What would you like to see an article about in Imaginary Realities?

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Griatch Art

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Apr 15, 2015, 6:15:48 AM4/15/15
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Two points for this post:

Ideas for articles

In the wake of the recent Imaginary Realities issue I have been asked if I'd be willing to write another article. I'd like to ask you guys if there is some particular aspect you would like me to write about. While it could be Evennia-specific (like seen with the Giant Mech article), IR is aimed at a broader audience so if possible it would be neat to be able to cover something of more general MU*- or text-game interest (like with the latest Choose emoting system and A case for bartering articles). So please reply with ideas! 


Write your own!

I think supporting central MU* resources like Imaginary Realities is an important aspect for keeping the mud community and hobby alive as a whole. It will only stay alive if we keep it so. This means more people than me contributing. 

So I would therefore like to again encourage you to contribute a text of your own. It need not be advanced, long or sophisticated if you don't want to. Some ideas:
  • The chronicling of your own ideas (or stumblings) when designing your own game, in Evennia or another system.
  • Some troubles or issues you faced trying to get into mudding (or into mud-designing).
  • The retelling of an anecdote you came upon as a player - maybe the best/funniest game situations you ever knew.
  • Describe a very interesting game system you came across and loved/hated and would love to see in more/fewer games.
  • A listing of player styles you've come across.
  • Hints on roleplaying in text-based games.
  • IR also accepts texts on Browser games, Gamebooks, Interactive fiction and Roguelikes, so go wild.
Next deadline (I'm told) is at the end of May. You can read more here. Hope to see your input!
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Griatch

Griatch Art

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Apr 20, 2015, 12:42:29 PM4/20/15
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Bump. Anybody?
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Griatch
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Achiel

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Apr 20, 2015, 11:56:39 PM4/20/15
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Hello -

I - as with many who've found evennia - am currently reading through a few virtual world development books, and a major topic in those books is the player base and what you might create in an effort to bring a specific demographic, or how you might appeal to a specific demographic with your existing game. I'm curious as to your opinion on the part after the game opens. As developers in the planning phase, it's very easy to say 'we're going to cover all our bases!' - as someone who has both played and programmed for virtual worlds, I think it might be insightful to read your opinion on how a developer/programmer could react to player type shifts after release. That is, methods you've used, thought of, or simply discussed with others that might be used to encourage or reward a specific type of player to contribute to your community.

I'd also be interested in your opinions on the combat side of role playing environments. Should combative virtual worlds - that is, both twitch and turn based environments with built in combat or conflict mechanics - and role play virtual worlds - where combat/conflict can be mechanical, but is often done through emotes - be separate entities?  Can they co-exist? If so, is harmony and balance in the hands of the programmers? Or the playerbase?

I'm considering a submission to IR at some point, but right now, I feel like I've got more to learn before I start talking as though I've got a handle on things.

As always, thanks for all you've given us.

Achiel

eartsar

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Apr 21, 2015, 12:21:49 PM4/21/15
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I'm looking to contribute an article about the sense of scale in roleplay-enforced MUDs, and how a smaller scale world can lend to a more compelling experience. I feel like players describe these sorts of MUDs like a cross between a fantasy novel, and a modern day mmo. Likely done with good intentions, but making this comparison really ignores some of the ways that each game can "cheat". MUDs get the benefits of both mediums, but also the luggage, in my opinion.

I'm "just another player" (albeit an avid one) who is contributing to a project on the side, but it's a very real design decision that we've been wrestling with, and hopefully I can spark some more discussion about it. I think it's important that other "just another player"s contribute to this, too. There are a lot of greybeards in the community who have some great wisdom to share, but I think we need new blood expressing their opinions and experiences, too.

Griatch Art

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Apr 22, 2015, 6:13:08 AM4/22/15
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Hi and thanks for the suggestions!

Player types (using e.g. the "Bartle classification" of Exorer, Achiever etc) is a tricky topic. Need to think about if I have anything useful to say about that.

Combat styles is an interesting topic. I personally (as a player) have little interest in twitch MUD combat. I always found twitch mechanics overall to be a awkward fit to a text medium - a somewhat desperate attempt to cram in a style of play that graphics is so much better suited for. But that's just my personal preference, there are many well-developed twitch-based combat systems out there and people enjoy them to great effect. Co-existing combat styles is an interesting question, hm.

Good ideas! Not sure I'll go with these in particular, but who knows, they are certainly worth brewing over!
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Griatch

Griatch Art

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Apr 22, 2015, 6:18:14 AM4/22/15
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Excellent, looking forward to reading your article! The topic of scale is an important one, especially in the context of a small team.
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Griatch

Tristano Ajmone

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Apr 27, 2015, 4:50:09 AM4/27/15
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@Griatch — I'm answering your post quite late, unfortunately, but I've been away from the PC during the last week.

I am really looking forward to your coming articles on IR magazine, I really appreciate them. Since IR magazine deals not only with MUDs but also Interactive Fiction, I think it could be a good idea (in general) to write some "cross-genre" articles—ie, I come from many years of IF, yet I find it often difficult to grasp the differences in overall mechanics between IF and MUD (multiplayer, realtime, and persistent world being the main differences amongst the two genres).

Since IR mag covers an audience from both genres (and others as well) it might be interesting to cover issues which might fill the gap that separates these genres. I guess that for those who "come from MUD" many issues just seem natural and obvious, while on the other hand for those "coming from IF" there is a bias toward thinking virtual worlds in a different way.

Nick Montfort's Twisty Little Passages is a classic book on IF that deals with general questions of design and play—possibly, it's the "IF counterpart" of MUDs' Bartle's Designing Virtual Worlds,

Coding issues aside, there is profound difference in design amongst the two genres: IF works are meant to be played once (rarely you might find some works that rely on randomly generated worlds that might offer different playing experience at each game, but it's not so common); MUDs are meant to be played continuosly and simultaneously. This obviously means a great difference in design from scratch, and things like "plot" take on a different dimension in those genres.

So, I'd be interest to read considerations on how plot integrates with MUD game desing/experience, on how a designer juggles the design process to suit both the individual player and the collective players. In a work of IF everything rotates around the single-player: the world, the plot, the time-scale, everything bends to his gameplay, so every action the player takes moves the story forward by changing the game universe. How does plot emerge in a persistent multiplayer world?

These are the difficulties that I've been facing while trying to step from one genre into the other. Possibly, IR mag is a good place to discuss such issues.

Thanks.

Griatch Art

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Apr 28, 2015, 11:13:23 AM4/28/15
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@Tristano

Hm, those are some good questions and ideas too. I don't know enough IF design to do a side-by side comparison but the difference between singleplayer and multiplayer is indeed quite a big one in general. We'll see. Thanks for the input!
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Griatch

Time

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Apr 28, 2015, 6:11:22 PM4/28/15
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Hi all. It's the first time I write something here, even if I follow the project since long and I wanna thank all the dev team for the big effort and for the awesome job you are all doing.

@Griatch: I can't write an entire article (even if I'd like to) as my english sucks too much, but I'd like to point you to a couple of topics I think could be interesting.

1. Area instances. "Stealing" the idea from the MMORPG world, I think a revolutionary thing for MUD systems would be allowing players to run multiple instances of entire areas (like quest-areas, very popular in some italian muds, yes I'm spaghetti-crawler, ciao Tristano :D). I won't go deep into design stuff as I would like to keep the subject "abstract" and "rule-free" but I think Evennia could make the magic due to how it's developed. What do you think about it?

2. Cover system for range combat. This is something I tried to design for a DaleMUD based game, tons of years ago, but I never succeded due to the design of the fight system and our lack of C knowledge :) (we were young and beardless)
I won't go too deep into the original idea as it's far too difficult to explain for me in english but in Evennics words, a room can be populated with "cover" objects the player can jump into. Melee fight is still avaible but range combat is now suitable and can be mixed with the standard melee one.
With standard codebases this could be tricky, mainly because the usual combat-system is not designed with rangecombat in mind (pull... oh please..) but Ev gives all the tools out-of-the-box and this could be accoplished with minimum effort. I love it. What do you think about it Griatch?

As I said, I'm a former italian player. I played a lot (1996-2008) but I don't know how is the "state of the art" of the foreign muds, so maybe these ideas have been already thought, developed and upgraded. If so, please let me know.

Bye

Griatch Art

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Apr 29, 2015, 4:30:32 AM4/29/15
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Hi there, Time!

First of all, I think your English is perfectly fine! It should certainly not stop you if you want to write something! Besides, Imaginary Realities have editors that will usually help you with language fixes and needed clarifications if there are any. I'm not a native English speaker either and that hasn't stopped me from writing stuff yet. :)

As for your two questions/suggestions, thankyou, these are useful ideas. The actual implementation of them are maybe too Evennia-specific to be useful to IR, but their use in a game design might indeed be a fun topic.

To briefly answer:

1) Area instances are simple enough. I can think of three ways to implement instancing:
  • Have multiple copies of the cluster of rooms that make up your instance. When a new user (or group of users) comes to the "entrance room" and all enter some command, they get teleported to a free copy. The drawback of this is that if there are no copies available, they will have to wait. Also, one needs to have some sort of "reset" mechanic so that the instance can be re-used with the next group.
  • Create instances on the fly when needed. That is, when users come to the "entrance room" and want to enter the instance something like a batch-build script is run to create the instance. When they leave, the instance is destroyed. The advantage of this is that the reset mechanic is not needed (the instance is always created fresh). The drawback is that creating a new instance may be expensive  if done often (you could potentially build it in the database in a separate process though since it's stand-alone from the rest of the grid and doesn't need to be cached until players actually enter it).
  • A hybrid - you build a few copies of the instance so people can quickly teleport into a fresh one on demand and offload the deletion/creation of them into a queue in the background as needed (this should definitely happen in a separate process - there would be no cache issues to do it this way).
2. Cover is probably a trickier issue to design, not because it's hard to do in Evennia but because clearly describing positional information in text is tricky. Can you still cover from a shooter while in the same room? How do you know someone shoots at you if the shooter is in another room? What if the cover faces the wrong way compared to the direction of the shooter - or does all cover work for "all directions"? Lots to think about!

Thanks for the suggestions, food for thought!
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Griatch

Time

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Apr 30, 2015, 10:39:03 AM4/30/15
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Thank you. Ok I'll take this as a challenge and I'll try to write something about mob-programs so I can keep the article less codebase specific and more general. I did a lot of study about designing good progs for "persistent" mobs that try to level up, loots, grind exp-areas and so forth. I'm gonna check if I still have some notes about it, otherwise I'll try to rebuild something from scratch. We got almost a month, should be sufficient.

Regarding the cover system, I'm going to open a dedicated thread as you gave me good points to discuss.
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