[MUD-Dev] Games vs. simulations

[adam at treyarch.com]

On Thu, 15 Jun 2000, Richard Tew wrote:
> > From: adam at treyarch.com
> > On Wed, 14 Jun 2000, Dmitri Zagidulin wrote:
> > > Not to spark a holy war, but can anyone explain to a 
> > newcomer why non-room
> > > systems (read some kind of coordinate systems) are a bad idea?
> > > They seem like a good holy grail to me...
> > 
> > I think I've discussed my own experiences with room based systems here
> > before.  In a nutshell, I spent a while on them, and decided 
> > that although
> > they worked great from a designer's and prorgammer's perspective, the
> > implementation was inferior from the gameplayers POV.  I 
> 
> I'm finding that the biggest problem so far is working out how to
> generate decent room descriptions based on where everything is
> placed in the room.

Funny - I found that bit strikingly easy.  In fact, the basic implementation in
general is not terribly difficult.  I had always assumed that text muds did
not use coordinate systems because people found them too hard to program.
Obviously this is not the case.

> Other than that, I can't say I have any other major concerns that
> I can think of at this time about the gameplayers POV.

Ah - but does it *add* anything from the player's POV?

As with most creative endevors, and especially with a piece of entertainment,
anything that doesn't add to the overall effect is actually a detractor in that
it takes up useful space that something else could be inhabiting.  If your
programmers and area writers are investing a lot of time into working with
a more cumbersome system, and especially if your players are investing their
time learning to cope with a new system that doesn't actually add anything to
the game from their point of view, then it can actually be considered a
"negative" feature.

> > was present.  Unlike some implementations of this kind of 
> > system (mostly
> > on LPs from what I've seen), there was no limit to how far 
> > you could go in one
> > direction, and objects and NPCs persisted on the game map 
> > even after you left
> > the room.
> 
> This is odd, you would think that if you went to all the effort of 
> adding space to your rooms (and the rest of it), the much easier
> details like these would be a must.

Most of the implementations I have seen simply stored an x,y coordinate
on your character and when you took a step it created a temporary room
and filled it with random objects and NPCs based on map position.  Lost
Souls is actually the one I'm thinking of at the moment.  It had that same
curious tacked-on feel that many elements in LPs have, and was IMO rather
pointless (other than giving a place to "hide" the Bonsai tree...).

> Flight:
> Our system recognises by your coord when you are hanging in mid-air.
> Sailing:
> Our boats are implemented on the same level as our islands...

Obviously these are some of the most obvious reasons to implement
a coordinate-based system.  Without it, these things are difficult or
impossible.  I first became interested in coordinates while trying to create
a giant keep upon a floating island (think Castle Black in Brust's Taltos
books).

> > The fact that some of the terrain rooms were high forest with 
> > pine trees,
> > and others were low forest with sandalwood and birch, and 
> > others still were
> > open plains was not terribly exciting to anyone but me, the creator.
> 
> Well, really if you look at a non-room based coordinate system
> as a basis for providing consistent depth in your mud, its not
> too much of a step to see that all this huge emptiness provides
> an opportunity for more consistent depth.

This is what I thought, as well.  My point was that it did not work out
that way in practice.

Or perhaps I should say that it *did* work out, but from the ant's-eye view
of the players, all of this depth was lost.

> Where you have terrain of a given type you can provide resources
> that suit it.  Herbs, minerals, vegetables, wildlife.  These can
> be used by the players to make them part of the economy, whether
> its using them to make goods or supplying other players or NPCs
> who have uses for them.  This is just a basic example of what the
> empty filler is good for but you can take this alot further.

Yep, we had all of that stuff.  Several hundred plants, trees, bushes,
flowers, and herbs, each with their own seasonal cycles, prefered areas of
growing, taste, medicinal effects.  Animals that prowled the terrain, hunting
one another (and waiting to be hunted by players and scripted NPC hunters).
Perhaps my favorite was Troll Forest, where every night the trolls would
go thundering through the trees looking for people to bop on the head, stick
in a sack, and drag back to their caves to turn into soup.
Strains of ore running through the mountain edges.  Rivers which flowed
realistically towards the ocean.  And so on...

As cool as all this sounds, from the player's POV it all ran together into
one incomprehensible mush.  They couldn't tell why a herb grew one place
and not another; how to follow a strain of ore; or why they could find an
animal in one place but not another.  You can blame this on the players
(shortsightedness generated by too many games of Quake), on our implementation
(which certainly could have used a lot more polish and user-friendliness),
or some combination thereof.

The original question was, "Why hasn't everyone (or anyone) gone to complete
coordinate-based system?"  The answer is not that it is impossible or
even undesirable.  Simply that the amount of work necessary to get such a
system into a state even resembling "fun" is huge.  In other words, you
sink a huge amount of time and energy into it *just to get it to the point
where it's approximately as usable as room-based systems*.  To actually get
it to be "better", you have to spend that much more!

If you have that time and want to spend it that way, please feel free.  But
in answer to why "everyone" isn't using such a system, the answer is simple:
a huge amount of work very a fairly small payback.  As a hobbiest, I like
to go more for elements that require smaller amounts of work and larger
payoffs.

> We are in it for the challenge and out of personal interest,
> rather than whatever motivates other people - perhaps this is why
> we have actually achieved some of the advanced features that
> most open muds have chosen cop-outs over due to the difficulties
> getting there. One of my co-workers had no interest in staying
> when we opened, he was just there because he found it interesting.

Those that know me know that I'm playing the "other" side of the fence in
this thread.  Normally I'm the ones making statements like the paragraph
quoted above.  However, I wanted to provide a counterpoint to the view of
"let's make everything as complicated as possible, because we can!"
Such a view is fine for academia, but not so good for actually getting your
mud to a playable (or dare I say it, fun) state.

Adam





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