Member Discussions

In another thread Drizzt said this:

Drizzt1216 wrote:

What do you feel is the most important element in a zone?

Scripting. Make the player feel like they are really in the zone and not just reading about it. If you describe an object in great detail make it interactive. Don't have mobs that are there as fodder to be killed, have them move, have them emote things based on what players around them do, have them have discussions with each other and not just with players, make the zone feel as if it were alive.

Continuing that conversation, what sort of features do you think could bring a zone to life? Mobs talking is one I have seen, and this can range from basic responses to discussion nodes between other mobs.

Another facet of living zones I've seen is "background interaction". Items or "mobs" that exist within a room description and are interactable but don't exist in the standard form. Trees that can be climbed or cut down. Stumps that can be sat upon, or harvested for termites. Insects that can be captured or interacted with in certain ways.

Dynamic Descriptions are also a really neat way to bring zones to life. Weather can change the direction leaves are blowing in the trees, or fire can be set to them burning them into ash and adding fertility to the soil which will allow new plants to grow. Dynamicism allows for a real living world, but it can get pretty complex pretty fast.

What else goes into a living zone in your mind? How can mobs be made more alive? What about objects? Rooms? The zones themselves? What are some efficient techniques that can bring life to a zone with little effort for the time limited builder or developer?


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MM

One of the things that I like to do when I build an area is set a focus point and build the NPCs around that.

For example, I built a Boston area that is set around the story of Hester Prynne. She's my focus point, and so when she goes to town, she's got a drummer behind her pounding the drum as she walks to the different carts in the marketplace with her daughter. She sets her mood to different things based on where she is(proud in town, sad at home).
She sneaks off to meet Arthur at night and there's even a quest worked in based on the book as well.

On top of that, things like dynamic room descriptions that change based on day/night and/or weather. NPCs that react to the weather and time of day(the shopkeepers go home at night). Trees you can sit under, or used to make staves or arrows are just a few other things that help an area come to life for me.

> What else goes into a living zone in your mind?

One addition I've found improves the "living" feel of the world is that of seasons, which includes factors such as the following:

Descriptions: Dynamic descriptions reflect the current season - for example a forest might be described as being lush in spring, green in summer, brown in winter and snow-laden in winter.

Terrain: Lakes and ponds freeze over during the winter, allowing players to walk over them as if they were solid ground instead of water.

Weather: During the winter it snows instead of rains, and storms are replaced with blizzards. This is a very simple implementation which could easily be extended, but it still adds a nice bit of flavour.

Nights: As winter approaches the nights gradually lengthen, starting earlier and ending later.

Mob variation: Certain mobs only appear during certain seasons, or vary by season - for example, treants that spawn in the autumn are more vulnerable to fire (and their descriptions describe them as having brown leaves).

Mob clothing: Human mobs in the starting village wear clothing appropriate to the season, dressing lightly in summer and wearing thick woolen cloaks and mittons during the winter.

All the already mentioned things are nice features. Here are some more things that we have in some, but not all, of the zones in our Mud - (I'm sure there are many more similar examples):

DAY AND NIGHT POPULATION:
A desert has a totally different wildlife during day or night.

Or a city, populated by rich and respectable people during daytime, changes character when darkness falls and the citizens go to bed. Thieves and thugs - (and in some cases ghosts and vampires) - come out from their dens to haunt the streets and alleys. (Pretty easy to script, the day mobs load the night mobs, then purge themselves, and vice versa).

ECOLOGY AND LIFE CYCLES:
Trees start as saplings, gradually mature, then grow old and die. Fruit trees bloom in spring, and bear fruit in the fall. Crops are sown, grow and get harvested.

Herd animals mate and get kids, then grow old and die, the young ones grow up and mate in turn, keeping the cycle going. Predators attack the kids and the mothers defeat them.

If you open a certain door in an abandoned spaceship, it starts a bug infestation, where cockroaches start to breed manically and take over the ship.

On one occasion our mad coder started a virus infestation, that spread from the mobs to the players until the entire mud was infected. The virus was deadly so it was pretty annoying while it lasted...


TIMERED EVENTS:
At 6 am on the vernal and autumnal equinoc the first ray of sun hits a statue in a temple, excavated deep into the cliff, and it springs to life.

A mob makes an appointment to meet you in a remote and secluded place at midnight. If you don't show uo in the right place on the right time, you'll miss an opportunity to fame and fortune.

PUBLIC TRANSPORT:
A train leaves the station at a set time, making several stops along the track die to a timetable, then turns and goes back. You can board the train at any of the stations, if you just keep track of the time table.

Mob clothing: Human mobs in the starting village wear clothing appropriate to the season, dressing lightly in summer and wearing thick woolen cloaks and mittons during the winter.

I've never seen that done, but I have to say that I REALLY like that idea, and that it wouldn't at all be hard to do on any codebase with decent scripting capabilities (for builders themselves to do that is, and if it's a common thing I think they should be able to do it themselves instead of bogging down the coder(s) with menial tasks).

I'll throw in some more of my own:

Dynamic Hand-Built Descriptions:

Not code generated but built into a room with certain specifications. The one in question had rooms that looked different at night, when you were drunk, when you were affected with "sadness" and when you were near dead. Quite the strain on the builder I imagine but the level of depth was astounding.

Walking down the city street while drunk would try to lead you to the riverbanks with its description. While at the river it would tempt you to enter. Of course entering the river while drunk would be instant death and your corpse would float down the river until someone found it.

While near death all of the rooms inside the city would seem like good resting places. You'd notice signs that pointed to the hospital which didn't exist in the room description when you weren't wounded. Also, while far away from the hospital and deeply wounded all the rooms would be bright red, as you got closer to the hospital they'd turn dark red, closer still, dark yellow, at the hospital, dark cyan. This part was especially neat as it built a real feeling of safety/danger because you could bleed to death in this game.

Mob Friendship Level:

This one was pretty interesting. Different NPCs around the city had information you'd need for quests, crime solving, politics, etc. Some of them would also pick up random bits of says that other players had said and store them until they chatted with a friend. Was quite useful for politicking because the MUD didn't have a tell command and the mobs captured emotes as well and discussed them.

To increase a mob's friendship level you'd give him food, money, beer, etc if he needed/wanted it. Protecting a mob that was being "shook down" by a bandit would be instant friendship. Bandits ran off with just one punch. Most NPCs were easily bribed although some were suspicious of you giving too much stuff.

Anyway, when talking with them they'd tell you bits about themselves that seemed to be randomly generated. They'd also throw in lines like "I heard Molly say '<captured line>'" or "Ol' Molly was over there <slapping Tyche> just <a few minutes ago>". Time frame and emoted messages/says were all included.

Race Rivalries:

Another good one. In this MUD (actually many MUDs) the different mob races would attack eachother if they came into contact. Sometimes races wouldn't hate eachother to instant attack but a random event such as an insult or a bad sale could cause them to jump in and start a fight against eachother.

Another example of this would be bandits attacking mobs. Cityguards attacking bandits and enemies. Swordsmen and Mages who would hassle eachother constantly with sass and resource theft (but no fighting as they were from the same unit). These rivalries added a real level of depth to the MUD in question. You felt like you were in a living world and could easily be drawn into their brawls. My roguely character killed a cityguard that was attacking the bandit chief and was very hansomely rewarded. Every bandit in town would share some of their spoils with me and refused to pickpocket me.



These are just a few of the different systems I've seen or thought of. All of them bring the zones to life, add real character and thrill to the zone. You feel like you're a part of a living, breathing world. Most of them are also rather easily added. Rivalries are just flags put on opposing mobs, with a check to see if they're saved from combat by a player. Doesn't even need the "saved from combat" bit, really. For your half hour of work you've likely created days worth of entertaining content for players, especially if there's ways they can lead one bunch of mobs into another bunch and watch them kill eachother. Then just waltz in and finish off the rest, reaping all the rewards.

There's a lot of other benefits to living zones, but I'm not posting to lecture. I'm posting to hear more ideas about them. We've heard what most of you have done. Now I pose the question:

If you had unlimited coding time and skill to focus on zones, what would/could you do to make them more lively?

Start by focusing on just one zone and try to make it as interactive or interesting as possible. How far can you take it?


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MM

MM wrote

If you had unlimited coding time and skill to focus on zones, what would/could you do to make them more lively?

But that's just it.
You DON'T have unlimited coding time - or building time for that matter - so you have to make priorities.

Building is already very time consuming, and each extra feature you add makes it even more so.

So however much I'd like to have for instance a feature like dynamic, handwritten descs, with different room descriptions for day/night/season/weather etc... it just isn't all that simple. Although it might be a comparatively easy thing to code the basics for it into the OLC, it would probably more than triple the work of the Builders.

At some time or other you have to ask yourself these questions:
- How much does this feature adds to the playability?
- How many of the players will even notice it? and
- Is it really worth all the effort that goes into it?

I guess it does depend on the type of Mud - in a RP intense Mud with a very small world dynamic, handwritten descs might actually be both feasible and motivated. In a Quest/Exploring based mud with a very large world like ours, it isn't feasible, because of the sheer amount of extra work that you'd put on the Builders. It's already hard to get a Builder to finish a zone; pile to much work on their shoulders and you might end up without any zones at all.

Scripts that are just designed to lend some atmosphere to a zone are nice, but when I use special features myself it's almost always Quest related. So if I make a script that sends a message about a rustling sound coming from the bushes, it's most likely a hint to look a bit closer at those bushes. The same goes for mobs or items that only load at specific times, or the hidden portals and containers we use, or some of the deeper extra descs. They are usually part of our built-in Quests and not just there for the 'depth' they add to the zone.

And it's not something that we'd do in every room of every zone, in particular not in 'travel zones', which are generally much less detailed.

We have to make priorities.

While there is a need for prioritizing, I don't think it's really a necessary part of this discussion. Your MUD seems to create lively zones through making each bit interactive. Sure it's not interactive in every room but if something moves, people can use it? That's a good example of living zones.

Removing the restriction of coding or building time is because some people think X or Y will take forever when for them it might, but for others it may take but minutes or hours. Ideas that you yourself have but could never put to use may inspire someone else entirely to create something vivid and lively. Such is the nature of brainstorming and why I created the different threads I made.

I believe if you add depth to a zone you should also ensure that it has proper functionality and not just be showy or pointless messages. That said, I'd rather a world of 5000 detailed and extremely lively rooms, a livable world that I can play in over 50000 rooms of static and drab world that I can only read and kill in.

Creating lively zones allows players to explore your world more intimately. It allows them to make it more their own. Sitting on a stump is simple as hell to code, but it means that every stump is sittable. If every stump is sittable and sitting gives minor regen bonuses then seeing a stump in a forest is something to take note of. If every lichen is harvestable as a basic ingredient for sale or food then noticing every patch of lichen is also something to take note of.

Suddenly your world is alive, it's vibrant, it's something more than just a container of arbitrary objects and mobs. Might this take a lot of building time? Maybe, although proper planning can make it take a lot less. Does it add a depth and sense of wonder to your world? You tell me. ;)


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MM