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shadowfyr · 08-27-2007, 01:54 PM

I think they are referring to "grid rooms", often used for the main world, since its damn hard, if your world is thousands of rooms + areas, to hand write every single square mile of "forest" or "plains", etc., in between the places you actually expect people to do doing things. Instead you employ some generic info, which is tossed together semi-randomly, to give a general sense of what you are supposed to be looking at there.

Mind you, this is **nothing** like an MMO imho. If someone wanted to emulate that, it may look similar, but I don't think its impossible to make it reasonably different. After all, a true coordinate based system would have to know distances to other objects, which direction you are facing and thus what to *add* to the description to make it accurate. The hardest part would be designing a "writer" function, which puts that information together in a paragraph, not 5-10 disconnected sentences. In other words, it would need to do, "You are standing on an open plain, tall grass swaying gently in the breeze. Nearby, to your left, you see a small village, and in the distance a strange castle simply floats in the sky." You don't want, "You are standing on an open plain. There is swaying grass on this part of the plain. Nearby is a village. A castle floats in the sky in the distance." The later **is** stupid, and is precisely the sort of junk you get from grid systems, since its easier to tack a bunch of stuff together, generated from a lookup table, than develop something that at least "attempts" to parse it into something that reads like someone really wrote it.

That said, its bound to be rather complicated to come up with something that can do it right. And it kind of hinges on what people mean when they say, "real coordinate system", in a mud, since a "real" one *must* do something like this, there being no way to write every room (no rooms), while if they actually mean "grid system", then they could hand write every description, but I cringe at the thought of how much time it would take to make all of them unique on a huge world.

08-27-2007, 01:54 PM	#14
shadowfyr Senior Member Join Date: Oct 2002 Posts: 310	Re: Roomless World Size I think they are referring to "grid rooms", often used for the main world, since its damn hard, if your world is thousands of rooms + areas, to hand write every single square mile of "forest" or "plains", etc., in between the places you actually expect people to do doing things. Instead you employ some generic info, which is tossed together semi-randomly, to give a general sense of what you are supposed to be looking at there. Mind you, this is nothing like an MMO imho. If someone wanted to emulate that, it may look similar, but I don't think its impossible to make it reasonably different. After all, a true coordinate based system would have to know distances to other objects, which direction you are facing and thus what to add to the description to make it accurate. The hardest part would be designing a "writer" function, which puts that information together in a paragraph, not 5-10 disconnected sentences. In other words, it would need to do, "You are standing on an open plain, tall grass swaying gently in the breeze. Nearby, to your left, you see a small village, and in the distance a strange castle simply floats in the sky." You don't want, "You are standing on an open plain. There is swaying grass on this part of the plain. Nearby is a village. A castle floats in the sky in the distance." The later is stupid, and is precisely the sort of junk you get from grid systems, since its easier to tack a bunch of stuff together, generated from a lookup table, than develop something that at least "attempts" to parse it into something that reads like someone really wrote it. That said, its bound to be rather complicated to come up with something that can do it right. And it kind of hinges on what people mean when they say, "real coordinate system", in a mud, since a "real" one must do something like this, there being no way to write every room (no rooms), while if they actually mean "grid system", then they could hand write every description, but I cringe at the thought of how much time it would take to make all of them unique on a huge world.