[MUD-Dev] The impact of the web on muds

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

Chris Gray wrote:

> :[Caliban:]
> ::But we don't really mean books. We mean TEXT. Let's say I show you a picture
> ::of a dragon. To use something we can all look at as a frame of reference, I'l
> ::give you a URL: http://www.darklock.com/fantasy/gallery/drag/drag.html --
> ::which is, if you ask me, a pretty damn terrifying dragon. IF -- and this is a
> ::big if -- you look at it properly.
>
> Yep, "Cool Dragon!". Now, if it were fully integrated in to the MUD scenery,
> and was smoothly moving and reacting...

Now, here we hit what I consider the problem with the 'graphics beat text'
mentality. In two sentences, less than 1K, I put an awful lot of action which left
a good deal to the imagination. The rocks cracking under the dragon's weight, for
example: I can imagine that being a stealthy, creaking and groaning sort of sound;
I can imagine it as something of a person walking on gravel; or I can imagine an
ear-splitting sound that goes off like a gunshot. Depending on my personal
preference at the time. Given the dragon moving around, we now need to design an
animatable object, say something like the MDL files used in Quake, and a series of
animation frames. Now we hit the problem of polygon count and level of detail.

End result: your dragon, moving around in the scene, is close to a meg and a half
after adding sound and movement. Your vision of how the dragon moves may be very
different from mine. Your concept of how the dragon sounds may be very different
from mine. So you're using 1500 times the space for an experience that will
probably not live up to most people's expectations. I may think a dragon should
move slowly like most large reptiles in the real world, you may think a dragon
moves swiftly and fluidly like a smaller reptile does in the real world. Get it
wrong, I'm not satisfied. And that trap is where I think graphics fall down.

We hear a lot about how cool it would be if you could walk through a forest and see
all the trees, or if you could see the goblins ducking behind trees and rocks for
cover when you chased them around. But what we're overlooking here is that this is
not necessarily an *advance*. Is it really, honestly better to have all the work
done by the computer? I log onto MUDs as a fantasy, as an escape, as an outlet for
things I can't do in the Real World. I choose MUDs over most other such pursuits --
computer games, stage acting, etc. -- because I have greater freedom to do what I
find appropriate. The computer can't do all that. It just won't be able to manage
that sort of thing appropriately; it has to restrict the possible actions. I don't
want to be restricted. And I think in order to manage the kind of graphics people
would need to provide a properly done graphic MUD, you'd have to restrict my
actions much more severely to save the CPU and memory necessary to handle all those
graphics.

That's my perspective on it. Although I think we're rapidly moving toward a time
when it will actually be feasible, and a lot of projects in development out there
right now seem to provide some seriously impressive capabilities. I'd like to see a
MUD that can do all this. I'd like to see true audiovisual VR that can create a
convincing world. But I just don't see it happening anytime soon.

--
=+[caliban at darklock.com]=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=[http://www.darklock.com/]+=
"It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more
doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a
new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by
the preservation of the old institution, and merely lukewarm defenders in
those who would gain by the new one."                      -- Machiavelli
=+=+=+[We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of dreams]+=+=+=+=