[MUD-Dev] Re: Room descriptions

[Adam Wiggins]

On Wed, 30 Sep 1998, Nathan F Yospe wrote:
> On Mon, 28 Sep 1998, J C Lawrence wrote:
> :Adam Wiggins<adam at angel.com> wrote:
> :> I don't think this sort of constructed world will ever be
> :> interactive in the way that I'm thinking; it will always be a
> :> sophisticated Zork spinoff, which is to say you only have the
> :> interactions which are coded by whoever created the area.
> 
> :Bingo.
> 
> Which is to say, there can't be anything more than case switching without
> a full scale simulation?

It certainly can; I'm just not sure that it works too well.  Most muds
are, indeed, an approximately 50/50 hybrid of simulation and special
casing.  How many times have you seen:

You are in a dark, quiet, empty hallway.
You see Bubba the Troll here.
You see Buffy the Troll here.
You see Biffy the Troll here.
You see Boffo the Troll here.
[...more trolls...]
There are 23 lit lanterns lying here.

Quiet?  Empty?  Dark?  The simulation parts (lightsources, freely movable
objects and characters) clash rather heavily with the special cased parts.

One could, of course, argue that mudders have been ignoring this sort of
thing for over a decade now, and thus it's "not really that important."
This may be true, except that now if someone (say, the readership of this
list) decides to "advance the art" and try to expand what already exists,
we find that the old methods get more and more klugey.  At a certain point
you just aren't gaining by trying to extend the old methods.  Which, of
course, leaves you with two primary options: one, to try to not innovate
too terribly much, and instead just do it "the old way", except do it
really really well, and maybe put some twists on it that no one has ever
seen before.  Legend falls into this category, as (I'd guess) most of our
favorite muds (Arctic, of course, is mine, and most definitely qualifies
in this category).  The second choice is to abandon the well-beaten path
and instead forge something new, with the intent of eventually surpassing
the tried-and-true methods.  This is a route with high stakes.  DartMUD is
one of the best examples here, and despite all its efforts still remains
relatively unappreciated and unknown.  Ultima Online is another, and has
experience wild success the likes of which the world has never seen
before.  Naturally, it's this second category of mud development which is
like a siren's call to developer like myself, and many others on the list.
One might even note that it (quite accidentally) leads to a minor disdain
for those servers still doing things the "old way" (which is most of
them).  This is ironic because in many ways we're just trying to find a
better way to do the same sort of game; as I always say, I'm trying to
write the mud I *thought* was playing when I was still naive to its inner
workings.

A tangential question this raises: Raph, how much of UO's success would
you attribute to cutting edge game technology, and how much to just having
a ton of marketing and one of the most popular single-player RPGs whose
shoulders you could ride on?  If you did the same (or similar) game but
not Ultima and minus Origin's marketing, would it have done as well, or
nearly as well?  If they had done Ultima Online as a standard, scripted
Ultima game with multiplayer capability and a burly central server, would
*that* have done as well?  Would it have done better?

Adam W.