I've heard of wilderness generators or area generators to be more generic whereby you input a bunch of "stuff" (be that criteria or X room descs, etc.) and the generators will produce an X vnum big area.

I'm wondering if anyone can recommend such a tool and whether they work well or basically just spit out redundant garbage or crap in general. I realize a generator cannot replace a builder who has the ability to create constantly unique rooms, etc. but I'm curious nonetheless.

This is for some tests I'm running on my own, just to see how they work.

Thanks in advance.

Pleos

Haven't heard anything about it in awhile so it may not be in devolpment anymore. I do know they released a small version of it which you might be able to dig up from someone.

Thanks for the link Tavish.

No info on their site, but I've sent off an email, so we'll see. - email actually bounced...*chuckle*

But on their forums they mention they're working on a new version and won't release the old one due to incompatability with the new one...we'll wait and see.

Does anyone know what DescribeIt did, if it worked, etc.?

Or any other recommendations...

Pleos

Important to note that DescribeIt isn't actually an area or wilderness generator, but rather a tool that produces room descriptions based on criteria that you can select. Unfortunately it never really took off, the main reason I think being that it didn't come with a built-in word list of criteria, you had to build your own using an HTML style language.

Like you both mentioned though, it doesn't look like it is supported anymore.

Lotius

In 4D we are using a version of the Wilderness Grid, that was developed by and converted to Circle code by Edward Felch,

Regrettably I don't have the address to the website any more, but as far as I can remember I just did a search for 'wilderness' on the net to find it. I am sure you could do the same, or e-mail any of the addresses above for info.

What the wilderness code does is generating the rooms, exits and a generic room name and desc for each type of sector (field, forest, hill, mountain etc.) - about 15 different choices in our mud. So when you change the sector of the room, the code automatically changes the room name and desc. It also generates pretty nice looking maps, wich can be displayed directly on the player's screeen, or - (which is the choice we made in 4D) - be shown when you type the command MAP. You can choose the generic descs yourself, and make them as long as short as you like. (In this case I'd suggest short ones, to mark the zone as a travel area). You can make the grids as large or as small as you like. And all this in a matter of minutes.

For a new mud the grid presents a way to quickly create a world large enough to play in, an alternative to using the stock zones. The wilderness grid is also really useful for travel areas, but naturally it has its limitations and drawbacks, mainly the repetitive descs. For instance, I wouldn't recommend using the grid for indoor zones, where you'd expect individual and more elaborate descs.

I use it myself for 'space areas' like oceans, Outer space, and large forests and other country areas, which by nature are somewhat monotonous. Then I just connect the 'real' zones up or down from the grid, in the appropriate places.

To make our Builders independent of the assistance of a Coder, we provide 2 different sized generic grids (10x10 and 20x20), which can easily be changed to new vnums for those who want to use grids in their zones. These grids contain the basic descs, plus generic exit descs as well as listen and smell descs. Then the Builders can combine them in any way they like, change the descs or room names, add extra descs, etc.

Basically the grids work like any other zone, so you can make mobs and objects for them and reset in the normal way. It's up to each Builder what they want to make of them. Personally I put a lot of extra work into my grids, usually adding individual descs to most of the rooms. The grid code still saves a lot of time creating the actual rooms and connecting them, which is very time consuming in Circle.