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Molly · 08-31-2002, 04:43 AM

As already was stated, it all depends on the zone. I can whip out a 400 room grid zone with identical room descs and no extras in 3 minutes, but who'd be interested?

What takes time is to build a quality zone, where everything interacts within a given theme; rooms, mobs, objects and scripts. What takes time is to think out good and consistent Quests, which are challenging without being ridiculously hard. What takes time is to research within a theme and write interesting and consistant descs for everything, and to put in all the extra descs with hints about quests and hidden objects.

In our mud exit descs are obligatory, and we also have listen/smell descs for all rooms and smell/taste/feel descs for all objects. Extra descs are optional, but strongly encouraged. Naturally all these extras take time, especially for the builders who use OLC.

For me, who mainly build in file, it's a lot quicker, but I still usually need around 100 hours effective work for a 100 room zone. And if it's a complicated one I need a lot more. And about 80% of that time is spent before I even create the zone in OLC, I write everything down in MS Words and spellcheck it, before cutting and pasting it into the OLC files.

Nobody in our mud is interested in crap zones. We still have a few old zones that haven't been updated yet, which are pretty lousy, but the players hardly ever go there. And sooner or later all those old ones will be updated to our current standards as well.

08-31-2002, 04:43 AM	#8
Molly Senior Member Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: Sweden Home MUD: 4 Dimensions Posts: 574	As already was stated, it all depends on the zone. I can whip out a 400 room grid zone with identical room descs and no extras in 3 minutes, but who'd be interested? What takes time is to build a quality zone, where everything interacts within a given theme; rooms, mobs, objects and scripts. What takes time is to think out good and consistent Quests, which are challenging without being ridiculously hard. What takes time is to research within a theme and write interesting and consistant descs for everything, and to put in all the extra descs with hints about quests and hidden objects. In our mud exit descs are obligatory, and we also have listen/smell descs for all rooms and smell/taste/feel descs for all objects. Extra descs are optional, but strongly encouraged. Naturally all these extras take time, especially for the builders who use OLC. For me, who mainly build in file, it's a lot quicker, but I still usually need around 100 hours effective work for a 100 room zone. And if it's a complicated one I need a lot more. And about 80% of that time is spent before I even create the zone in OLC, I write everything down in MS Words and spellcheck it, before cutting and pasting it into the OLC files. Nobody in our mud is interested in crap zones. We still have a few old zones that haven't been updated yet, which are pretty lousy, but the players hardly ever go there. And sooner or later all those old ones will be updated to our current standards as well.