[MUD-Dev] Re: Using HTML for a Mud character generator

[Vadim Tkachenko]

John Bertoglio wrote:
> 
> From: Vadim Tkachenko <vt at freehold.crocodile.org>
> To: mud-dev at kanga.nu <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
> Date: Monday, May 18, 1998 6:46 PM
> 
> >John Bertoglio wrote:
> >>
> >> In reading the archives, I noted some interest using a web-based system
> for
> >> generating characters. Given the web-based nature of my project, it is a
> >> natural for me to explore this method. I have put a sample of a portion
> of
> >> the character generator for AR on my demo site ( www.paper.net/mud/ ).
> >
> >Looks too technical. What I was dreaming about was a constraint-based
> >fractal-like visualization, which you can manipulate without any numbers
> >at all (though, in this particular case numbers are significant).
> 
> Now I know I have fallen down the rabbit hole.

Can you please mail me the explanation? My idiomatic English is still
limited...

> My modest system uses a
> little arithmatic to do some basic spreadsheets. Vadim is talking about
> "constraint-based
> fractal-like visualization"...and my stuff is too technical?

What I meant was it looks (okay, _may_ look) too technical for a person
on the other side of a screen, the user. I admit, the stuff I was
talking about may be more technical in implementation, but may be
simpler to use - I can illustrate it as a difference between the manual
and automatic transmission.

What I may come up with (given enough patience :-) is some snowflake
with different segments corresponding to different properties (stats)
and draggable nodes.

> In general I believe in supressing stats. Damage adjetives should reflect a
> randomized value of the potential for that kind of attack, etc. I wrestled
> with the notion of not allowing it during char gen but decided that
> character tweeking is too important a part of the for a lot of people.

Exactly the point I was trying to make. No numbers, just the look and
feel of an abstract snowflake changing appearance and colors of its
segments - with some experience, the user will make a sense out of it.
Also, it should be relative to the user's own 100% status - not in your
example, though; say, as a status display.

> We use bar graphs for stat display with different colors describing base
> and current stats. A player who really cares can look at the html source
> and work back to get reasonably accurate ratios...but in general the stats
> are masked. When looking at another character, your various assesment and
> perception skills produce a picture of what you think their stats are. This
> will never be exactly accurate (except by accident) and with the deviation
> based on skill level.

This is a good idea - you have to have some clue about what is skill X,
for example, to estimate other person's skill X level.

> John Bertoglio

--
Still alive and smile stays on,
Vadim Tkachenko <vt at freehold.crocodile.org>
--
UNIX _is_ user friendly, he's just very picky about who his friends are