Quote from: Reiloth on May 13, 2014, 12:15:27 AM
What purpose does a 1000 cookie cutter rooms serve, without the things that bring those rooms to life?

I don't know, why don't you ask the Salt Flats?

You could just as easily write a small script to produce a varied area with a few shared descriptions as well.

Then go in and add custom features by hand after, which would take a lot longer, but you stated it would take a long time to make a thousand rooms, not a highly customized area.

The Salt Flats is probably one of the least interesting areas of the game, due to its mundanity. It's a cool concept, and I love it as a concept, but it isn't a blast to explore. Unless you like exploring Mekillot mouths.

I'm pretty sure the Flats could be spiced up with some additions, like a Sea, complete with aquatic life, and maybe a village on the edge of that - just four rooms of a village. Maybe some cracks you go in and explore, discover bnew life, and what ab ... that's spicing up an area.

The thing is that you need the distance too. You can't have some fortress or cave or wagon wreck pop up every five rooms, or things start to feel crowded. You need the vastness as well as the interesting parts.

But I agree that spicing up the existing areas in subtle ways would be good too.

Salt Flats also isn't 1000 identical rooms, technically.

Quote from: Eyeball on May 13, 2014, 12:38:32 AM
The thing is that you need the distance too. You can't have some fortress or cave or wagon wreck pop up every five rooms, or things start to feel crowded. You need the vastness as well as the interesting parts.

But I agree that spicing up the existing areas in subtle ways would be good too.

Agreed with that. Spice isn't the main dish, but it enhances the flavor.

The Tablelands is a great locale by example, where it has some flavor, but also vast wastes in-between.

I think the world should always expand. Not necessarily in girth, but in interest. Add to existing areas, not tack on 600 more desert rooms.

Quote from: Eyeball on May 13, 2014, 12:38:32 AM
You can't have some fortress or cave or wagon wreck pop up every five rooms, or things start to feel crowded. You need the vastness as well as the interesting parts.

Make them temporary, once the first PC finds something, give it a certain amount of time before it degrades based off what it is.  It makes little to no sense that some of the wagons at the bottom of the shield wall, for example, have lasted over a hundred years.  Thinks break down when they are not maintained....

*Have a fissure open up in an unstable area, and once it is found (assuming staff has some kind of way to know this) it only has 30 or so RL days before the landscape will reclaim it.  
*A raider camp that spawns in random places with has roaming NPCs of varying combat abilities.  The camp itself is defended (also at varying levels of strength), and has a decent amount of loot to be reclaimed by those who wipe it out (tents/mounts/weapons/coins/plot items).  Once destroyed staff can choose to drop another somewhere else.
*Landslides that block off certain pathways that either have to be cleared or replaced, changing they way PCs have to play without NEW STUFF!
*Have a certain flavor of spice start acting differently (foragable grains at first, then processed spice later on after the bad stuff would have started finding it's way into the mix).
*A new poison type.
*A random jewel/stone stars becoming scarce due to over mining. (OMG the obsidian mines are drying up! [the actual mines, not the deposits]) Suddenly obsidian becomes much more valuable.  Eventually a noble or templar-led expedition finds a new vein and mine building plot begins).
*A disease starts killing trees in the Grey and the nearby groves, Dasari must find a cure before all is lost!
*[redacted because I want to try to do this with a future pc of my own]
*New resource deposit found in the north or south that the opposing team REALLY REALLY wants.
 -Want to see Tuluk thrive? Find a reason to get people (characters, not players) from the rest of the world to come there (with or against the wishes of the powers that be) and Tuluki PCs popping in to either give them hugs or run them off!


Have the world ebb and flow, a single desert elf shouldn't be able to search the entire Pah in one RL day and examine every single "safe" place to hide.  Same with the criminals/law in the city.  I would like to not have to choose between using my OOC knowledge of the game to find safe places or avoid dangerous ones or making my PC suffer because I don't want to use that info which means I have to purposefully avoid safe places.  I'd like to stumble across a new cave/wagon/abandoned building or tent/random cool item dropped in a wilderness room or back alley.  I'd also like to fall in a hole I didn't know was there, run into a gith outside of Red Storm or Tuluk, or mantis making a move toward the Pah.

I like the idea of player ran plots, but there are so many beings and forces in the known that aren't controlled by PCs, I don't feel like the rest of the world should remain static just because a PC didn't push the Cycle Start button.

Edit: Changed "players, not characters" to "characters, not players" because that's what I meant.

I've kind of gotta go with FW here. I love player driven plots, but I love staff plots too. And they don't have to be big. They don't even have to really be plots. But staff making the world come alive means a lot, in the end. Recently, I've seen something like this happen second hand, and it scared the crap out of the people involved in it, but it was the world coming alive. Players are best at conducting plots regarding politics, and minor exploration and gathering. They are best at these because the world doesn't really react to them unless staff makes it happen, and these plots require little coded assistance.

But you can't find anything without staff. You can't build anything without staff. You can't effect a single room in any meaningful way without staff - or magick, and even that is temporary.

I am glad that we are given the power to conduct our own plots, but I want the staff to know that just about everyone appreciates all the plots and events that only staff can make happen, even when we curse you out for killing or harming our character in it.

Quote from: The7DeadlyVenomz on May 13, 2014, 08:02:10 PM
They don't even have to really be plots. But staff making the world come alive means a lot, in the end.

This is most of what I was trying to say.  Staff animating the world in response to us is awesome.  Having to/getting to change the way we play our characters in response to staff animating the world is also awesome.

*misses being a noob*

Quote from: FantasyWriter on May 13, 2014, 07:18:58 PM

Quote from: Eyeball on May 13, 2014, 12:38:32 AM
You can't have some fortress or cave or wagon wreck pop up every five rooms, or things start to feel crowded. You need the vastness as well as the interesting parts.

Make them temporary, once the first PC finds something, give it a certain amount of time before it degrades based off what it is.  It makes little to no sense that some of the wagons at the bottom of the shield wall, for example, have lasted over a hundred years.  Thinks break down when they are not maintained....

*Have a fissure open up in an unstable area, and once it is found (assuming staff has some kind of way to know this) it only has 30 or so RL days before the landscape will reclaim it.  
*A raider camp that spawns in random places with has roaming NPCs of varying combat abilities.  The camp itself is defended (also at varying levels of strength), and has a decent amount of loot to be reclaimed by those who wipe it out (tents/mounts/weapons/coins/plot items).  Once destroyed staff can choose to drop another somewhere else.
*Landslides that block off certain pathways that either have to be cleared or replaced, changing they way PCs have to play without NEW STUFF!
*Have a certain flavor of spice start acting differently (foragable grains at first, then processed spice later on after the bad stuff would have started finding it's way into the mix).
*A new poison type.
*A random jewel/stone stars becoming scarce due to over mining. (OMG the obsidian mines are drying up! [the actual mines, not the deposits]) Suddenly obsidian becomes much more valuable.  Eventually a noble or templar-led expedition finds a new vein and mine building plot begins).
*A disease starts killing trees in the Grey and the nearby groves, Dasari must find a cure before all is lost!
*[redacted because I want to try to do this with a future pc of my own]
*New resource deposit found in the north or south that the opposing team REALLY REALLY wants.
 -Want to see Tuluk thrive? Find a reason to get people (characters, not players) from the rest of the world to come there (with or against the wishes of the powers that be) and Tuluki PCs popping in to either give them hugs or run them off!


Have the world ebb and flow, a single desert elf shouldn't be able to search the entire Pah in one RL day and examine every single "safe" place to hide.  Same with the criminals/law in the city.  I would like to not have to choose between using my OOC knowledge of the game to find safe places or avoid dangerous ones or making my PC suffer because I don't want to use that info which means I have to purposefully avoid safe places.  I'd like to stumble across a new cave/wagon/abandoned building or tent/random cool item dropped in a wilderness room or back alley.  I'd also like to fall in a hole I didn't know was there, run into a gith outside of Red Storm or Tuluk, or mantis making a move toward the Pah.

I like the idea of player ran plots, but there are so many beings and forces in the known that aren't controlled by PCs, I don't feel like the rest of the world should remain static just because a PC didn't push the Cycle Start button.

Edit: Changed "players, not characters" to "characters, not players" because that's what I meant.

This is sort of like an idea I had. Don't expand the rooms, just make little neat things pop up to mix things up. Sometimes it's an empty ragged tent. Sometimes it's a random corpse. Sometimes it's a temporarily uncovered ruin to explore. Sometimes it's a rare animal native to that area. Have them pop up in certain areas sort of like those dunes blocking the routes. Each zone will have zone appropriate little 'extras'. They could build more and more so each individual 'extra' is rarer and rarer.

Nice post FW..

RSE and the the Silt Shores near there get invaded by a new race of beings from somewhere across the Silt Sea.

Boom. World goes nuts.

We don't need new areas. Just new content now and then. But I have a feeling staff is working on this.

Quote from: Dakota on May 15, 2014, 05:15:27 PM
RSE and the the Silt Shores near there get invaded by a new race of beings from somewhere across the Silt Sea.

Or just have the race that already did become active in the world.
Even if an ant has no quarrel with a boot, it may occasionally run into one.

How about allowing players to create and submit rooms/areas ?
Define a certain for the coders useful format (like XML or whatnot) and have people go for it ?
The staff could even give out "area-orders" that could be fulfilled.

"We need a 15x15 grassland with a little village in the middle"

Format could be something like

<room>
  <x>3</x>
  <y>5</y>
  <exits>n,e,s</exits>
  <desc>You walk across some nice well described grassland, lorem ipsum origal dutor.</desc>
</room>

Same idea for animals / npcs / whatnot. "We need a little grass eating rodent"...

This way the players who really long for new areas/content could help to create it.

Writing room/item descriptions is the fun part.
Staff would still be stuck with all the "work" end of it, I believe.

Staff does call for player submissions at time, there is an entire portion of the GDB devoted to it, in fact.  I absolutely love stumbling across items I wrote during submission calls. 

Just a random thought:  More than a few players, including myself, have offered in this thread and in the past to do building work, so that leads be to believe that staff doesn't want dedicated builders for some reason or other.  It's even possible that the staff (at least some of them) we have -like- building work but are too busy with other things to do much of it, so hiring builders would be like giving candy to the late-comers while the current staff is stuck eating the vegetables? *shrug*

What you don't get is that rooms and items require extra code. There's a lot of values that have to go into item making. I've worked on Smaug, which is a diku variant, and it's not SUPER tricky to create rooms or items, but you also need to have the proper flags, modifiers and whatnot, that go into each of these things that is created. In essence, by writing room descs and names, you're doing like 5% of the actual work related to making a room functional.

Just some food for thought. If you really want to see what making rooms and items is like, go into a smaug codebase and try making about a hundred items and a thousand rooms. It's no joke.

Quote from: Saellyn on May 17, 2014, 02:38:48 AM
In essence, by writing room descs and names, you're doing like 5% of the actual work related to making a room functional.

Sorry, but "5%" is just total bullshit. I've made rooms in this game, and writing the desc, night desc, edescs, door descs and the like were always the most time consuming part. Setting flags like indoors/outdoors and linking rooms together were easy with the area already planned out.

I wish there was a nonstaff position for revising descriptions.  Room descriptions, item descriptions, all the descriptions.  I wouldn't want to deal with the player crud on a day to day basis, but I'd love to help with what I'm good at.  Ah well.

Quote from: valeria on May 17, 2014, 12:21:32 PM
I wish there was a nonstaff position for revising descriptions.  Room descriptions, item descriptions, all the descriptions.  I wouldn't want to deal with the player crud on a day to day basis, but I'd love to help with what I'm good at.  Ah well.

People who have to deal with the player crud need something to look forward to. 

Quote from: Adhira on May 17, 2014, 01:14:01 PM

Quote from: valeria on May 17, 2014, 12:21:32 PM
I wish there was a nonstaff position for revising descriptions.  Room descriptions, item descriptions, all the descriptions.  I wouldn't want to deal with the player crud on a day to day basis, but I'd love to help with what I'm good at.  Ah well.

People who have to deal with the player crud need something to look forward to. 

SWEET, SWEET EDITING SOLITUDE.