[MUD-Dev] Report: MUD-Dev dinner of 10 June 2000

[Sellers]

Just a few comments on JC's addled yet articulate remembrance of our dinner
the other night:

JC wrote:
> ...
>   People who use Emacs.  (Mike Sellers had his ears soundly boxed
> for deprecating Emacs).  Horror/funny stories on accidentally
> invoking Life, Psychoanalyze and other cute Emacs games on source
> buffers.

Hey now.  I was a dedicated emacs pilot for years, having first slogged
through SOS, TECO, and even Frank.  But eventually I got better.  

> ...
>   How to build a decent and interesting world which embodies complex
> player-based political and social systems and is yet populated by
> players who login for only brief periods and in general just don't
> care about and are not interested in investing themselves in the
> game.

That for me was probably the high point of the evening.  The powerpoint
presentation was particularly effective.  I'm sure glad we were able to nail
that one down so cleanly.  

>   How neat/impressive/large the NWN demo is.  My note, not having
> seen it, was that all the enthusiasm seemed to be surrounding how
> cool the graphics were.  (Mike Sellers said he'd post the URL of the
> demo.  Warning: the movie is several hundred Meg).

You can see the videos on daily radar
(<http://www.dailyradar.com/features/game_feature_page_856_1.html>).
They're chopped up into ~12Mb chunks, but the whole thing is over 200Mb.
Worth watching though.  It's not just the graphics, though those were
impressive.  The apparent ease with which they created a dungeon and were
able to create city/forest/dungeon areas was I found most interesting.  That
and how many times the demo guy said "simply" (as in, "we simply paint this
texture and...").  

> ...
>   Peeling off that discussion, we also hit the areas of story
> construction and method, with me championing Algis Budrys (an author
> I love tho most people's reaction was, "Who?") and Mike Sellers
> speaking at length about an author/book whose name I just can't
> recall and wish I could.  (Mike, mind posting the details on that
> thing and the whole dramatic analysis of Casablanca bit?)  

The book I was talking about is called "Story."  It's by Robert McKee.  He
has short courses and other info available on his site
(<http://www.mckeestory.com/>).  I *strongly* recommend this book for
writers and designers.  It ought to be required reading for anyone trying to
create characters, settings, stories, or the environment within which
stories can be told.  

Oh, and in terms of our widely ranging discussion the other night, you
forgot the bit about geckos' feet, how they stick to things by molecular
(van der waal's) forces, not suction or anything.  Essentially biological
nanotech, which is pretty cool.
http://news.excite.com/news/ap/000608/03/gecko-feet 

And now, back to the closing-in-on-600 still unread posts...

Mike Sellers



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