[MUD-Dev] Justifying twinking

[Christopher Allen]

From: "Raph Koster" <rkoster at austin.rr.com> wrote:
> Jonathan Baron tells me that this is what Multiplayer Battletech did so
> well. There are many opssible tactics, I agree, and many of them have to
do
> with just good map design. Has anyone else here read "A Pattern Language"?

I have, though the context that I'm most familiar with it is in architecture
of buildings. I have applied much of what I've learned from Christopher
Alexander in the environments that I work in -- even environments like the
Skotos office which I had less control of the design of are quite appealing
places to work due to an aesthetics learned from Alexander. The old
Consensus offices I designed were wonderful and appealing places to work,
and someday I hope to build a building from scratch based on the ideas.

I have some collegues who rave about the lessons from the book in general
for any type of design. I have seen attempts to create a pattern language
for user interface design, for software architecture, for businsess
enterprise, etc., but I've not been as quite able to articulate what I've
learned from the book into other things that I design. Thus I'd say that I
don't yet grok all the meta ideas of pattern languages yet, but certainly
have learned enough to find it useful.

Your question does turns me on to something I'd not realized before. Though
I knew that pattern language was useful in architecture of buildings, and
knew more abstractly that it was a useful technique in software design, I
never thought that the two together may be useful ways to look at the design
of virtual worlds.

I guess I'll have to go back an read some more until I fully grok it.

BTW, some interesting pointers regarding A Pattern Language:

Long but complete intro to pattern languages in software:
http://www.enteract.com/~bradapp/docs/patterns-intro.html

Summaries of the 253 architectural patterns discussed in the book A Pattern
Language: http://www.ozemail.com.au/~butter/pattern/

Summary of another book by Christopher Alexander "A Timeless Way of
Building": http://www.bigbangworkshops.com/html/timeless_way.html

A home page with many links to pattern languages associated with computing:
http://hillside.net/patterns/

A pattern language for usability-oriented software:
http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~moke/papers/principles/

A pattern language for the enterprise, by one of the board members and
investors in my previous firm:
http://www.mgtaylor.com/mgtaylor/jotm/winter97/patintro.htm

------------------------------------------------------------------------
.. Christopher Allen                                 Skotos Tech Inc. ..
..                           1512 Walnut St., Berkeley, CA 94709-1513 ..
.. <http://www.Skotos.net>               o510/649-4030  f510/649-4034 ..




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