[MUD-Dev] Metric vs. English System of Measurement in Games

[olag at ifi.uio.no]

Adam M wrote:

> 1 foot seems to be believed to be a more useful length than 10cm -
> certainly, when measuring real-world distances on the "human
> scale" (c.f. architecture books) a foot is much easier to work
> with, completely ignoring the fact that it's approximatable by
> your own body.

10cm is a very tiny foot... Anyway, I don't really see why feet are
easier than meters.

What is easier is to have a unit which allows you to express
yourself in small numbers.

> Ditto the inch. This one's better because the variance in the part
> of the body used to approximate it is much lower than with the
> foot.

Nah, an inch is better because most of the graspable things we are
interested in saying something about in our everyday life fall into
the range 1-9 inches (or thumbs as we would say in norway). cm is a
little bit too short which makes the numbers too high to easily
visuallize them in our heads, and dm is a little bit too large to
describe objects well. Both cm and dm has counterparts on your body
(little finger/hand).

> For instance, those friends of mine who are 6'-4" come up with
> very similar hand-segment lengths as those who are a mere 5'-5".

And those height measures are _completely_ uncomprehensible to me. I
find it much easier to visualize people as 150cm, 160cm, 170cm and
180cm. I have prototypes for men and women in those
ranges. E.g. women are approx 166cm and men are 180cm, so tall and
short are relative to those prototypes. I also know that women who
are 150cm are cute. ;-)

> about, since the relationship is deterministic: simply make a
> checkbox in the setup menu for "imperial / metric". Implementing
> the conversion formulae once is pretty trivial...

Except that I prefer inches when talking about beams and nails, feet
when talking about boat lenghts, yet other units when talking about
quantities of countables... Then you have the Danish with their own
way of counting (base 20)... Etc.

In a text MUD you could simply use "tiny", "short", "long", "very
long" etc. In a graphical MUD you could just visualize it. Why have
the explicit numbers in the presentation?

Ola.
_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev