[MUD-Dev] Dynamic Descriptions

[Bernard Graham]

On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 11:56:51 +1000, Tess Snider <malkyne at gmail.com>
wrote:

> This may sound like it's turning into a game vs. world rant, but
> being pro-world is no excuse for being boring.  A good world
> varies, grows, changes, and remains interesting, whereas The
> Plains of Green Grass, Bears and Spiders gets to be
> mind-bogglingly boring after a few trips.

I totally agree with you on the fact that creating space just for
the sake of "space" is a waste of space.  This basically touches on
the reason why I am actually interested in creating such dynamic
descriptions.  When you have a world that is described to you based
completely on is properties - *that* is a dynamic world.  When
someone changes those properties, it is automatically reflected in
its description.  So when I have a whole lot of forest which are
initially just *forest*, and as the game progresses, people do
things in the forest that would change it - for example, druids may
start to live in the trees.  This would cause the forest floor to
change over time, giving hints to the locations of these druids (due
to the fact that as the owner repeatedly go in and out of his/her
treehouse, the forest floor may be worn down and start to look like
a path).

All of these are the kinds of things that really (in my view), make
the world seem alive.  And these are just simple examples.

I still believe that you need space.  Here is another idea which
ties into the things I want to do: Initially, the world that is
experienced by players are small - maybe just a city.  One day
someone decides to leave the boundaries of the city.  The "outside"
world has not yet been created.  But the engine knows that outside
of the city is a forest.  So the first person to walk outside of the
city causes the forest to actually exist for the first time - be
that only one room or a whole forest that is generated the moment
someone goes beyond a certain point.  Using this idea, it is much
easier to desigh your complete world by simply mapping global
regions and as the mud grows, people discover these areas.  This way
its even fun for the developers to play :-) But this would
completely rely on the engine being able to display proper english
descriptions of locations that has been created on the fly by a
computer and not an english writer. This also leads to the ultimate
simulation of reality - the ability to completely modify the world
you live in, because if you don't have to worry about static
descriptions, changing the world and reflecting those changes are
done automatically by the engine.  Someone chops down a whole region
of trees and destroyes a portion of the forest - suddenly it becomes
an open plain in the middle of the forest.  Only over time it may
grow back into a forest or become a newly founded city...

Now back to reality...  How likely is it for an engine to be able to
do all these things.  Do we have enough computer power?  I believe
so...  Would all of this rely on simple methods, or something more
powerful like rules engines and maybe neural netts that would
understand cities and other types of areas.

I totally believe that this can be done - I am just not yet sure
from which angle to tackle this problem.  I believe that creating an
engine like this has the possibilities to again revolutionize the
mudding world - imagine you can build these dynamic worlds in a
matter of minutes and then spend you time on balancing resources,
creating skills and quests, etc...  It will allow mud creators to
"push the envelope" into new areas of imagination if some of the
more tedious work can be automated...
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