Foomer wrote:

I know some of you probably have your ideas set for what you'd like to see in a MUD, but I'm going to ask this anyway.

In the original FoomerMUD, the world was intended to be a 500x500 colossal map (that'd take forever to save and load) with cities and occasional villages (mostly NPC) sprased here and there. Now, if I decided to actually go and make a world like this, what would be the best way to attempt setting up a map?

The way I'd planned on originally was to have two area types, detailed areas and general areas. Detailed areas are the towns and special areas where each room has a unique description and there are usually things to do and places to see. These areas include towns and villages, maybe little huts out in the forest somewhere, secret hideouts, etc. The general areas are the space fillers, which might be a half-dozen different types of jungle in a jungle region, or forest in a forest region, etc... A few different descriptions, but mostly the same descriptions over and over. This way allows for open roaming, which is good for a game where hunting and tracking are part of the fun.

The other way would be to make sure each room in the entire game has a unique description. Of course, I'm not going to write 250,000+ room descriptions for the game, so the alternative would be to have certain paths that a player can follow from one place to another. There might be a path from village A to village B that leads on a mazy trek through the jungle. This prevents random wandering though, and it forces me to write a new jungle description for each piece of jungle you encounter, which gets really tedious. Using a setup like this, the world would end up much smaller than the original plan, but there would be more to read and everything would be new to explore.

Then of course, I could scrap the whole idea of a huge world and try fiddling around with some more focused maps...

Any thoughts to which is better, why, and what I could do to improve on anything?

Both have their drawbacks. I am more partial to the first one, believe it or not... here's how you'd do it.

First of all, 250000 individual room descriptions is not plausible whatsoever. Even major companies wouldn't want to invest that much time and money into writers for a given MUD. Heck, if I remember correctly, GemStone III only has about 50000 individually-designed rooms, and it's been run, financed, and worked on for just under a decade.

But at the same time, 50-200 repeating descriptions (with specific areas detailed appropriately, which would give another 500-1000 or so descriptions) would be disgustingly boring.

What you'll need to do is reach a compromise. My best suggestion to do that is to make a system where descriptions for given rooms are generated randomly with a basic template, and then kept that way forever.

For example:
The thick underbrush of the jungle threatens to swallow you alive in a writhing mass of windswept ferns, dew-covered vines, thorny bushes, and viscous mud. Trees cluster around you like soldiers assailing a diplomat from a foreign country. Above all else, it is hot.

Basically, you could boil that down to:

Terrain type, description of terrain type, description of terrain features, description of weather.

Thus, you could just create little "templates" of terrain types, descriptions, etc. for each of the 50-100 repeating terrain, and then stick them together.

People would begin to notice the random lines, but it would at least give some variety to the repeating rooms. In addition, it would give people a better sense of movement.

If you continue to head north and all you see is

...then things are going to get very boring very quickly.

However, if there were subtle variations on those (I'm not feeling creative enough right now to write up some =P) then if people aren't wowed by the variety, they'll at least notice that they're moving, and will be able to recognise where they are simply by memory of the description, albeit random, of the location.

Well, using your idea that brings me down to 3 options that I can think of.

1. I could put together various combinations of descriptions for the same thing and just lay them out randomly on the map. It's more work, but they'll always be the same and you can use the change in descriptions as guiding points.

2. I could have each general area's description be randomized at world startup, so that they'll stay the same until the world reboots and then they'll be different all over again. Good for keeping it the same during that run, but could confuse people after a reboot.

3. Make them random every time someone enters them, but I think that'd be pretty weird, honestly. Moving back and forth keeps putting you into "different" rooms...

Ideally, a skilled navigator in my MUD could just follow their own tracks back :oP