While reading my Wired Magazine on the toilet, a thought came to me on why I never read room descriptions outside of a city.
How difficult would it be to code rotating rooms into desert rooms?
By Rotating, I mean that everytime you enter a desert room, it will show 1 of 3-ish possible Room descriptions. For example: Between dunes, on the side of a dune, or ontop of a dune.
When in a group of people, the room decides which Desc it is going to have and displays it for the first one, and everyone following that person also sees that description.
When entering a room with a PC, npc, or wagon already in it, the room wont pop up a new one, but keep the one that is there currently.
With this idea installed, deserts' dunes will be moving around, constantly, and I think it would be great.
Any ideas, thoughts, answers?
This might be fine, except that, unless it actually affects desert geography (ie. changes room linkage, which is much more difficult than shifting descriptions), I'm not sure the result will prove very interesting... Additionally, a lot of our desert geographical features are enormous dunes that spill across dozens of rooms. Doing those right (while very interesting as a programming challenge) would be hard.
-- X
I am speaking more along the lines of the wide open desert. Some dunes just don't look like they can ever move.
All around Allanak it is the same Room description over and over and over. From what I have seen.
Changing Geography sounds like a good idea though. But not for Wide open areas of the game's deserts. Maybe for Areas that are already skewed.
bleh nobody reads it anyway.
They -would- read it if it were meaningful. :)
It's a monotonous desert, what can you say?
Brief on.
That is what I can say.
I read the room describes, even when I've been there a few times. There's no wish to fall off the edge of the world, you know.
Brief is for slow readers. ;-)
I read every room while out hunting - afraid of falling off something or missing a buried clue.
Besides, the descriptions are beautiful...and I like the writing style.
On the other hand - if I'm running - I just go with the scroll.
(http://img352.imageshack.us/img352/29/untitled6copy0gb.jpg)
If you were standing at either X things would look relatively similar, and its hard to have a meaningful description for every room when your in an environment like the above that could possibly be 1000 times bigger, with each room roughly like that picture ;).