Thoughts of enhancing code for being blinded

[slvrmoontiger]

Blinded code is lacking incredibly.

1) You aren't able to pull anything out of a container you are holding. In real life blind people are able to get stuff by feel. This should be also true ingame.
2) There really is a huge lack of sensory information in Armageddon. You just sniff the air and that's all it says "You sniff the air." It doesn't tell you what you smell. You sniff a person and unless they are wearing some sort of perfume you always get "He/she smells like sweat and dust.
3) There's nothing to tell where you might be because the walls and other things have no feeling.
4) No recognition of people's voices that you know. Blind people in real life would be able to tell if someone was talking to them that they knew. They learn voices and accents and inflections that people have in their voice.

I've seen other MUDs that have tried to implement these things yes some of them are a work in progress. I also realize the level of difficulty that doing these things would be. But I'm just thinking simple things at first like being able to reach into a bag you are carrying and feeling around and finding coins in that bag would be something simpler to implement.

[manipura]

I agree that at times when your character is blinded it can be frustrating...I wouldn't say it's lacking incredibly though.  It sounds like, from the points you listed, you want some things to be different when your PC is blinded, yeah?  I don't really see suggestions for improvement in your post, just pointing out what you don't like.  That being said, it seems like you want:

1) to be able to dig around in your bag/inventory/container and get something out
2) for there to be more smell echoes (...is this related to the issue you have with how being blinded works, or just another thing you thought of regarding senses?)
3) to be aware of where you are after you've been blinded and are stumbling in blind darkness
4) to be told (through the code/echoes I guess) who it is that's talking to you


A few thoughts:
1) I do agree it would be nice to still be able to get something out of your bag (by feel) when you are blinded, but not because 'blind people in RL do it so it's very realistic.'  Most people who are blind have either been born blind and have known no other way of living day to day life, or they have lost their sight and have adapted to new ways of doing things.  I would argue that in the half hour to an hour after they lost their sight, they weren't up and running around, digging stuff out of their backpacks by feel.  It's called adapting because it takes time to learn, it isn't instantaneous.  Also, I'd guess that most people who have suddenly lost their sight weren't riding around hunting on a huge lizard when it happened.  They probably didn't lose their sight because someone 'magicked' them or because some nasty beast shot them in the eyeballs with some burning, blinding poison.  So I would argue that in game, when this sort of thing happens, your character might be in a bit of a panic.  Shit just got real.  Really real.  Digging around in your bag for something when you're blinded and panicking and likely worrying about whether whatever did this to you and still there standing right over you shouldn't be an easy task.

2) There are rooms that have smell echoes, by the way.  I'm not sure what this has to do with being blinded.  Not every room has a distinct smell echo, but they are there.  Also, I would think in a blazing hot world like Zalanthas when we're all running around with our heavy shell and leather armor and carrying everything we own with us half the time, unless we -are- specifically wearing perfume the sweaty-dusty smell would be pretty prominent.

3) When you are suddenly blinded you completely lose your bearings, yes.  There are things to tell you where you might be though.  When you're blinded in game and you try and walk south and you cannot go that way, there's your clue that it might be a wall.  Or a building or a half-giant in front of you or anything that's blocking your way.  I would find it very unrealistic to be wandering blindly through the city and suddenly be told "Sorry, you can't go that way because you've reached the wall along Dark Moon Road.  By the way, there's a mural being worked on here."  I don't see why you should be able to know where you are when you're suddenly blinded.  Are you saying that if you're blinded and you wander into a bar, you should know what bar you're in?  Maybe if you've been moving carefully, going by feel as you stumble about you'd have an idea where you were, but I don't think having the code tell you where you are is a good thing at all.

4) Yes, blind people in RL recognize voices of people they know.  Again though, my argument against comparing "blind in Arm" to "blind in RL" is that someone in RL is not likely in a high-stress situation after being suddenly blinded and they have had time to learn to adapt to living without sight.  This is the same sort of ongoing argument players have about how we should be able to recognize the voice of someone we know, even if they are hooded or masked.  Out of curiosity, how would you want this to work?  Would you want to see their sdesc as they talked?  Or something like "A familiar voice says: blah blah blah"?  What about someone I've heard talking at the bar for weeks, I'd recognize their voice, but maybe I wouldn't know -who- it was.  Would that still be a familiar voice to me when I was blinded?  What about people with similar voices?  Or someone that I know but who's voice I don't recognize right away.  I'm sure we've all had times when we've picked up the phone (before caller ID of course ) and heard "Hey it's me!" and we've stood there a minute thinking Me?  Me who? before saying "Oh, hey Bob" only to have the caller say "Bob?  It's not Bob!  It's Jack!"

[QuillDipper]

Getting stuff from your bag in the dark/while blinded is reasonable.

Smell echos are eh, I think they're fine as they are personally. A lot of rooms have smell stuff in the descs.

This is where I really got a bone to pick. I think getting around while blinded as it is is just fine. For one, you can hit 'exits' to stumble around and find exits. It costs MV and it shows you possible rooms. If you have trouble walking in a direction, get better Direction Sense. There's a reason we have a skill for it.

Voices, it would be nice to be able to recognize voices, but I really can't think of how this would work without being too informative.

--

I'd like if there was more ability to blindfold yourself, for various numbers of reasons.

[a french mans shirt]

I do sort of wish more outdoor rooms in cities had coded perpetual lighting on the roads where you would reasonably find such, I'm not sure why they don't, perhaps to help criminals? Its just that for places such as the front door of the water temple on Meleth's, to be completely blackened on moonless nights, seems unreasonable, given that either there are torches hanging somewhere or five to a few dozen being carried at any given time past the place.

[valeria]

I do wish you had a voice sound that you could assign to your character that would stand in for "a female voice" or "a male voice" but character creation is already complicated enough.  Maybe a setting you could set, like an objective.  I don't know.

[Dresan]

I've always felt that the penalties for fighting in bad weather should be far more severe then they currently are. If you can only see two rooms away, you should feel some penalties but it would still manageable. If the weather is so bad you can only see one room away, fighting something in those conditions should be a lot tougher unless of course you are skilled at blind-fighting in which case those penalties wouldn't affect you very much at all.

[slvrmoontiger]

Smell echos are eh, I think they're fine as they are personally. A lot of rooms have smell stuff in the descs.

When blinded you don't see the room descs, so this is useless. It should be implemented into the sniff command if it's in the room desc.

[whitt]

I do wish you had a voice sound that you could assign to your character that would stand in for "a female voice" or "a male voice" but character creation is already complicated enough.  Maybe a setting you could set, like an objective.  I don't know.

Been on another mud where you could set travel and voice tags.  Effect was the same as a constant bracketed [in a high shrill whine] at the send of every ask,say,tell,talk,movement that did not come with its own () or [] to modify the action in question.

[solera]

If I was carrying a tablet , I'd like to be able to put it in my mouth when I was blinded. 

[Kryos]

I've always felt that the penalties for fighting in bad weather should be far more severe then they currently are. If you can only see two rooms away, you should feel some penalties but it would still manageable. If the weather is so bad you can only see one room away, fighting something in those conditions should be a lot tougher unless of course you are skilled at blind-fighting in which case those penalties wouldn't affect you very much at all.

From personal experience, I can say that the penalties for fighting in severe weather are rather harsh, and that some skills do effect how well you fight in poor weather conditions.

As for being blind:  being able to pull items from containers that your character has a working knowledge of their existence (worn containers), and eating those items should be possible in my opinion, but for one condition.  You might accidentally pull something of the same size(check the weight in the code) when you 'get' from the container.

And as a final thought and tangent, my favorite implementation of being blinded by far was in EverQuest.  When Raiding Sanctus Seru in the Luclin expansion, my guild and I discovered the hard way how difficult it is to coordinate forty people when suddenly your entire screen goes to black, as if your monitor shut off.  I heard everyone's death screams, including my own.  Damn that slime.

[manipura]

If I was carrying a tablet , I'd like to be able to put it in my mouth when I was blinded. 

I wanted to touch on this idea in my original response but wasn't explaining it well.  If you are carrying cures, either in a bag on your person or in your inventory, how are you going to know which tablet you're eating?  Are you just going to eat every one and hope you have an appropriate one?  Same as getting something out of a bag, like someone else (Kryos I think) mentioned.  It might seem obvious that it would be easy to pull my big mighty hero-sword out of my bag, if it's the only sword in there...but if I have four different similar things in there, how will I know I'm pulling the right thing out?  Maybe you could get, for example, all four small pouches from your bag and open them all and tell 'by feel' what's in them.  But when you finally determine which one is full of tablets, surely you shouldn't be able to know which tablet you're taking out.

[LittleLady]

Why wouldn't you be able to tell the difference between tablets. In my experience, each tablet has a unique size/texture. When feeling in a bag, or taking out tablets to feel them you would be able to feel the difference in size/shape/or texture.

[solera]

I was expressing grievance over holding one tablet in  my inventory and not being able to find it. Thinking about it though, in reality it wouldn't be in my little hot hands as all my (armored) fingers would be wrapped around my weapon. Inventory means pockets as well as hands.

RAT Blindness gave me one of my best experiences at a time when my world seemed to be becoming more predictable.

[valeria]

I do wish you had a voice sound that you could assign to your character that would stand in for "a female voice" or "a male voice" but character creation is already complicated enough.  Maybe a setting you could set, like an objective.  I don't know.

Been on another mud where you could set travel and voice tags.  Effect was the same as a constant bracketed [in a high shrill whine] at the send of every ask,say,tell,talk,movement that did not come with its own () or [] to modify the action in question.

I don't like this really.  I don't want it to append to every single thing I say.  I personally find those kinds of emotes to first get annoying, then get boring, and then either get blocked or ignored by me.  Rather, I'd want a voice sound to be identifiable when my character isn't actually visible (instead of the current generic 'a female voice' or whatever).  That's what I was thinking of anyway.

[Harmless]

There are a lot of good points in this thread. Inventory management is a little too all or nothing in particular. You should be able to eventually figure out where your shit is. I think the simplest solution is add a delay to getting things out of your bag. You can't look in it still, but if you know you keep your tablets in a pouch somewhere you ought to be able to get the right one eventually, by combining probing around, sniffing, licking it even, whatever.

So, I suggest to add a delay when grabbing things out of a pack blind. Maybe make the delay longer if the bag is larger or more cluttered up, too. But if you carry a pill in a pocket that has nothing else in it, little to no delay. A relationship check to how large the thing is, vs how cluttered the bag is, vs how large the bag is could be described in a pretty straightforward formula:

Blind get before-Delay = (const) x (bag capacity) x [ (# of total items in bag) / (weight of object grabbed.) ]

Bigger capacity bags increase delay time, more cluttered bags increase delay time, and tiny objects are harder to grab in a cluttered bag.

If # of total items in bag is equal to one, then the delay becomes very tiny, esp if the object is weighty. So, if it is a 5 stone object, sitting alone in a bag, that second part of the equation works as a built in bonus to negate this delay. This formula encapsulates all the relationships above.

The delay should be interruptable, just like foraging, so you can cancel a search if it seems to be taking forever. That's how I would go about it.

[Yummri]

Alright I'm coming at this thread being a blind person in RL. I see good and bad points on both sides of the argument here. But codedly? There does need to be more done.

Being blinded suddenly or having dealt with it over time should not effect getting things from your bags etc. Sure it might be slower and panic of the event might disorientate you but if you know what is in your bags you should be able to get it. In sandstorms and the dark we can still ge things from our inventory this is not really any different. Blind or not if yu handle an item over and over again you don't need to look at it to know what it is you grabbed. You don't suddenly become inable to distinguish objects just because you suddenly cn't see. So being able to do this while blinded should be implemented. If some balance to it should be considered.

This also applies to picking things up in a room. If you feel around on the ground enough you are gonna find it. Recently blinded or not. So make it a delay or something but it needs doing.

As for smells and sounds. I do not agree it should be so specific or that every room needs a coded and specific scent. Infact it would take years of adapting to be able to pick up distinct scents over hugely potent ones. I'm blind and I can't do that but I can hear better than most people. It works differently for each person.

There should be more generic smells for each area. The warrens/rinth should smell of garbage and foul. Apartment buildings in that area should smell like rotten would and rats. You should be able to type listen <area> and get a feel for the sounds. You can hear the sounds of performers and music (poets circle). Because blind or not you can smell that. The smell anf sweat and dust would be so familiar most people wouldn't notice it.

Voices though? I don't think anything needs doing here. The way I understand it most people can recognise voices but do so with the aid of being able to see. Some people sound a lot alike.  Blind people in RL do recognise voices with ease but codedly there is not support to that and just being blinded would not give you that ability. However nothing is stopping a player from saying who they are to the blinded individual.

Something codedly does need doing to improve the "blind" code and make it more usable. Because the code in this way is extremely limited needlessly so and unrealistic both.

[slvrmoontiger]

Voices though? I don't think anything needs doing here. The way I understand it most people can recognise voices but do so with the aid of being able to see. Some people sound a lot alike.  Blind people in RL do recognise voices with ease but codedly there is not support to that and just being blinded would not give you that ability. However nothing is stopping a player from saying who they are to the blinded individual.

I don't know if I agree with this completely. If I answer my phone and don't look to see who is calling me. If it's someone I know I usually can pick out who within the first few words that the caller is saying and I'm not blind in RL. But I guess this is different for each person and everyone is different, so I'm not going to qualm about it.

Thank you for the insightful post.

[slatefox]

I do kinda agree with the OP in that suddenly getting blinded (be that by ignorantly entering a dark room or just getting caught by night or storm conditions) presents a number of unrealistic conditions and can quickly turn into a death trap.

Here would be my recommendations/suggestions, if a staffer ever saw them and agreed:

1.  Add a 'grope' command that can take arguments and is moderately affected by certain skills and modifiers.  Anyone should be able to do this with eventual success, but someone with search abilities OR great direction sense (assuming they have a good knowledge of their own body orientation, not just outdoor navigation) would do it much more quickly and with fewer tries. 

Example uses:
'grope' = You grope around in the dark.  You sense there are rough stone walls here.
'grope' = You feel around and find a heavy blade, and pick it up.
'grope sword' = You feel around for a sword, and find a heavy bone sword and pick it up.
'grope door' = You feel around for a door but are unable to find it.
'grope ladder' = You feel around for a ladder, and have found one in the dark.

When you look in the room, you might see:
Darkness
   Total darkness surrounds you, preventing you from seeing anything
at all.  You have trouble telling where to put your feet when you walk.
You sense a stone ladder is nearby.

At that point, you can 'use' it, or 'open' doors/chests/objects/whatever, or whatever manipulation command is needed to proceed.


2.  Change blindness code to not hide objects that would be in direct contact with PCs.  For example, their own clothing, equipment, and inventory.  You may not be able to 'look in' containers, but if you know an object is there, there shouldn't be anything stopping you from getting it out.  The idea is that just because you can't see the hood on your cloak, that doesn't mean you can't feel it, and you don't have the mental development of a 3-month-old with no concept of object permanence.  It's still there.


3.  Maybe a compromise on voice recognition?  I've not seen anyone talk in dark rooms on Armageddon, so I'm not sure if this is already implemented, but it would be fairly easy to tell a person's accent, gender, and race. 

The more complicated thing to do is for the game to try and assign number values to voices.  So you might hear, "A male human voice says, 'Wow it's dark in here." and then, "A second male human voice says, 'You're right, Amos!'"

An even MORE complicated option is to allow players to set their own voice descriptors or adjectives. It would only get used when another player can't see them.   "A male human with a gravel voice says, 'I can't find my light.'"  Perhaps this could get added in char gen alongside origin, or maybe it's just optional, with defaults reverting to race/gender. 

[a french mans shirt]

I know this isn't completely relevant but the sinkhole on the road to the tablelands really needs room mdesc changes in the rooms immediately surrounding it. You've never been there before, you're going to fall into that crap. If this hasn't been fixed yet anyway.

1. (assuming they have a good knowledge of their own body orientation, not just outdoor navigation)

Acrobats! yet another thing to sweeten the deal or make more serious the compromise between some subguilds and others. I feel some subguilds are inherently more useful, given the distribution of resources and societies in the game, in a way that can't really be changed to please everyone, but could be improved in realism in ways like this.

[WithSprinkles]

I know this isn't completely relevant but the sinkhole on the road to the tablelands really needs room mdesc changes in the rooms immediately surrounding it. You've never been there before, you're going to fall into that crap. If this hasn't been fixed yet anyway.

[FantasyWriter]

IIRC, the mdesc of the rooms on either side of said sinkhole DO have clues pointing to said sinkhole. If you >look <direction> toward the sinkhole, it's -obvious- that there is a sinkhole there.

[Harmless]

There are also certain conditions under which clues to sinkholes are or aren't given to you. You mentioned a specific one but there are dozens of sinkholes in the Known, and some of them are -mean-. (and I like it just as it is).

[FantasyWriter]

Yeah, if you are wondering around in the dark in unfamiliar territory, you pretty much deserve whatever pops out at you (or out from under you).

[a french mans shirt]

Oh yeah I think I mistook that sinkhole for an open hole. The ones I always knew were actual sinkholes were pretty cool.

I wish we had giant birds. Shit coming from you from the sky and from the ground. Rare and thought to be extinct birds don't count. I want the Byn to be -afraid.-

I wish you could have a poison that permanently gave you a special type of bad eyesight with huge doses, and also an OOC command to have done this say in the OOC scar room you can bring up, and you could never reverse it. Perhaps a single type of powerful rare animal could also cause it, at a 1% rate while fighting it every time they struck you with their poisoned part. I've actually never seen someone in the world with bad eyesight, save myself. Just a couple of blind or mute folks.

[Delirium]

bad eyesight = anyone that doesn't have the scan skill.

I kid, I kid.