Okay, a lot of discussion and examples have gone into creating a dynamic system that describes wilderness areas. But here's the question that I lay to you...

"How do you dynamically create a city, or the interior of a building?"

For a city do you actually have 'building' objects which are enterable?

For the interior of a building do you use a flag to describe it as interior? And how do you deal with things like hallways, alcoves, etc?

I've got ideas but I'm just interested what others have done/are planning to do...

A dynamic description cannot be generated from nothing. In the case of hand-written dynamic descriptions, the content of those descriptions is already there - the builder just uses variables and conditional checks within the descriptions. For automated dynamic descriptions, far lessinformation is needed, but you do need to know some (even if that information itself was previously generated).

The approach I used in my old Diku derivative was to assign 32 bits of data to each room. That included a "room type" (one of 512 possibilities, including several indoor rooms), walls, doors, etc. That information, combined with the surroundings, was used to determine what should be in the descriptions.

In a true coordinate-based mud, where there are no rooms, you'd probably want to generate the description from the surrounding objects. So yes, for a building that would mean actually having a "building" object which could be entered, and using its data (material, size, etc) to generate the descriptions. Within the building you might well have individual rooms, each of which are additional objects containing data about themselves (room type "hallway", "alcove", etc)

This may seem like a dumb request ... but anyone out there that uses a dynamic description system - would you mind posting an example of one room desc?  In my limited experience, I didn't like the desc's that I found on the only Mud I tried that used Dynamic descs (which will remain anonymous).

I'm not bashing that particular Mud, but instead am talking about the system.  It could have been a badly built system, I don't know ... but either way - it left me feeling that although dynamically created rooms is a great idea, it was a far too limited system.

Has anyone else felt this way, or am I the only one on this side of the fence?  Or, am I completely missing the other advantages that outway the negative I mentioned?

re: KaVir

I'm running with an automated Dynamic system, and we use objects; terrain, weather, climate, etc to build the system.  I wonder what the possibility of having a building object that created virtual rooms when entered.  Thanks.

re: Lanthum

My system is not built yet, and doesn't create anything intelligible, but I think that it was just bad design. Designing a good system is a lot of work, and takes lots of planning to develop.

Here's an example from mine - but let me say first that the dynamic descs on my MUD are not nearly as advanced as some other MUDs'.

Within the desert
Tumbleweeds - some the typical greyish ball, some still younger and green - dot the horizon here, rolling across the uneven, slate-grey sand. Partially buried, a skeleton bleached snow-white by the sun lies a short distance away. High dunes of built-up peaks and valleys jut randomly from the land, drawn out by the wind which whistles, hot and dry, over the low-slung bushes. To the south and west, the most viable routes lead through the desert.

[Exits: s, w]


Here's another from the same area, to illustrate the reuse of phrases; it becomes less obvious as we add more, but still:


Within the desert
A near-bloodied colour from the sediment thickening it, a narrow river of mud criss-crosses the plain at this point, while layers of rock, eroded into strange clay-toned shapes, rise into a column nearby. A nearby cleft has been cut by either wind or a pick, partly filled with sand; the wavering of heat-distortion seems almost to form a vague image of a small pond ahead. High dunes of built-up peaks and valleys jut randomly from the land, drawn out by the dry wind, while to the north, south, and up, the endless desert terrain stretches on.

[Exits: n, s, u]