[MUD-Dev] Persistent Worlds

[Nathan F.Yospe]

the_logos at www.achaea.com said:

> On Tue, 20 Feb 2001, Eli Stevens wrote:

> > Granted, we need more (a lot more) to really be able to say that the
> > system can produce prose (rather than repeat it, re-stitching it as
> > necassary).  But, what is there _is_ decent reading.

> I doubted then and I doubt now. That prose looks very stitched
> together to me.

> Output of command: focus logran

>   - You adjust your optical cybernetics to focus on the pack of 
>     Logran drones. 
>   - There are fourteen of them. 
>   - Magnification is at x300. 
>   - The pack is led by a class three hunter. 
>   - The Logran drones are carrying laser rods. 
>   - The Logran hunter c3 is carrying a rail cannon. 
>   - They are heading in your direction. 
>   - They are about 250 meters away.

Ouch.  Accurate, and placed where it hurts.  Look, my goal was never
to, as it were, write the Great American Novel.  I do that with my own
hands at odd hours of the night, as further inspiration strikes and
leaves me, sleepless and strained, with no choice but to purge it.
This was, quite simply, an attempt to look less stilted than standard
text muds.  If the stuff I create ever became prose, it would still
lack the structure, and the vision, of a novel.  Doesn't mean I
shouldn't set novels in the same universe...

> Now, granted, none of us are the next James Joyce and none of the
> writing for MUDs needs to be winning Pulitzers. The Physmud stuff
> isn't bad. But, it DOES look stitched together and from the examples
> there wouldn't do a very convincing impression of storytelling.

Gee, thanks.  Later stuff looked less... accurate, gramatically, but
the structure was far less stitched.  Mainly because it used sets of
grammar constructs and sentances as templates, choosing from a vast
set with the randomization weighting based on environmental variables,
instead of, as you correctly identified, stringing together pieces of
output as above.

--
Nathan F. Yospe  email: yospe at kanga.nu nyospe at a2i.com nyospe at pacbell.net
Don't mind me, I'm just insane - there's someone else here, in my brain. 


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