[MUD-Dev] Dynamic Descriptions

[Paul Schwanz]

Alistair Milne wrote:
> Nathan Yospe wrote:

>> In any case, I'd like to hear what others here think of having
>> descriptions flow in a stream of awareness (from the character
>> perspective) instead of as a periodic "room" spewed at them...  >

> I'd have a problem maintaining the attention span necessary to
> play that kind of game.  If the "room descriptions" are
> dynamically changing with the gameplay (thus requiring more
> attention) and are interleaved with your own actions instead of in
> larger-sized discrete chunks, there's a risk I'd miss something
> important in the spam.  It's different in a graphical mud, because
> at any time you can glance around and recap, but reading back
> through a page of text looking for the nuggets of information is
> much harder on the brain.  On my brain, at least ;)

Perhaps your character could remember what the room contained the
last time you visited and only print out the changes?  So, you might
get, "It doesn't appear that anything has changed," in addition to
the brief location description.  Of course, you'd always have the
option to request the more detailed description.

Doing this would probably entail a significant amount of overhead,
though.  Less costly (and much less helpful) would be simply
determining whether things had changed in the room instead of
tracking the actual changes.

--Paul "Phinehas" Schwanz
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