[MUD-Dev] Dynamically changing room descriptions

[Mik Clarke]

I'm experimenting with a couple of ways at the moment.

Method 1

I have conditional extra descriptions, which get added to a rooms
description when the conditions associated with them are fulfilled.
So you could have diffeent descriptions for night and day.

Method 2

I'm going to rip out the existing ROM weather system and put in
a 'mood' system.  Mood would be specified on an area basis and
would have a small number of variations (nominally equivilent to
weather), with transitional progress between them.

Consider a 'Central European' mood:

  Var 1: Warm, Fine weather
  Var 2: Gray, Overcast skies
  Var 3: Light rain and mist
  Var 4: Storm

There would be a fixed chance of progression from one state
to another (probably 25/50/25).  The state gets cross referenced
with the time to produce a 'current mood'.  This is then cross
referenced wit the rooms sector type to produce the appropriate
message.  Some sort of sub-state (or more states) may be needed
to get the right sense of progression.  Transion matrixies (markov
chains?) may be different for each mood.

So, you cross time (afternoon), with mood state (1) to get current
mood (say 17), you then cross this with sector type (forest) to get
the message "The sun hangs high over he trees, cast dark shadows
below them.".

Another lookup the next day might find mood state 3, giving current
mood 39, and message "Heavy rain pours down through the tree
branches."

I suppose there should be a seasonal element in there as well.

I guess movement and action modifiers will follow (probably keyed
from the current mood x sector type cross).  Heavy Snow in a
forest should be different from heavy snow when you're in a room.

The scheme is area based because different areas tend to have
different weather types, so global weather is inappropriate (rain
in the desert looks odd, especially when you are dieing of thirst).

Mik

Ronan Farrell wrote:

> I can think of several ways of doing this, but I am wondering if
> anyone has done anything similar, and whether people think it
> would be worth doing in the first place.
>
> Ronan






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