[Divunal-list] A Brief Reminder

[Michael Dartt]

[Disclaimer: If you want a purely technical answer, this isn't it.  Should
still be useful, though.  :-)]

	We've talked about this a few times, but it's nothing that we're
100% certain of doing any time, as far as I know.  I'm personally a big
fan of computer graphics, but I question whether going graphical would be
in the best interest of Divunal.  Time, resource, and design (1st person? 
3rd person isometric?  Both?)  issues aside, we can do a lot with text
that would be nigh impossible to do graphically.  The major benefit that
comes to mind is dynamically altering the world.  Right now, we can have
room descriptions that change while you're there, create items on the fly,
have players/items/etc. change the world in complex ways in-game, and
probably a bunch of other things that I haven't yet discovered.  (Someone
more familiar with the server needs to do a feature list.  James?) 
Replicating this in a graphical context would be mighty difficult, if not
impossible.  I remember being impressed by how Half-Life does bullet marks
in walls and such--we're capable of changing and saving much more about
the world if we use text.  To put it another way, our text interface is
*more* interactive than any graphical interfaces will be in the near
future.  (The wonderful irony of computer graphics: a few words can be
much more descriptive than a picture, due to hardware limitations.  Maybe
if we just do a Playstation 2 version....:-) )

	That said, I have to admit that it's certainly a cool idea, and it
might be that we can do it in a way so that the weaknesses of the
graphical environment have a negligible effect.  I'm definetely interested
in talking more about this, but a different venue may be more appropriate
if the discussion surpasses more than a couple of postings.  I can hear it
now: "We need to have a finished engine and a game before it's really
worth our time to talk about extending it.  Focus, focus, focus!"

	Which is right, of course.  :-)


--Mike/Jedin

 

On Tue, 15 Jun 1999, Gordon Tyler wrote:

> >New subscribers: please send us questions, I'm sure many of you have the
> >same ones... we'll be taking any relevant answers from this list and
> >putting them up as a FAQ as soon as we have a few.
> 
> 
> Here's a question: Is it possible that the design of the game engine could
> be extended to provide a more interactive, visual interface? Something akin
> to the current "3D" online multiplayer games. But better, of course ;)
> 
> Ciao,
> Gordon
> 
> 
> 
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