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Valg · 09-26-2005, 01:17 PM

The problem is of course that writing room descriptions rapidly becomes intractable for one of several reasons:

- If you're accounting for day/night, seasons, local weather (sunny/cloudy/rain/snow), you're already at 2*4*4=32 possible room states which could possibly require unique descriptions. Obviously they will often be variations on a theme (that huge tree is still there, but the leaves turn) and therefore easier to produce than 32 unique locations, but you're still going to add a lot of overhead to creating a place. Depending on your game's focus, this workload increase may not be worth the immersion difference.

As a micro-example, you mention transforming into a wolf. This might be a good tool for a game where a large percentage of the player characters are werewolves. It would be a horrible tool for us, where a small percentage of characters (maybe 3-4%) belong to a guild that teaches upwards of 100 possible transformations. #### if I want to rewrite that room description for a (typically human-sized) spider monkey, falcon, wolf, armadillo, etc.

- Some people skirt the above by writing automated room generators, or other tools that vary descriptions on the fly based on game states. The problem there is that while any one room can be made to look very convincing, once you've been through a couple dozen, the patterns tend to become predictable and dry. They also tend to be high on choppy declarative statements, lacking the smooth transitions a human author could do with little effort. We've gotten some good results with narrowly-targeted substitutions (for example, those things at the end of your legs might be feet, hooves, hindpaws, or claws, depending on what type of PC you are), but anything "bigger" tends to be ugly.

How do people address these issues?

09-26-2005, 01:17 PM	#4
Valg Senior Member Join Date: Apr 2002 Home MUD: Carrion Fields Posts: 643	The problem is of course that writing room descriptions rapidly becomes intractable for one of several reasons: - If you're accounting for day/night, seasons, local weather (sunny/cloudy/rain/snow), you're already at 244=32 possible room states which could possibly require unique descriptions. Obviously they will often be variations on a theme (that huge tree is still there, but the leaves turn) and therefore easier to produce than 32 unique locations, but you're still going to add a lot of overhead to creating a place. Depending on your game's focus, this workload increase may not be worth the immersion difference. As a micro-example, you mention transforming into a wolf. This might be a good tool for a game where a large percentage of the player characters are werewolves. It would be a horrible tool for us, where a small percentage of characters (maybe 3-4%) belong to a guild that teaches upwards of 100 possible transformations. #### if I want to rewrite that room description for a (typically human-sized) spider monkey, falcon, wolf, armadillo, etc. - Some people skirt the above by writing automated room generators, or other tools that vary descriptions on the fly based on game states. The problem there is that while any one room can be made to look very convincing, once you've been through a couple dozen, the patterns tend to become predictable and dry. They also tend to be high on choppy declarative statements, lacking the smooth transitions a human author could do with little effort. We've gotten some good results with narrowly-targeted substitutions (for example, those things at the end of your legs might be feet, hooves, hindpaws, or claws, depending on what type of PC you are), but anything "bigger" tends to be ugly. How do people address these issues?