[MUD-Dev] Dynamic Descriptions

[Alex Chacha]

From: Tess Snider <malkyne at gmail.com>

> And, that, I would say, is an important point, if this is a topic
> that interests you.  If you are going to make these things
> mutable: 1.) It should be important to the typical player's
> experience in some way that they are mutable, and 2.) it should be
> *conventional* for these descriptions to change -- so that your
> players come to expect change, and know that they should pay
> attention, just in case.

I have noticed that too a while ago that when adding random flavor
texts to the description, people would ignore them after the novelty
effect wore off. However this can be used in a very useful way and I
can describe how I used it.

I added a property list to each room that was essentially a map of
property name to property object (which contained description and
other parameters).  As a simple example lets say there was a
property called 'light' in a given "room" (in my case it was a small
vegetable field near an abandoned farm).  There was a thread that
would update that value for a bunch of rooms based on time of day so
when it was night in game time then it would update the object
appropriately (this was done every 2 game hours to reduce too much
change).  Now at night the description of that room changed and a
ghost that only lingers at night was present and a related quest was
only available then.  This along with the description were altered
for a that time, so people moving through that area during the day
time never knew about the ghost or such.  I later added malevolent
sprouts during night and if it was raining which got me a few
positive feedback emails.  The system was a lot more complex but you
get the idea.

Just using randomness in descriptions can be interesting but it
suffers from the "novelty effect", making it part of the game will
definitely add dimension and in some cases a lot of complexity :)

++Alex
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