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

[ceo]

Yaka St.Aise wrote:
> At 11:06 -0400 03/09/09, Chris Duesing wrote:

>> Text could of course be more problematic, but certainly not
>> impossible. Of course if the 3DML[1], for lack of a better term,
>> only encompased a mathmatical representation of the world, then
>> much of the richness of context would be lost. It would be easy
>> to say "the ground rises steeply to the east" it would be
>> possible to describe a beautiful mountain range, but what if this
>> particular game was set on pluto? Here our options are to expand
>> the protocol for contextual information, leave this to the game
>> writer to handle in a plugin, or just ignore text clients and
>> allow any game that wanted it to account for it in their design
>> and write a seperate client (or just support the current ones). I
>> dont think this should be a show stopper.

> 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, here's a reason: I don't play MUD's any more because the
paradigm sucks. It's so difficult for me to navigate in an
artificial maze of "rooms" with walls painted to look like views off
in the distance that I get exhausted and confused in minutes.

What's logical about a geography where "You are at the head of a
mountain trail. You can see a track leading off into the
distance. Of course, you cannot actually SEE the track - you can't
see anyone or thing on it, instead you can see a painting of what it
might look like when you get there. You can also see all sorts of
things that don't actually exist in this world (since you can never
get to them), and many places that are adjacent to each other
actually...aren't. You are also constrained by a force field to only
be able to travel along certain limited paths".

OTOH, a MUD where "you are standing on a path; there are several
people to the west, and what looks like a sm,all figure way off in
the east. Nearby there are: a forest, a stream, a small hut, several
rabbit-trails leading in different random directions.", where you
type "approach stream", or "follow a rabbit-trail" followed by
"which one? bearing 30, 75, 193 or 320?" is at least a much more
natural paradigm.

I am, of course, making an assumption of how the 3D world would be
rendered in text. My own experiments showed that a system that works
as I've just described is actually easy to write content for and
easy to play. It does require non-standard data structures (compared
to run-of-the-mill MUDs), but really these are little different from
the work that any 3D engine developer has to do to hold millions of
polygon-objects on the same map (LOD techniques, for example). I'd
love to see more of such MUD's, and things such as Nathan described
at the MDC (I've looked on google for references to Nathan's work
before, but failed to find any, or I'd supply one here :().

> 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. ;)

Nope. Having tried it, I disagree entirely. You have to be quite
creative with how you describe things - I used concentric rings of
proximity, so that things were "Right next to you; beside you; a few
paces away; the other side of the clearing; a little way off; in the
distance; ..." etc. Also you have to do extra work in writing LOD
(Level of Detail) descriptions for everything - so that a person at
greate distance becomes "a short figure", and at closer distances
becomes "a short, stocky man", "a dwarf", "a dwarven warrior moving
aggressively", and "Roger, the psychotic dwarf warlord". Or
something like that... :).

I didn't play with this long enough to get bored of seeing the same
proximity-phrases over and over again, and I expect there would be
significant research work needed to keep it interesting. But without
fundamentally changing anything from the 3D world, you still get a
MUD that is actually a lot more interesting IMHO than a room-based
one. The design processes are identical to the ones you have to do
when building your 3D models for objects and environments...

I'd like to think that if you put more time and resources into the
process than I did, you'd end up with something quite fantastic. :)

Adam M
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