Member Discussions

I don't think there's anything a builder can appreciate more than finding they can't do x, ask the coder to make it, and they put it in for you immediately.

I just had to share my happiness ;)

Yep, that is pretty cool. Also cool when the admin himself realizes he need something, so he codes it in and expands on it later.

After years of building and having almost NO support at all from the coder types, when I began coding, I've made it one of my priorities that if a builder needs something within my reach of capability, to get that in as soon as possible.

There have been a few things I simply wasn't able to do, and I have maybe only a couple of things I still need to add in for some of my builders, but I think it should indeed be a coder's priority to support his builders in anyway possible.

The last several things, code wise, I've added (probably the last month or two's worth of things) have been oriented almost completely toward expanding builder's capabilities, whether it's been new mob features, object values, program commands/triggers, room flags, etc. I would daresay that adding new OLC features are one of my favorite things to do.

I'm glad to hear you are working with a coder who is willing to do that for you. I wish more coders were like that, as someone who still builds and who spent over 6 years building and limited only to what was currently in the codebase, I love having the freedom to be able to just add something in when I need it, and I very much enjoy being able to do the same for the people building on End of Time.

Arawn has always been very supportive of his builders. Building capability is a great strength on Lensmoor that few people have the chance to grasp fully (in terms of ease, and the cool innards behind the output that everyone sees).

We have so much available to us that it's hard to imagine needing more, but if we do, it appears, like magic. Also one of the things I appreciate, when he has time, he explains whether or not something is feasible given the code, and why. I don't much like asking for the impossible.

I see both sides of the coin, but I agree that it is very good for builder morale to have things they need put into the game in good time.

Some builders, ask for some stoooopid things (no offense, I'm a hardcore builder myself). Aka, I want a flag that adds this uber unique quest to my mob... It's called addmprog 1234 greet 50, write it yourself, that's what mprogs/oprogs/rprogs are for *bonk builder*.

Yet, when a builder goes, man it'd be nice to know the average damage while you're building a weapon... dot dot dot... yes, that is GOOD information to have! (I requested it myself, so I coded it myself, self-gratification ;p).

But, it helps the rest of the builders and I'm constantly listening to suggestions on what would make building more streamlined, easier (aka, let the computer do some of the work for you where it makes sense). More than a few of the changes I've done have been things directly OLC related, purely to make building more of a no-brainer.

I totally agree, quick changes that effect a betterment of the building process... very very good.

What I love is when your coder, who's never been a builder before, decides to create an area. He/she wants to create a maze area with 250 rooms...and only 10 rooms is going to actually have it's own description. I'm sorry, me head builder. You coder. You follow builder rules. Give me 250 destinct room descsriptions....Not 10.

The other thing I like is when the coder codes something in for builders....and forgets to tell us about it for a couple of months until one of us asks him for something else.

I love it when a coder can create a race in moments, yet can't find a memory leak we've had for five years. *snicker*(tm).

Hrm, but I shouldn't be mean to coders. They have a hard job that I have no idea how to do. So, I give them heck when I can.

Heh, that's pretty amusing, actually.

But yeah, I really think that any person running a MUD, whether by pure Administration or by being the Coder, should have enough experience as a builder to be able to understand the builder's needs, be able to help the builders with area stuff when necessary, and to be able to understand what he or she is doing when adding in new features for builders (or in the above example, building an area).

I also think it's exceptionally important for the person in the TOP position to set the best example possible in all areas, whether it be through code, through building, through their attitude to the rest of the MUD, or through following rules as an Admin and/or player. If the TOP guy builds a 250 room zone with only 10 distinct room descriptions, why should anyone else bother putting anymore effort into it.

"Well, if 10 descriptions copied over a 250 vnum zone is good enough for the owner, then why should I worry about doing anymore than that?"

(Comment added by Hades_Kane on Wed Jun 20 15:14:57 2007)

I would certainly never ask anyone to put more work into the MUD than I am or make more progress than I'm making, which I guess further goes toward the "set a good example" mentality.

Though it appears that you have a rather amusing coder on your hands, I do feel I should comment on one of your remarks... just for your information and whatnot.

I love it when a coder can create a race in moments, yet can't find a memory leak we've had for five years.

Just for your information, creating a race is actually a process which couldn't be much simpler, and one which anyone without coding experience could take care of in moments with only a little bit of direction. A memory leak, however, is one of the banes of a C programmer's existence, and one of the reasons I moved from C to Java. Sometimes they're easy, but sometimes they're nearly impossible to find... and it oftentimes really does seem like a "needle in a haystack" sort of scenario. So, that being said... were the situation anything *but* what you have described (only moments for a race, but a significant chunk of time for a memory leak), I would be surprised. *smile* *shrug*

Best of Luck,
-Jess

That's a tall order.. I would strive for the best in their field in all my staff, if I were to run a mud. A base example in hard work and ethics sure, but if the coder were the best builder and quest maker and etc, that either says they are a phenomenal genius or their staff is pretty weak in comparison... It's ok for the head builder to be the best builder in the game.

That said, I see 4.5 zones to Arawn's name here. :)

Good evening. I would like to comment the following:

"What I love is when your coder, who's never been a builder before, decides to create an area. He/she wants to create a maze area with 250 rooms...and only 10 rooms is going to actually have it's own description. I'm sorry, me head builder. You coder. You follow builder rules. Give me 250 destinct room descsriptions....Not 10."

First of all, and something alredy commented before, it's rare a mud player read every description allways. Or he is doing a quest, or the short description calls his attention... basically this.
Second, and I've remember now that comment: if you are in a trail in a forest and walk north, you will still see the same trees, the same trail, everything is basically equal. If in a huger forest, is easier for someone get lost exactly due to that.

So in my opinion there is not a big problem if an area has many rooms with the same description... of course that not at a ratio of 25:1 :) Depending of what area is being coded, I even say it should have the same description. But I think also the following: the more repeated description rooms, the better that description must be.

Imagine the following:
- someone climbing a mountain 1000m high
- each room represents a square of 50m
- I wouldnt be shocked if the same description is applicable for each 100m (two rooms with the same description will make 100m, so to climb that mountain the person must move 20 rooms)
- also, if during the 200-250m one can watch a snake hole, that can be described in the long description (and the short one still equal to the room from 250-300m), can be described in the temporary phrases (like each 3 minutes appears a phrase saying you can sense movements coming from the hole) and also in the other looks (at that room, typing "look hole" would give more information
- to finish, all this I wrote in the last post could be done as a part of quest (that is what's usual), or can be understud as well as builder's art. It's more appealable a dinamic room, than a static one.

Resuming, if climbing a mountain one need to move 20 rooms, a builder may only create 10 room descriptions (2 equal descriptions for each 100m), and may enrich 10 of those rooms with situations explained before (or eventually even not so many, by the reasons stated before).

A last situation/example that follows also the reasons stated before in this post: if I want to map Middle-Earth, or any huge world, it would take years of ininterrupt work if is to give individual quality descriptions to each room... Only an imaginitive poet could describe each 10m differently and beautifuly :P

(my main point was refering to large areas, but even in small areas, like inside buildings, this can happen as well: just imagine a huge corridor or tunnel)

Thanks for the time

That's a tall order.. I would strive for the best in their field in all my staff, if I were to run a mud.

Diablos does deliver. I think he does it to play mind games with his builders. We slack off a bit, he works harder, and we feel a bit of guilt at our sloth. Arrggghh!


And as for the repetitive room descriptions idea... It's generally accepted that if you're in a generally boring or intentionally confusing place, you can use the same room description. Maybe use a base description, and add little details...

*Second, and I've remember now that comment: if you are in a trail in a forest and walk north, you will still see the same trees, the same trail, everything is basically equal

Maybe if you are walking through a tree farm (grin) but actual forest/woods are not the same from one spot to another.

Even if they were, why make your players insane with boredom by forcing them to move through hundreds of rooms with the same description?

I wouldn't assign a builder more area (rooms) than they are capable of fully fleshing out. If I need a truly huge area, I would break it down into managable chunks and assign different sections to different builders.

*but even in small areas, like inside buildings, this can happen as well: just imagine a huge corridor or tunnel*

See, I can't even wrap my mind around needing to reuse descriptions inside a building. If it isn't a maze, (and there specifically to get players lost) then every reused description is a missed opportunity to engage the players and enrich the game world.

Kitkat -

Wouldn't you prefer being shown how to
do it yourself?

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net

"Even if they were, why make your players insane with boredom by forcing them to move through hundreds of rooms with the same description?"

To influence the player's perception of the size of the world. I don't just means this in the "our game has 10K rooms" way; I mean, if the player has to spend time getting from one place to another, the world feels larger to the player.

Besides, most players read the room description once if you're lucky. If they can turn on a "brief" mode that only shows mobs and objects in the room, many will turn that on the moment they create.

*To influence the player's perception of the size of the world. I don't just means this in the "our game has 10K rooms" way; I mean, if the player has to spend time getting from one place to another, the world feels larger to the player.*

I still don't see why you can't do this creatively. If you can achieve a decent level of interactivity in your rooms and areas, the mud 'feels' bigger regardless of actual size. I understand we all have our own ideas on building but I feel like it can be a waste of time and resources to build an area with no purpose other than 'it makes the mud seem larger' or 'well, we needed this wilderness thing'.

*Besides, most players read the room description once if you're lucky.*

Well, maybe if all the rooms were interactive and had unique descriptions (or dynamic descriptions that directly influence gameplay) the players would not turn them off. I am not fond of repeat descriptions when I play either.

Kitkat -

Besides, most players read the room description once if you're lucky. If they can turn on a "brief" mode that only shows mobs and objects in the room, many will turn that on the moment they create.

There are two ways to make a MUD:

1) The lazy way where you only put effort into that which seems to matter or have value, trying to maximize time spent toward the areas that seem to have the most important.

2) The non-lazy way where you put as much effort into every part of the game, trying to maximize the quality of everything at the cost of time spent.

This attitude, to me, clearly illustrates method #1. While for some games, I suppose that's acceptable, I do what I can to try to pour as much effort into the 8th room in a 15 room corridor as I might put into the one of the main recall spots of the game.

Personally, I don't build for the lazy people that will breeze through the areas, I build for the people who will take the time to appreciate the work and read the descriptions (and thus finding many hidden things the others won't find). If that means I'm only building for %5 of my playerbase, then that's fine. I can finish an area knowing I did my best and that I completed something worth being proud of.



Oh no... Epilogy figured out my evil scheme...

> There are two ways to make a MUD:
>
> 1) The lazy way where you only put effort into that which
> seems to matter or have value, trying to maximize time
> spent toward the areas that seem to have the most important.
>
> 2) The non-lazy way where you put as much effort into every
> part of the game, trying to maximize the quality of
> everything at the cost of time spent.

It's not as black and white as that. Time is a limited resource, and we all have to draw the line somewhere. Dynamic descriptions, scripts, extra descriptions, mobs, objects, etc...show me any room you've ever written, and I'll show you half a dozen things you could still add to it.

It's a bit like the old joke about an alcoholic being someone who drinks more than their doctor. If you put more effort into a feature than me, you're a time waster, and if you put less effort into a feature than me, you're lazy.

I still don't see why you can't do this creatively. If you can achieve a decent level of interactivity in your rooms and areas, the mud 'feels' bigger regardless of actual size. I understand we all have our own ideas on building but I feel like it can be a waste of time and resources to build an area with no purpose other than 'it makes the mud seem larger' or 'well, we needed this wilderness thing'.

*Besides, most players read the room description once if you're lucky.*

Well, maybe if all the rooms were interactive and had unique descriptions (or dynamic descriptions that directly influence gameplay) the players would not turn them off. I am not fond of repeat descriptions when I play either.

I am not saying either that the objective of similar descriptions in multiple rooms was to win the 1st prize of world size... I mud for more than 10 years, and I often search for new muds, even than only to be aware of some new ideas, and in the mud listings sites I never check one based on the world size - perhaps because I understand that to make a mud somewhat more realistic, maybe it's needed to add more rooms. A world with 10k rooms don't have quests or important info in every room description... nor a world of 1k rooms.

And I just support this idea in obvious situations. I guess that a good example is, and again I'll use the one of my previous post, creating the geography of middle earth, and then make every room of Rivendell, Bree and Minas Tirith perfectly detailed and described. Each of these cities can be a own world... but how would you dealt with it if you cannot construct the geography outside? Remember also my last post about the mountain of 1000m height - there are similar descriptions, but with logic.

Also, why the command "brief" exist in every mud? Would be nice if someone make the statistic "how many times you read a room description?". The answers would be like 1 to 100 (each 100 movements players read 1 description), or something. This do not mean long descriptions should be ignored or not detailed, though.

A last thought is that a MUD even not having graphics (the typical mud) still has many players in the world because of the M :) Multiplayer. And because it's easier to create any kind of mechanism than any other game, which makes the relations between players much more deep. But of course, and finally, because everything is written and every player imagine and shape everything in his head in the more perfect way (again Middle-Earth, but comparing the books with the movies from Peter Jackson: in my mind, Aragorn was a desilusion in the movie, as well as some combats and some cities... Many fans hate the movies, and others love them. But all love books cause they imagined everything in their heads, which was different from each one. And I didnt liked some things of Peter Jackson's perception). So I don't support descriptions with no content at all 100%, but there are some specific situations where that it's needed (all in all, even most of the ones that do not agree with this have said already that sometimes it can be useful).

"It's not as black and white as that. Time is a limited resource, and we all have to draw the line somewhere. Dynamic descriptions, scripts, extra descriptions, mobs, objects, etc...show me any room you've ever written, and I'll show you half a dozen things you could still add to it."

Yes.

When I'm building a forest I'll use a few stock descriptions and vary a sentence here or there but, let's face it, if you had to do a 4 or 5 line description of a forest every 10 or 20 feet, they'd look a lot alike.

When I get to the bandit's encampment in the forest, or a spooky glen where something supernatural lurks, each room gets it's own description that's appropriate.

It not only saves me time on uniquely describing all of the filler, but it also clues the player in that something just changed and it's time to be more wary.

Kavir,
Are you aware of any studies which compare the length of average time one plays a mud based on game type vs player type? For instance, are RPers and explorers really more likely to stick around games which have some environmental perks? Now I think we’d agree that an RPer or Explorer type might just skip games which don’t seem to meet their needs, but if they do play, I wonder how much, if any, this type of design plays in retention.

Now I do draw a distinction between interactive environments which have some sense of uniqueness with that interaction over environments which are simply interactive. I can see an explorer enjoying finding some altar which does something unusual, but I don’t think that 10,000 trees are better than 1,000. Or that an explorer is going to get overly excited because the new area has green wicker rockers rather than the white wicker rockers.

Just to add my 2 cents:

If I'm making a desert, (which I set up much like a maze, since we all know how easy it is to get lost in one) I will use the same description in the "inner" parts of the desert, while the edges I will use different ones.

Same thing with normal mazes, forests (though like others, I'll alter some aspects of the descriptions where needs be).

For roads, I'll often use the same short(base) description and only change the long desc which describes buildings, etc.

Inside buildings, temples, yada yada, everything is different.

Oh yeah, forgot one, I use same description when doing bodies of water, while for rivers/streams I use same base, different long descriptions.

Have you been to a desert? Yes you can get lost in one, but the generalizaiton doesn't fit across the board...

I'm just wondering if all of you have experience with the general environment types. I'm sure not everyone was fortunate enough to grow up by desert, ocean, forest and whatever. On the other hand, it was many years before I saw a large natural lake.

I've been through deserts, when I lived in Utah (lots of trips through desert, plains, mesas, etc). I grew up in NJ where there were a great many forests. I currently live 3 hrs east of the Rocky Mountains. I've seen a lot of different environments. I've lived on both coasts, seen both Atlantic and Pacific oceans, been through hellish winters of Edmontons where temps are -45C, lived in Utah where temps often got to 110F in summer, and everything in between.

While all forests may not be the same, nor all deserts, they'd be the same or similar within the same forest, same desert, same mountain range, etc.

Or thats been my experience.

I think that repeating descriptions are definitely acceptable in a maze, and in some instances may even be necessary.

There are other instances in which repeating parts of descriptions I would say are ok.

Case in point, I was building an area based on the Cave of Mist from Final Fantasy IV, and the general idea is that the cave is covered in a thick mist, making it hard to see what's around you. In this instance, I chose sections of the cave where the first two-three lines were the same (as in, 10 rooms here had the same partially repeating descriptions, and 13 rooms over there had a different but repeating set of two-three lines, etc.), describing the thick mist obscuring your view, and then limiting the other parts of the description to what was immediately surrounding you. Normally I describe what the path ahead or behind you looks like, and other parts that are visible from that location, but in the instance in which the only thing visible outside of the immediate area was an identical wall of white mist, I felt it was not only acceptable to use partially repeating descriptions, but that it actually added to the feeling of the area.

Growing up where I have, and with the parents that I did and how much time we spent in nature, I can tell you first hand walking through a path in a forest will show you many different things over a 20 foot path. Unless the point of the area is to have numerous parts of the forest look identical, I think there is plenty to work with. I've found it handy to give a general idea of what the area looks like, then choose individual aspects of the immediate location to focus on, whether it be the fallen log to the side of the path with a patch of green moss growing on it, or the large puddle of water just on the side of the path that has an animal track in the mud on it's outer edge.

Every MUD will place different priorities on how much to vary room descriptions, and while we certainly do have some old areas that are far below the standards that have since been set for my game, I do place a fair amount of emphasis on having unique descriptions among every area. I would rather an area take an extra couple of weeks and have every description unique rather than have areas pumped out quicker but having numerous repeating descriptions. But like I said, every MUD will set their own standards and that's fine.

*Anything* is unique, though... even if only in the slightest way.

Even in a desert, you pass cacti, rocks, sand dunes, other plantlife... or life in general... and more. Even in a cave, the passageway twists and turns in just a certain way, and the walls around you are shaped, cracked, and moulded in a certain manner.

The issue I see is that, even in those instances, you should be able to find your way *back*, or make the same path *again*, based just on recognition of those little things you saw the first time around, unless you're specifically disoriented from some outside force. (Dehydration coming to mind, for example).

Not to bring back bad memories or anything... but you may remember from the Blair Witch Project that the "characters" remembered a rock (?) that they had seen, and figured out that they had travelled in a circle.

These things are important, even just from a playability perspective. There have been times that I've played a MUD where someone had constructed a maze where all the descriptions were identical, and getting out of the maze was impossible. I *know*, on a factual basis from having been in a number of mazes myself, that the experience would be much different... and getting stuck somewhere like that isn't exactly the most fun experience in the world. I've never stuck with any of those games, just because then it's not about trying to figure out how to get out... but instead it's about running around blindly until you manage to hit the right combination of directions. Yeah... that's a blast.

Best of Luck,
-Jess

(Comment added by mann_jess on Sun Jun 24 18:59:16 2007)

I should note that I have no problem with repeating certain *elements* of descriptions in an area to create an effect... I had thought that would go without saying, but after reading HK's post I realize it probably wouldn't be taken that way.

However, there is a *huge* difference between saying the following as the whole of *every* description:

You are in a massive forest, surrounded by gargantuan trees.

... And in using the following couple descriptions:

You are in a large forest, surrounded by gargantuan trees.
You are on a small pathway in a large forest, surrounded by gargantuan trees.
You are standing on a path of moss in a large forest, surrounded by gargantuan trees.
You are standing near a patch of moss in ....

Now, after having gotten out of that "forest maze", what are you really going to remember? Just a large forest with gargantuan trees, where everything looked exactly the same. (Especially when 9/10ths of a 4 line description was identical, instead of 3/4 of a 1 line description as above). However, you'll still be able to recognize certain areas *while still IN* the forest, just because you were very recently there. In my mind, this is a *much* better solution to the problem... and is much more realistic.

Best of Luck,
-Jess