[Reality] Re: [Divunal-author]Propgating events (fwd)

[Glyph Lefkowitz]

To begin; please don't crosspost -- although this is a discussion which
has *some* authoring components, it's still mainly a technical discussion.
Authors who want to have a hand in deciding how things like this work
should have a hand in the code anyway; so all you're doing by crossposting
is making it so all interested parties get the message twice, and
everybody else gets it and deletes it.

On Sat, 2 Oct 1999, Michael Dartt wrote:

> Lotsa nifty stuff, but only time to reply to one...
> 
> > Why too difficult?  We just describe all "outdoor" rooms in such a way
> > that a sentence at the end describing the weather or whatever would be
> > appropriate, then we make it a description element.  It seems simple to
> > me.  (Is this the geek in me overriding the writer?)

> 	This would prevent the author from having much in the way of
> richness in his description.  Ideally, we could allow for, e.g.:

Not really, no.  That is, as with all other features of TR, merely a
reasonable default.  We could *also* have the description dynamically
switched in and out, but that's not usually going to be the case.

> A Path Through the Woods
> 
> Oaks and maple trees tower above you, their leaves a rainbow of reds,
> golds, and browns.  Fresh air, tinged with the scent of sap, fills your
> lungs with every breath.  The chittering of squirrels mixes with a
> cardinal's song and the buzz of insects.  The dust stirred by your passage
> sparkles as it swirls through the sunlight streaming through the forest
> canopy.

Secondly, I challenge you to make an example description where these
actions don't occurr where weather is still this important :-)  The player
is not necessarily walking along this path -- they could have teleported
there, or they could be stationary for a long time.  They could be having
a picknick there.

[snip second description]

> 	Making a description a bunch of concatenated sentences ruins the
> chance to relate different aspects of a place (e.g. time of day, weather,
> stuff in the room) to each other.  There's probably an acceptable way of
> handling this; I just haven't sat down to figure it out.

I disagree.  The fact that things are described independantly might make
the flow a little harder to control, but it *does* allow us a great deal
of flexibility in designing a dynamic environment.  It should be a
constraint that the authors work with... after all, if we have highly
specific descriptions, they are necessarily static.  This *IS* the reason
we came up with description elements in the first place :-)