[MUD-Dev] [DGN]: Ludicrous speed.

[Chris Duesing]

Yaka St.Aise wrote:

> Unless I misread you, your take on crossmode game design (meaning
> games playable both as text-only and 3D mode) seems limiting
> itself to scale down gamestate description and commands from 3D to
> text. While it sure offers some challenge, I fail to see how it
> would be attractive from the text side of things, be it as a
> prototype solution or a production one.

Well, this was one of the 3 possibilities I presented.

  1. Interpret 3D information to create description at the client

  2. Add contextual information to our protocol, so when you load
  the 3D model for the tree you are also getting a description of
  the tree.

  3. Handle this on the server side completely seperately. This
  would actually be similar to number 2, but instead of your 3D
  client knowing the description of a tree, only players that log in
  to the text port get this information.

> A textual description written only from the cold 3D facts without
> real interpretative room for the text engine and the player
> commands would be about as much fun to read as your average
> phonebook, and would indeed qualify as "graphical MUDs without the
> graphics" which is not an enviable position. ;)

And yet the idea amuses me to no end. Wouldn't it be fun to be able
to switch between the text and graphical and see the differences?

Actually I think, given that we include contextual information, it
is theoretically possible to create a game that is as rich to the
text player as it is the graphical client. It is largely a matter of
design. We simply need to follow some rules about what information
gets presented where.

The first technological hurdle is moving away from the typical
concept of MUD rooms, where a description is attached to a physical
space. You would need to move to a system that generated
descriptions based on location, terrain type, proximity to objects,
etc. This of course would not be useful to tell a story, as some
MUDs use the room concept, but is much more akin to the concept of
the world in a MMO. You 'see' in a MMO what we will tell you in our
text MUD. In a MMO the means of telling a story is moved elsewhere,
and is frequently presented as printed or spoken text. This is no
problem to present on your text client either. the UI for movement
might require some tweaking on the text client, but there are
roomless, coordinate based MUDs out there already... (aren't there
:)

The second technological hurdle is Natural Language Generation,
which closely ties in to the paragraph above. In our case it is
fully a matter of how dynamic you want your descriptions to be,
current muds do not do this, so we dont HAVE to put in much more
work if we don't want to.

The real issue is "why would I ever want to do this?". I don't know,
I was simply saying in the case of 3D protocols being interpreted in
different formats by standardized clients, you "could" do it.

> I see it more like a way of improving overall quality of worlds
> and rulesets design, and to test the "plan aginst the ennemy", as
> well as an opportunity for the early team to get a feel for the
> bigger game to come, thus helping the building of a stronger and
> better (as in more mature) vision shared by the core development
> team which hopefully will smooth some of the difficulties of the
> longer 3D development cycles and help adress both the issues of
> butchering and dilution that arise when key features go back to
> drawing board (or to the bin) 1 year into development, up to the
> point nobody remembers anymore what this darn game was supposed to
> be about in first place .

I am not a professional game developer, so I cannot truly speak to
your concerns. However, I do not see this as improving anything,
since you would need all of the information you originally needed
for the 3D client plus more. Now if your game was completed on the
server side and it was going to be 3 months before the client was
finished, then I could see this as a useful means of starting QA
early to test game mechanics. Does that ever happen?

Chris

P.S. Sorry about the title change, "The Schwartz" got the best of
me... :)
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