[MUD-Dev] Maintaining fiction.

[Travis Casey]

Neil Brown wrote:
> --- Phillip Lenhardt <philen at monkey.org> wrote:

>> Have you looked at how the ps2 game "Oni" handles displaying
>> damage?  To summarize: it uses colored flashes.

> Thanks for the reminder - I just went and fired up the Oni demo to
> take a look.  To sum up, Oni uses a colored 2D sunburst-type effect
> radiating outward from the hit location to depict hits, blocks, and
> general amount of damage. The sunbursts are Green-Yellow-Red for
> increasing amount of damage, and blue when you block an attack.
 
> While this makes for a nice, easy to understand representation, I'm
> not sure that it scales well enough to be used in a MMORPG.  Damage
> changes pretty radically over the life of your character, and you
> need something that scales well and can also be interpreted by the
> other players in the game.  I think you could attempt it one of two
> ways ( I'll just pull numbers out of a hat for this example ):
 
>   1) Damage color is constant : 1-20 is green, 21-60 is yellow,
>   61-150 is red ( just to pull numbers out of the air ).

>   2) Damage color is relative to character: The color you see is
>   divided evenly across your character's range of possible damage.

[details snipped on both of those]

I think you've got a hidden assumption in here -- that the game in
question is using a D&D-style "damage capacity increases with
experience" system.  For a game which uses fixed damage capacity, but
varies damage according to how well an opponent hits, you can have
both things -- damage colors that are constant, but are still
meaningful across characters (as long as you have some idea of what
the character's relative combat abilities are).

In such a game, the player's thought process would be, "They're
scoring some decent hits on Bubba, and I know he's a way better
fighter than I am.  I'd better not try to take them on."  (Or
variations as appropriate.)

Something else that could be done is visual overlays on characters...
Niven and Barnes' Dream Park mentions something along those lines --
when you stop to check your condition, moderately injured body parts
are limned in yellow, severely injured in red, and ones that have
become useless in black.  There's also mention a few times of a
flickering effect being used to indicate borderline conditions --
e.g., red and black flickering together for a body part that's about
to become useless, but can still be saved.

--
       |\      _,,,---,,_     Travis S. Casey  <efindel at earthlink.net>
 ZZzz  /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_   No one agrees with me.  Not even me.
      |,4-  ) )-,_..;\ (  `'-' 
     '---''(_/--'  `-'\_)
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