Attachment to old-school MU* clients
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@kestrel That's an interesting idea -- and I'm not sure it's a bad one, either. But to retain a map -- yeah, players will need to be able to pencil in.
What we do on Keys is grow the grid organically based on player requests -- shops, houses. And then we use the real life Google maps of Chincoteague -- if you want somewhere that isn't on the grid, well, it's there, somewhere. Make it up. And if it becomes popular/used enough? We add it to the grid.
Best of both worlds or the laziest cop-out ever, you decide!
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@kestrel said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:
@l-b-heuschkel said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:
These are great points I hadn't considered. I know at least one person was thinking about some grid randomisation code a while back, where basically you'd input a command to go find a bar in some city and the game would automatically generate one which can then be referenced by anyone else in future, or they can just keep spawning new bars this city supposedly has. The idea was to combat the "small world" feel a lot of games suffer from, where they're supposed to represent something like a network of planets or a great medieval fantasy land but the scope is limited by how much patience builders have to fill in every detail. I live in my country's capital and can't imagine any game ever successfully mapping out all the bars and tunnels and secret hideaways it has to fully capture the feel of what life in this big city is like.
But if it robs people of even a basic sense of what the environment they're navigating is like, I can see how that would be a problem. Unless perhaps you give players the authority to pencil their additions into this vaguely hand-drawn (or even computer generated) map?
EDIT: I know the coder whose idea I'm referencing up there has posted on MSB but I can't find their posts and don't remember their handle right now. I'll link it in if I figure it out.
I have been dabbling with an idea like this but not for destinations/points of interest. I would use it to generate some random areas between the origin and destination. Maybe have it generate one random room between every set room on the grid. The grid knows that to get from point A to point D, you have to go through points B and C first, but ,when someone decides to go that way, it inserts point A.5, B.5, and C.5 on the route. Those random rooms could stick around for a while, so anyone else going from say B to E will also go through B.5 and C.5 as well, so there's a chance of two character running into one another in the random room. Honestly, though, except for a game based around overland travel between cities and such, where building out a huge grid would be exhaustive, it sounds like way too much work for very little payoff.
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I get why folks like grids for the immersion factor, and that's cool. I'm not judging. If that's your thing, Penn/Tiny/Rhost or any MUD engine fits the bill nicely. Nobody's trying to take them away.
But looking forward to next-gen RP, consider having a map like this:
And a selectable list of locations - each with a wiki page (containing not only the desc you'd find on a MU grid but also maybe reference images, links to associated scenes, detailed background info, etc.)
I think most MUSHers would be able to understand where things are located and generate RP just fine without an actual "grid".
Personally I prefer it because I find it avoids some mental disconnects, like "an exit could take you to the next room or the next planet", being forced to create filler rooms to create a sense of space, and being forced to reconcile non-square locations onto a square n/s/e/w kind of map.
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@faraday I see what you mean. And at the same time -- it would be a return to something far more basic and old-school in a sense, because I can do far better descriptions with words, or with a link to Google maps in case of a contemporary game.
I think this is an argument that is going to go on forever and pretty much come down to what mood a game is trying to set, and what the theme of it is. For your example there? I am seeing something almost Oregon Trail-like in my mind, possibly without the dysentery deaths.
The graphic expression will be of significant importance for something like that, at least. Because what you see will very much set the mood of the setting.
http://keys.aresmush.com -- Come to Chincoteague, we have ponies.
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@l-b-heuschkel said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:
possibly without the dysentery deaths
Well way to take all the joy out of it. Sheesh.
(Kidding, <3!)
I have not the first clue where that map is from but boy do I want it. Is that in Ares? Waaaaant.
Racism isn't Tinkerbell. It doesn't need you to believe in it for it to exist.
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@derp said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:
I have not the first clue where that map is from but boy do I want it. Is that in Ares? Waaaaant.
It's from Sweetwater Crossing, which closed in 2014. Sorry
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@faraday said in Attachment to old-school MU* clients:
It's the exact same command/screen to start a public scene as to start a private one. Public is actually the default setting.
@faraday Maybe Crystal Springs has changed the defaults, but when I go into the create-a-scene web interface, it defaults to private. I haven't used the telnet version of scene creation, so I don't know how it's set up there.
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@ell This is also the case on Keys and I know for a fact that we have not changed that there. I think it defaults to open from a client, though.
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@ell Yeah, I may have overstated. In some cases it's the default; in others it assumes private because if you're creating a scene off-grid the presumption is that you don't want to be on grid where others could crash the scene.
Regardless, though, it's just as easy to create a public scene as a private one. What I've observed is that a lot of people (myself included) just prefer smaller scenes with people that are either OOC friends or IC connections.
This is not a phenomenon caused by Ares' scene system. Ares just lets people more easily play according to their preferences. If there aren't any open public scenes, it's because the players don't want them. Some might think that makes it harder to find RP, but that's presuming (erroneously, I believe) that those people would be available for public RP otherwise. My experience across numerous games (Ares and non-Ares) tells me differently.
ETA: There are certainly games (TGG comes to mind) that have had no OOC room, no RP/TP rooms, and no private apartments for people to RP in, thus forcing every scene to be public. If that's the sort of game you want - great, build it. You could do it through Ares with a mandate "no private scenes" or you could use one of the other MU servers that supports such a thing more natively.
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@faraday It's all about game culture, not codebase, indeed. Ares makes it easy as pie to set scenes to private or open whether from the client or the portal. The decision to do either lies with the player.
