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Old 08-27-2007, 05:51 PM   #15
Molly
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Apr 2002
Location: Sweden
Home MUD: 4 Dimensions
Posts: 574
Molly will become famous soon enoughMolly will become famous soon enough
Re: Roomless World Size

Umm... gotta agree and disagree with both here.

Like Hephos I prefer hand-written descs to auto generated. I've seen some single auto generated descs that looked very impressive, but as soon as you encounter a large number of them, they become repetitive. There are only so many phrases you can put into the system, and even if they are combined in different ways and great care has been taken to make the different phrases fit together, they still give a 'mechanic' feeling.

To me a well-written zone with lots of depth is like an interactive novel, where the plot unravels as you explore the zone. You can never get that feeling with auto generated descs.

However, as KaVir pointed out, the fact that a desc is handwritten is no guarantee for quality, nor is the fact that a zone is 'original'. I have seen Muds where the 'all original' zones they were boasting were so horribly written that the ever abused Old Midgard stands out like a true work of art in comparison.

In these cases the game would have been much better off with auto generated descs, or with just keeping a selection of the stock zones, (because most of these old stock zones at least had some basic quality standards, it's just that you've seen them around so many times that you get totally fed up with them).

It's a pity that quality is so hard to quantify. It's a pity that we cannot have little checkboxes for 'number of typos per 5 line descriptions', or 'number of exclamation marks per description'... Or - on a more serious note - 'number of repeated descs per 50 rooms', or 'number of extra descs per 50 rooms', or 'number of scripts or quests per 50 room zone', (all of which can be set as minimum standards in the Building policy of a Mud with high zone quality ambitions.

Well, the number of rooms does matter.

So does the quality of these rooms.

A too small word soon gets boring, even if it is well written, with many extra descs, because there just isn't enough to do.

A large word without depth gets equally boring, if you like to read descs and not just kill anything that moves.

Ideally would of course be a large world, where all the rooms have well written, individual descs with lots of extra depth. Unfortunately, since time isn't unlimited, and since traditional building even normally is very time consuming, you have to make a choice and try to find a balance between the size of the world and the level of detail - i.e. a compromise between quality and quantity. I usually handle the problem myself by creating two types of zones, the 'connection' zones, like forests, roads, prairies, swamps, sea etc., which usually have shorter descs and lest detail than the 'real' zones, like cities, castles, islands, etc.

Dynamic descs of course are awesome, since they allow you to let parts of the room descriptions change with time of day, weather, people in the room etc. But again this creates more work for the builders, and you have to decide whether the extra plus factor really is worth the extra work, since so few of the players will take notice. It certainly is worth it for a few special rooms and situations - (like the inscription on the wall that only becomes legible when a beam of moonlight hits it at midnight). But these are so few that it probably would be easier to work with scripts for those cases. You can create almost any illusion that you want with a good script.

Still - it would be nice with a checkbox for dynamic descs, even if I don't have them myself.
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