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Old 03-10-2007, 09:57 PM   #41
Ide
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No, you're missing the point. Substandard writing will not be distributed. That's the idea behind managed distribution, and perhaps managed is the wrong term if you think you need to spend a great deal of time on it. You write a system so that the players 'manage' the distribution of the content according to your rules.

Also, who's to say what's substandard and what's not? If you want to write everything yourself, fine. If you want to write with a team where everyone writes to the same standard, fine again. But there's nothing that says a player-generated world must result in 'a lot' of really bad writing. You're looking at the situation too simply.
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Old 03-11-2007, 12:58 AM   #42
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Old 03-11-2007, 09:59 AM   #43
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Player-added content doesn't necessarily mean freeform writing.  Implement the appropriate rules for managing the content, then you can work on something else while the players use your tools to expand the game.

As an example: I allow players to set their own descriptions, but they may only do so through configurable options, not by writing their descriptions manually.  This ensures that they cannot write what I would personally consider to be a 'bad' description (i.e., descriptions don't have spelling mistakes, bad grammar or incorrect information).

Admittedly the above example doesn't actually help expand the game, but it does save me the effort of verifying people's descriptions for quality and consistency.  The only other two alternatives I can think of would be to (1) spend administrative time and effort verifying/validating player descriptions, or (2) allow players to write what I consider 'bad' descriptions. My approach sacrifices flexibility, but it's a price I'm more willing to pay than the alternatives.
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Old 03-11-2007, 11:25 AM   #44
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Old 03-11-2007, 12:24 PM   #45
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I agree for the most part with KaVir. I think for the most part players should be able to change the environment they play in, even if they aren't adding 'new' content per say, they're still changing things up for other the players, keeping each adventure new and exciting. I think MMO games could do the same thing, but its a lot easier to create more permutations in text without the expensive overhead of paying artists and designers. In this regard a MUD is more or less a continuous system where as a MMO is discrete, we can fill in the gaps because of the flexibility of text that MMO games cant.

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Old 03-11-2007, 12:24 PM   #46
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Old 03-11-2007, 05:01 PM   #47
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Not necessarilly. They recently open sourced their client. They know they have bad interface design, so they are going to see if the thousands of people using it can fix it. Good bet they can. By contrast, games like EQ and EQ2, WoW, etc. have fixed, non-adjustable interfaces. Even when you add a hack, like the one I recently added to EQ2, to give you more points of interest on the maps you can navigate to (and so you can fracking find things at all sometimes), you still can't re-scale the map to focus in on specific points, the maps don't always line up 100% with where you are in the world and other glitches. The maps in EQ didn't look as pretty, but the new ones suck in some critical ways and you *can't* fix them, since the client's interfaces don't let you make the changes you need to correct the problems.

By contrast, text parsing is only non-trivial if someone intentionally designs areas that are nearly impossible to map, but the mapping can be done using several existing systems, or you can build entirely new ones, which someone did for a Battletech based mud a while back.

As for muds being better at actions... Maybe... If you mean you could "write" three paragraphs about what a monster is doing in a room, instead of having it animate it. But part of designing muds tends to be small and concise room descriptions, small and concise object descriptions and lots of very short descriptions for how you hit, kick, zap, etc. the mobs (or them you). There are really only a few "actions" muds deal with combat wise - DOT, heal over time, heal, hitting. Everything else is a label. Do muds do a better and easier job of "labelling" things? Sure. But so what. You spend almost as much time trying to avoid attack A from looking too much like attack B, C and D in three other guilds as you would changing the color of a cloud of sparks or gluing a different handle to an axe, so attacking with it doesn't look the same.

But.. How about Emotes/Souls? Well, a lot of them are now animation scripted in 3D games. But, you have the same problem with non-scripted ones there are you do in muds. A Muds mechanics don't generally allow you to do an emote that "automatically" corrects for gender pronouns or other issues, neither do they do so in 3D environments. The only *gain* you get from the text environment is that its not 3D, so you can do, "Shadowfyr hops on one leg.", and not worry about the fact that the character model just stands there. Gosh! lol

Seriously, 3D environments do action as well as muds do, and they get better all the time at it. Its probably not going to be too long before someone tries building a "magic" physics engine in one that defines internally how spells *work*, and not just manually script every spell individually. There will still be limits, but adding one effect that is missing is going to be a lot easier than animating 100% of the entire sequence. I wouldn't be suprised if some of that is already going on. The gag animation in EQ2 is also used for most plague type spells, just with some other stuff thrown on.

Put simply, muds could write chapters for the "big" details, but no one wants to play the text equivalent to a Hemmingway novel, so they write what is paragraphs for main descriptions and mere sentences for the details, when you look at them. 3D systems don't need to "write" the novel, they just need to show it, so even the smallest object of real interest, if transformed into part of a book, would take a whole page. And that includes actions, which if described in sufficient detail would be so horibbly spammy you wouldn't be able to tell what was even happening in the fight.

I am not sure the argument that muds do action better is anything more than, "We have more labels and they can be pasted on the jars faster than if you tried to paint them on instead." Certainly a valid argument, if you don't mind all the labels to be nothing but strips of paper with a word printed on them, while the guy down the streat is drawing pictures on theirs. Even more relevant an argument if you can draw pictures, but not quite the same as the guy the next block over doing glass etching, and so on. More generic doesn't mean "better", just easier and faster. And that only remains valid so long as it remains easier and faster to do it. The day the guy on the next block over can take "any" label and "print" it through an etching machine.... you're hosed. lol

So, the entire argument about "better at actions", really is just a statement of *for now*, with the additional caveat of, "but not with as big of a gap as there used to be."

---

I do agree that some sort of QC control needs to be placed on things. Perhaps that would be one grounds for guilds and societies. To make one you might be required to have one or more people "in" the group that is good at writing the descriptions. Or failing that, maybe those that "do" write well might even make a builders guild, which would take less time to build you your castle than if you submitted it to the games own staff. I.e., using local contractors, instead of hiring the experts from some far off kingdom. The later might do a better job, but they might also have so many other projects that it would take years to get to yours. Better to hire the local builders guild, whose work has already been vetted and approved "by" those distant experts.
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Old 03-11-2007, 10:39 PM   #48
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Shadowfyr wrote:

Not necessarilly. They recently open sourced their client.

Yep, which is a step in the right direction but doesn't fix their crappy and stupidly expensive technology (they can support approximately 4 simultaneous players/server).


They know they have bad interface design, so they are going to see if the thousands of people using it can fix it. Good bet they can. By contrast, games like EQ and EQ2, WoW, etc. have fixed, non-adjustable interfaces.

Have you never seen Insomniac for WoW? It's a compilation of dozens of interface alternations. Runescape fans have also reverse engineered the client and made a completely custom client (which Runescape doesn't like).

Allowing users to play with the client is nothing new and is quickly going to become fairly standard. In EE, we plan on opening up the client to users after it's stable, for instance.


But part of designing muds tends to be small and concise room descriptions, small and concise object descriptions and lots of very short descriptions for how you hit, kick, zap, etc. the mobs (or them you). There are really only a few "actions" muds deal with combat wise - DOT, heal over time, heal, hitting.


Combat is one system in many MUDs, but just one of many. Perhaps one of the most important, but saying that a MUD only deals with a few actions combat-wise is true, but also misses the fact that the actions in combat are just a small set of the overall actions available.



Everything else is a label. Do muds do a better and easier job of "labelling" things? Sure. But so what. You spend almost as much time trying to avoid attack A from looking too much like attack B, C and D in three other guilds as you would changing the color of a cloud of sparks or gluing a different handle to an axe, so attacking with it doesn't look the same.

The labels are content/nouns, not actions/verbs.


But.. How about Emotes/Souls? Well, a lot of them are now animation scripted in 3D games. But, you have the same problem with non-scripted ones there are you do in muds. A Muds mechanics don't generally allow you to do an emote that "automatically" corrects for gender pronouns or other issues, neither do they do so in 3D environments.

There are certainly text MUDs that do that. Achaea does it for instance. I don't care what "most MUDs" do, as most MUDs are just people screwing around in their spare time, just like most graphical MUDs (few of which you or I have ever heard of as they have few to no players) are people screwing around in their spare time. I don't think there's much to gain by defining the potential of MUDs by the lowest common demoninators.


The only *gain* you get from the text environment is that its not 3D, so you can do, "Shadowfyr hops on one leg.", and not worry about the fact that the character model just stands there. Gosh! lol

As the classic example (courtesy of Raph Koster I believe) goes, try doing this in a graphical MUD: "You bow ironically."

And try doing custom animations at all in any gamey-environment (WoW, Runescape, etc etc). Second Life lets you but it's that very pupeetering system that has helped ensure that they are still not profitable.



I am not sure the argument that muds do action better is anything more than, "We have more labels and they can be pasted on the jars faster than if you tried to paint them on instead."

Well, again, those labels are content/nouns not action/verbs and are not what I'm talking about.

--matt
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Old 03-12-2007, 05:10 PM   #49
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Old 07-04-2007, 06:33 PM   #50
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Re: The future of text-based gaming?

I think a lot of cool stuff could come from hobbyists rather than from companies. As a hobbyist you can focus on what you enjoy and try out new concepts that a company might not be as willing to attempt. I have seen good MUDs made by hobbyists. The issue though is that you usually don't know about these MUDs as to discover them requires you to play the game a while. There seems to be gems in the stack of MUDs.

One MUD I visited *really* impressed me. Oddly enough it had 0 players ;-).
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