Top Mud Sites Forum - View Single Post - The future of text-based gaming?

shadowfyr · 03-11-2007, 05:01 PM

Not necessarilly. They recently open sourced their client. They know they have bad interface design, so they are going to see if the thousands of people using it can fix it. Good bet they can. By contrast, games like EQ and EQ2, WoW, etc. have fixed, non-adjustable interfaces. Even when you add a hack, like the one I recently added to EQ2, to give you more points of interest on the maps you can navigate to (and so you can fracking find things at all sometimes), you still can't re-scale the map to focus in on specific points, the maps don't always line up 100% with where you are in the world and other glitches. The maps in EQ didn't look as pretty, but the new ones suck in some critical ways and you *can't* fix them, since the client's interfaces don't let you make the changes you need to correct the problems.

By contrast, text parsing is only non-trivial if someone intentionally designs areas that are nearly impossible to map, but the mapping can be done using several existing systems, or you can build entirely new ones, which someone did for a Battletech based mud a while back.

As for muds being better at actions... Maybe... If you mean you could "write" three paragraphs about what a monster is doing in a room, instead of having it animate it. But part of designing muds tends to be small and concise room descriptions, small and concise object descriptions and lots of very short descriptions for how you hit, kick, zap, etc. the mobs (or them you). There are really only a few "actions" muds deal with combat wise - DOT, heal over time, heal, hitting. Everything else is a label. Do muds do a better and easier job of "labelling" things? Sure. But so what. You spend almost as much time trying to avoid attack A from looking too much like attack B, C and D in three other guilds as you would changing the color of a cloud of sparks or gluing a different handle to an axe, so attacking with it doesn't look the same.

But.. How about Emotes/Souls? Well, a lot of them are now animation scripted in 3D games. But, you have the same problem with non-scripted ones there are you do in muds. A Muds mechanics don't generally allow you to do an emote that "automatically" corrects for gender pronouns or other issues, neither do they do so in 3D environments. The only *gain* you get from the text environment is that its not 3D, so you can do, "Shadowfyr hops on one leg.", and not worry about the fact that the character model just stands there. Gosh! lol

Seriously, 3D environments do action as well as muds do, and they get better all the time at it. Its probably not going to be too long before someone tries building a "magic" physics engine in one that defines internally how spells *work*, and not just manually script every spell individually. There will still be limits, but adding one effect that is missing is going to be a lot easier than animating 100% of the entire sequence. I wouldn't be suprised if some of that is already going on. The gag animation in EQ2 is also used for most plague type spells, just with some other stuff thrown on.

Put simply, muds could write chapters for the "big" details, but no one wants to play the text equivalent to a Hemmingway novel, so they write what is paragraphs for main descriptions and mere sentences for the details, when you look at them. 3D systems don't need to "write" the novel, they just need to show it, so even the smallest object of real interest, if transformed into part of a book, would take a whole page. And that includes actions, which if described in sufficient detail would be so horibbly spammy you wouldn't be able to tell what was even happening in the fight.

I am not sure the argument that muds do action better is anything more than, "We have more labels and they can be pasted on the jars faster than if you tried to paint them on instead." Certainly a valid argument, if you don't mind all the labels to be nothing but strips of paper with a word printed on them, while the guy down the streat is drawing pictures on theirs. Even more relevant an argument if you can draw pictures, but not quite the same as the guy the next block over doing glass etching, and so on. More generic doesn't mean "better", just easier and faster. And that only remains valid so long as it remains easier and faster to do it. The day the guy on the next block over can take "any" label and "print" it through an etching machine.... you're hosed. lol

So, the entire argument about "better at actions", really is just a statement of *for now*, with the additional caveat of, "but not with as big of a gap as there used to be."

---

I do agree that some sort of QC control needs to be placed on things. Perhaps that would be one grounds for guilds and societies. To make one you might be required to have one or more people "in" the group that is good at writing the descriptions. Or failing that, maybe those that "do" write well might even make a builders guild, which would take less time to build you your castle than if you submitted it to the games own staff. I.e., using local contractors, instead of hiring the experts from some far off kingdom. The later might do a better job, but they might also have so many other projects that it would take years to get to yours. Better to hire the local builders guild, whose work has already been vetted and approved "by" those distant experts.

03-11-2007, 05:01 PM	#47
shadowfyr Senior Member Join Date: Oct 2002 Posts: 310	Not necessarilly. They recently open sourced their client. They know they have bad interface design, so they are going to see if the thousands of people using it can fix it. Good bet they can. By contrast, games like EQ and EQ2, WoW, etc. have fixed, non-adjustable interfaces. Even when you add a hack, like the one I recently added to EQ2, to give you more points of interest on the maps you can navigate to (and so you can fracking find things at all sometimes), you still can't re-scale the map to focus in on specific points, the maps don't always line up 100% with where you are in the world and other glitches. The maps in EQ didn't look as pretty, but the new ones suck in some critical ways and you can't fix them, since the client's interfaces don't let you make the changes you need to correct the problems. By contrast, text parsing is only non-trivial if someone intentionally designs areas that are nearly impossible to map, but the mapping can be done using several existing systems, or you can build entirely new ones, which someone did for a Battletech based mud a while back. As for muds being better at actions... Maybe... If you mean you could "write" three paragraphs about what a monster is doing in a room, instead of having it animate it. But part of designing muds tends to be small and concise room descriptions, small and concise object descriptions and lots of very short descriptions for how you hit, kick, zap, etc. the mobs (or them you). There are really only a few "actions" muds deal with combat wise - DOT, heal over time, heal, hitting. Everything else is a label. Do muds do a better and easier job of "labelling" things? Sure. But so what. You spend almost as much time trying to avoid attack A from looking too much like attack B, C and D in three other guilds as you would changing the color of a cloud of sparks or gluing a different handle to an axe, so attacking with it doesn't look the same. But.. How about Emotes/Souls? Well, a lot of them are now animation scripted in 3D games. But, you have the same problem with non-scripted ones there are you do in muds. A Muds mechanics don't generally allow you to do an emote that "automatically" corrects for gender pronouns or other issues, neither do they do so in 3D environments. The only gain you get from the text environment is that its not 3D, so you can do, "Shadowfyr hops on one leg.", and not worry about the fact that the character model just stands there. Gosh! lol Seriously, 3D environments do action as well as muds do, and they get better all the time at it. Its probably not going to be too long before someone tries building a "magic" physics engine in one that defines internally how spells work, and not just manually script every spell individually. There will still be limits, but adding one effect that is missing is going to be a lot easier than animating 100% of the entire sequence. I wouldn't be suprised if some of that is already going on. The gag animation in EQ2 is also used for most plague type spells, just with some other stuff thrown on. Put simply, muds could write chapters for the "big" details, but no one wants to play the text equivalent to a Hemmingway novel, so they write what is paragraphs for main descriptions and mere sentences for the details, when you look at them. 3D systems don't need to "write" the novel, they just need to show it, so even the smallest object of real interest, if transformed into part of a book, would take a whole page. And that includes actions, which if described in sufficient detail would be so horibbly spammy you wouldn't be able to tell what was even happening in the fight. I am not sure the argument that muds do action better is anything more than, "We have more labels and they can be pasted on the jars faster than if you tried to paint them on instead." Certainly a valid argument, if you don't mind all the labels to be nothing but strips of paper with a word printed on them, while the guy down the streat is drawing pictures on theirs. Even more relevant an argument if you can draw pictures, but not quite the same as the guy the next block over doing glass etching, and so on. More generic doesn't mean "better", just easier and faster. And that only remains valid so long as it remains easier and faster to do it. The day the guy on the next block over can take "any" label and "print" it through an etching machine.... you're hosed. lol So, the entire argument about "better at actions", really is just a statement of for now, with the additional caveat of, "but not with as big of a gap as there used to be." --- I do agree that some sort of QC control needs to be placed on things. Perhaps that would be one grounds for guilds and societies. To make one you might be required to have one or more people "in" the group that is good at writing the descriptions. Or failing that, maybe those that "do" write well might even make a builders guild, which would take less time to build you your castle than if you submitted it to the games own staff. I.e., using local contractors, instead of hiring the experts from some far off kingdom. The later might do a better job, but they might also have so many other projects that it would take years to get to yours. Better to hire the local builders guild, whose work has already been vetted and approved "by" those distant experts.