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Old 04-23-2005, 10:42 AM   #19
Molly
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Join Date: Apr 2002
Location: Sweden
Home MUD: 4 Dimensions
Posts: 574
Molly will become famous soon enoughMolly will become famous soon enough
KaVir wrote April 23 2005,06:43
I couldn’t agree more.

I get really tired of the endlessly hashed and rehashed subject of using or not using the word “you” in descriptions. I have no problem with the word you itself, I actually use it quite often in my own descs. However we have a general rule against descriptions that presume an emotion or action from the player’s side, like for instance ‘You feel very scared’ or ‘You are shivering in the cold’. (I could actually live with sentences like ‘You get an uneasy feeling of being watched’, provided the area is full of roaming, high level, aggressive mobs that may also be invisible or hiding/sneaking. Or ‘This place feels very secure and peaceful’, provided the room is set as peaceful, or the area is a low level one with no aggressive mobs at all. In these cases I think the sentences convey useful information about the general character of the area.

We also explicitly forbid expressions like ‘You are standing…’ or ‘You are walking…’ for the simple and logical reason that the player could actually be sitting, resting, swimming or flying.

But what KaVir describes is a totally different system for descriptions; code generated, dynamic descs, where the code checks for time of day, room sector, weather and the body position of the player. In this case expressions like ‘You are standing…’ or ‘You are walking…’ would of course be totally okay, because it would reflect what the player actually is doing at that very moment. A code generated, dynamic desc is built up by parts of sentences like the below example (correct me if I am wrong):

‘You are walking/standing/resting/flying/ (body position) in the middle of an open field (sector). The air has a cool crispness (season) and you can feel that it’s been some time since it last rained (weather). The sun is setting in the west, colouring the sky blood red (time of day). A forest edge bars the sight to the east, otherwise the terrain lies open in all directions (room exists).’

You could probably quite easily make the code check for the players level in comparison with the hardness of the zone and whether the player is new to the zone, or has visited the same room several times before, in which case you could also add a sentence like:

‘You are very familiar with the terrain, and feel confident that you could handle any problems that might crop up.’ or ‘This is unknown ground to you, so you proceed with caution, keeping a close watch.’

I have also seen some very advanced examples of coded, randomised descs that were put together by a number of different elements describing different types of terrain, vegetation, topography etc. I forgot who made them (perhaps it was Ytrewsu?), but they looked really impressive, certainly a lot better than many desc you see in sloppily put together muds. Obviously some skilled writer, with a good sense of the value of words, had been involved in creating the elements that were the foundation for the randomisation.

Personally I feel a bit divided when it comes to code generated descs however. Although they can be made to look pretty good, and I can see the use for them particularly in PK based muds, I still feel that they’ll always be a bit ‘generic’ and repetitive, and never could totally replace a well written individual desc. If you are blessed with a staff of very talented builders, (like we are), I would never want to forfeit the imagination, creativity and ‘flavour’ that a really skilled builder can add to the descriptions. If you have a problem in finding good and active enough builders, I guess that dynamic descs would be a better choice than settling for low quality descriptions.

The only place where I would consider using dynamic descs myself is in grids (large filling zones between the ‘real’ zones. I always disliked repeated descs, so I usually try to write individual ones even for the grids, but that really can be a pain-in-the-ass at times – (I mean how many ways are there to describe a 400 room big prairie or open sea?). So maybe some day we might implement dynamic, sector based descs for our wilderness grids, but I realise that this needs quite a lot of initial work, to write all the random sentence parts and make sure that they always fit together.

It would be interesting to hear how many hours it took to set up the randomised desc system that I described above. Perhaps whoever created them has a reply to that?
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