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Old 04-29-2010, 06:26 PM   #6
silvarilon
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Re: RP Intensive mud with no need for description

Interesting topic. It caught me entirely off-guard, which is surprising.

I'd honestly never considered which is better. In my mind it's so completely obvious that they are both better in the right situations. For that reason, I'd never even considered whether my MUD should use one or the other.

For the most part, we use hand-written descriptions. This makes it easy for any builder to start making items and locations without needing coding skills. As the builders advance in skill, we teach them to make use of dynamic descriptions, and then how to set up new dynamic descriptions for themselves.

Almost every item has some "default" dynamic properties, such as "color" or "material" which are used in the descriptions. This allows us to have hand-written descriptions of an item, say, a spear, and mention the steel spearhead, and wooden shaft. But that item can then be re-used in other situations. Say there is a plot about the emperors elite guard, and we want to make the guard stand apart. We can very easily set the property of the guard's spears to be black-lacquered spearheads with bronze shafts. Or whatever. In the short term, it's minimal extra work to make use of the dynamic properties, and in the long term it means we can have almost unlimited variations on the items, allowing pretty much every player in the game to have easy access to custom items.

The balance of generated description vs handwritten description also varies based on the item. Our clothing is extremely customizable, using in-game skills. A skilled tailor can get various materials, dye the material to the color they want, make various garments, add buttons (each potentially with their own color and material... for example, when making a coat for a captain you might put gold anchor-shaped buttons on it...), add trimming, add lining, etc. - in a case like that the description will be much more heavily generated than in a case like the spear.

We plan on releasing a new area into the game soon, that will be procedurally generated. Each room will, obviously, have a generated description. But even that generated description will be built up from hand-written descriptions. I honestly have trouble seeing the line between one and the other.

Why can't you have both?
You can list what they say they look like, and then mention the generated content.
"You see Silvarilon.
He is totally buff and awesome and wrote this description of himself. Arrogant, isn't he? He also has a totally square jaw.
Silvarilon's right hand is dripping blood, and his left leg has been punctured with a spear.
Silvarilon is wearing a guard's uniform and a black cloak."

In the case of shapechanging, a generated description can temporarily replace their custom description, until they change back.

I'm quite horrified by that! I've only played in RP intensive muds, but seen enough of that sort of player on graphical games, so I'm not so surprised.
In ICO the description is generated based on what the player inputs from choices (e.g. "choose your body type") so it's not an issue, but even if we allowed it, I'd be very surprised if the players didn't self-police themselves.
So I suspect it is a very different attitude on RP muds.

Maybe that different attitude also factors into the hand written vs generated discussion? Do the players of one type of mud have a different preference to the other, perhaps?
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