.

>A layer system would only work if each sense was assigned a colour.  Say
>purple for magic.  Coz this is a scalar value, some senses like smell
>could be split into multiple senses (for implementation purposes).  So
>green would be for the smell of apple blossom and brown for poo.

You could also use an alpha channel. Or you could use momentary layers, as
mentioned above, and have qualities assigned to each component; using RGBa
you could use green as the 'pleasant' component and red as the 'unpleasant'
component, with inverse alpha indicating how strong the sensed phenomenon
is (weak - transparent, strong - opaque), and you still have the blue
component to play with. Smells which are 'iffy' would be yellow, with
somewhat annoying smells being orange and really delicious smells being
bright green. Really gross smells would be bright red.

>Magic horse manure would be viewed as graphically brown with a dense brown
>mixed with light purple transparent blob superimposed upon it.

I shudder to think of what exactly magic horse manure would DO. I can see
it now. "You have discovered a pile of Horse Manure +5, Holy Avenger." Even
worse: VORPAL HORSE MANURE. 

Man, I could have such fun with this concept. How about +4 horse manure...
on the armor table? Enough to cover two man-sized creatures. ;)

>PS: I like to point out at this stage that if you hadn't already gathered,
>I'm one of those talented people who implicitly understands something but
>is rather hopeless at explicitly understanding.  (I'm an awful case for
>proving I'm self-aware.)

More like you have difficulty explaining it, I'd say... which tends to be
an indication of high intellectual prowess, in my experience. ;)