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Old 11-15-2004, 07:46 AM   #61
Jazuela
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Join Date: Apr 2002
Location: New England
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I can't -disagree- more about building being daunting and time consuming. Perhaps it's because my building background is of the modified MOO variety, but I've done a little bit of building for DIKU as well. It's a little more time consuming in DIKU than it is in MOO, but what's three minutes per room when you're working on a zone? An extra day's work? Big whoop.

Same forest example, multiplied a dozen times in the zone:

The forest is very dense here, the trees growing so close to one another that their crowns form a canopy overhead that almost completely blocks out the sun. Many of the trees are ancient, with gnarled trunks and twisted branches. Because of the deep shade the ground vegetation is sparse and straggly. A strange object protrudes from the canopy above; it looks almost like the blade of a sword.

The forest is very dense here, the trees growing so close to one another that their crowns form a canopy overhead that almost completely blocks out the sun. Many of the trees are ancient, with gnarled trunks and twisted branches. Because of the deep shade the ground vegetation is sparse and straggly. On a twisted maple sapling up toward the northeast, a tiny nest hangs low from a curled branch.

The forest thins out as it stretches westward, the trees less dense and the sky overhead almost visible through the canopy of gnarled branches and leaves. Many of the trees are ancient, with gnarled trunks and twisted branches. Because of the deep shade the ground vegetation is sparse and straggly.


Lush grass sprouts from the fertile soil on the western end of the forest, though here, it struggles to poke through scattered twigs and leaves covering the ground. The forest becomes very dense toward the east, the trees growing so close to one another that their crowns form a canopy overhead that almost completely blocks out the sun. Many of the trees are ancient, with gnarled trunks and twisted branches. Because of the deep shade the ground vegetation is sparse and straggly.


----

and so on and so forth, and this entire thing I just did took me less than five minutes.

How the heck can anyone say it's time consuming and daunting? You CAN use the same "template" of the generic forest room description, and altering only a sentence or two, or switching "here" to "toward the east" can change the entire vantage point of the reader's experience.
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Old 11-15-2004, 02:44 PM   #62
Auseklis
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You don't really need to repeat descriptions for forests... although maybe it's just because I was brought up near several large wooded areas that I find it easy. But it's not hard to write different and interesting forest rooms given several hundred species of trees, and everything else already mentioned in this discussion above.

It's especially important if you have forest guilds, druids etc who'll be spending a lot of time there and will want unique rooms and so on.

Come to Lusternia to see over 600 unique forest rooms written almost entirely by one person!
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Old 12-29-2004, 04:04 AM   #63
Molly
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Some Muds have implemented SIZE as one of the stats for player and mob races. The main idea probably being to restrict some of the equipment, so that pixie- or giant-sized people cannot  wear human-sized clothes, and the opposite.
In 4D all the races are humanoid, so size really isn’t an issue.

But sometimes a Builder might think it fun to create a Pixie Village, which obviously would be a bit hard for humanoids to move around in. One of my Builders solved this problem by inventing a ‘Diminishing Potion’, which made you shrink to the size of a pixie when quaffed.

As for myself I thought it might be fun to try a more ‘realistic’ approach. So below is my design for a Miniature City. (The zone is part of a mini-quest, and to solve it you need to talk to the inhabitants of the city. Obviously there won’t be any inhabitants out in the streets).

The first room desc tells you that you are in a Miniature City, with buildings the size of doll’s houses lining the east side of the street.
Looking east tells you that a miniature house is there.
Walking east produces the message CRASH! and the house is transformed to a heap of sticks and straws.

All the houses in the City are actually containers, so you can both look at them and look inside them.
'Look AT house' gives you a description of the exterior.
'Look IN house' gives you the usual list of the contents, like for instance:
 a miniature bed with a bedspread made of gossamer web
 a spindly miniature table
 a miniscule chair, made from sticks and straws
 a small pixie
‘Get all from house’ works as usual, leaving you with a handful of useless doll’s house furniture.

But when you grab the pixie, it triggers a script, which sends a message of her wriggling loose and running away terrified, (while the pixie-object purges itself).  
(You could also make the object load an identical looking mob before it purges itself, but in this case I found this a bit too ‘easy’, since the object of the quest is to talk to the pixie).

Instead it is actually possible to get inside one of the biggest houses - at least partly.
The command ‘ENTER HOUSE’ will produce the message:
‘You poke your head through the door, but your shoulders get stuck in the doorway.’
It will also transport you to a new room, where the desc shows the interior of the small house, with your head taking up most of the space.

This room has the exact same objects in it as the one in the matching ‘container’ house. However, if you try to take any of them now, you get the message:
‘Your head takes up all the space in the house, so there is no way to get a hand in too.’
Very frustrating...

However, since your head is in now, you can finally talk to the pixie inside the house.

Problem solved.
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