[MUD-Dev] Breaking down the walls

[Brian Lindahl]

Matt Chatterly wrote:

> The other question which I will now raise is that of
> information. The information given to a text-mud player is
> traditionally blocks of text which describe his environment. I'm
> contemplating mingling these with ASCII overheads, a stick-man
> equipment diagram, and a few other things (and am contemplating a
> system with an optional custom client).
 
> Has anybody here tried Roguelike style views in parts of their
> textbased Muds?

Many Diku MUDs have created Rogue-style views in their addition of a
Wilderness area, although, each square represented a room, so the
only moving object on the map was the player's token.

Rogue-style views aren't exactly efficient enough, from what I've
seen at this point in time, to allow for hundreds of users to be
running around, each one calculating their own complex line of
sight. If this was, however, done on a client (the calculations),
perhaps this would be a feasible option.

Personally I'd rather not adopt a Rogue-style view, as it seperates
the connection a player has to his or her character, making
role-playing even harder for those who have trouble being absorbed
into their character.

As far as a descriptional system, I've opted to use incremental
updates for my locational movement and nodal polygonal region
system. For example, as you get nearer to an object that you are
focused on, you may recieve several descriptions of it. Key to this
description system is an object's focus on another object and the
fact that you will never recieve all the information that you have
access to. Each motion, activity, sound, etc. that an object or the
environment can produce has a focus level. Depending on how intent
your focus is on a given object at any point, you may or may not see
these motions, hear the sounds, or see the activities. I'll delve
into this more if you'd like, but I think I've articulated my system
clearly enough.

-Brian Lindahl, coder of TCP ('The Cathyle Project')
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