What could of been

[aaa]

http://www.network54.com/Forum/153244/thread/1032902531/last-1033008753/Some+Bad+news+and+some+Good+news.

Anyone else ever wonder what that 3d version of FL would of been like? 

I like to think that there's an alternative timeline where it happened. 

[Fool_Hardy]

Well, it the supercollider really does create small black holes, perhaps one will swallow this reality and we will end up there to see it.

But, on a serious note.

I am glad we have what we have.

[Pali]

The question is what you want out of FL.  If you want an excellent gaming experience, then I don't see any reason going 3D would necessarily impair that, and it could conceivably add to it a great deal.  But FL also has a strong simulation aspect to it, the sense of being its own world evolving on its own terms, and I think anything involving graphics will impose a limit to how that kind of evolution can occur - especially in terms of the work required to bring it about from the fairly small staff that a MUD is going to have.

 

Consider a plot that involves the destruction of a major city, something that has happened here more than once.  In a MUD, representing this can be done largely through rewriting room descriptions and titles, removing or changing mobs, and altering references throughout the game (I'm sure I'm still simplifying a bit here, but you get my point).  When you add graphics, all of this still needs to be done, but also a whole lot more - you need to create new visuals for the entire area.  If you want people to be able to watch it happen, rather than just a number of echoes being run on the screen, you'll need to create graphics to represent all the craziness taking place as well.

 

And consider the smaller scale: I can RP an invoker running lines of fire or lightning around his fingers through custom emotes.  If I want to do that in a game with graphics, that specific gesture needs to be created for the game for me to do it.  I can have the grass under a necromancer's feet shrivel and die, have my charmy play a game of checkers with me, literally whatever I can think of the game will let my character do through text - but any game with graphics is going to require the whole animation to have been created ahead of time for it to happen.

 

Graphics engines have limits in ways that text does not, and I think FL benefits from the relative freedom text brings.

 

P.S. Also, micro black holes would evaporate before doing anything, so don't worry about them.  

[Fool_Hardy]

44 minutes ago, Pali said:

Graphics engines have limits in ways that text does not, and I think FL benefits from the relative freedom text brings.

 

+1

[Magick]

A picture is worth a thousand words, but it takes a million words to code the picture.

[mya]

You could completely replace room descriptions with still pictures and achieve a similar effect. Even better have both.
We could even have Players, mobs and objects in rooms represented by some sort of sprite.
You could probably have all this available to players through a Tablet play, with minimal command loss (although at the cost of non-standard input input speed).
And you could have both versions working at the same time (console & GUI).

[Pali]

And it would look freaking terrible.  I have no interest in losing the ability to animate my character through detailed emotes in favor of crappy sprite animations.

 

edit: sorry Mya, missed that you were proposing both text and picture together.  Definitely a better option than trying to switch to pure graphics, but I don't see it really adding that much to the experience (at least not for me personally).

[Trick]

I don't think I'd get anything out of it. The fun of a MUD is that how I imagine something looks is how it looks. Going with pics or graphics means its someone else's rendition of something. I don't want that. I want my mind to create it from reading it.

Speaking of... Am I the only one that has directions backwards in their mind because of how the directions are labelled?

[Unknown Criminal]

A whole whack of years ago me and UB were reprogramming 'Tribes' to look and play like FL, we had a blast playtesting it but fell off the wagon timewise, it was actually some very cool shit we put together  

UC

[Fool_Hardy]

I have been doing this since '99.

I dream in text.

I would not have it any other way.

[f0xx]

The sole reason why I started playing was to improve my English. The only words I knew back then was yelling at CC "I'm the king of Rheydin!"

I wouldn't like it is much if it had graphics.

[aaa]

50 minutes ago, f0xx said:

The only words I knew back then was yelling at CC "I'm the king of Rheydin!"

That sounds so familiar for some reason. 

[Fool_Hardy]

58 minutes ago, f0xx said:

The sole reason why I started playing was to improve my English. The only words I knew back then was yelling at CC "I'm the king of Rheydin!"

I wouldn't like it is much if it had graphics.

lol. This post made me think of @ajwetton. Not sure why

[Magick]

9 hours ago, Fireman said:

Am I the only one that has directions backwards in their mind because of how the directions are labelled?

I don't think you are as I'm fairly certain that this was mentioned some time ago, but you are among the minority.

I've always seen west as left as generally when you look at a map, north is at the top.

I mean after all, how many maps of the US do you see where Texas is at the top and Maine in the lower left-hand corner, despite the Texans' wish to always be above us all?

[north east south west]
But I can see where you're coming from as on the line, east is listed is on the left, so it makes sense to have  your orientation this way.  Is this why you see it the way you do?  Because I've always viewed this as a clockwise placement rather than a literal one.

Edit: second guessed myself, but was originally correct.

[Unknown Criminal]

[west north south east]

[Lloth]

The order of directions is the order of directions on the compass, starting at north and revolving clockwise. Which is the correct way of listing cardinal directions in order, as per cartographer standards. I am sure most of you learned it that way in school. Never Eat Shredded Wheat or some other acronym. 

[Magick]

1 hour ago, Unknown Criminal said:

[west north south east]

You've been playing FL long enough to know that that's the wrong format.
You troublemaker. 

 

1 hour ago, Lloth said:

The order of directions is the order of directions on the compass, starting at north and revolving clockwise. Which is the correct way of listing cardinal directions in order, as per cartographer standards. I am sure most of you learned it that way in school. Never Eat Shredded Wheat or some other acronym. 

Correct is relative, especially in this case.  Popular would be more accurate, which then became the standard.  Similar to how the Prime Meridian came about, though that was more adopted by other countries because England said "this is how it is" and the rest went "sure, whatever."  At least with the compass points it means the nearly 90% of the people that live on Earth live in the Northern Hemisphere, a number which I doubt changed much in the past 3000 years as there's only about 30% land coverage in the Southern Hemisphere and about 30% of that is Antarctica, and we share the same reference point: the North Pole.
We could have easily gone counter-clockwise (though clockwise and counter-clockwise are referenced from north too, but I digress) and come up with Nice Witches Sell Effigies or Saw Elephants Near Water.  Or used left, up, down, right to come up with Wind Never Sweeps Evenly.  It matters not in which order you write them, so long as they're in the correct place relative to each other.  Admittedly, some mnemonics are easier than others.  What this does mean though, is that even though they're not common, doesn't mean they're wrong.

 

Alright.  I'll end my pedantic rant. 
Still love you, Lloth!
Please don't smite me.

 

Edit: I can English good.

[Pali]

9 hours ago, Lloth said:

Never Eat Shredded Wheat or some other acronym. 

Definitely was the one I learned growing up.

 

8 hours ago, Magick said:

Correct is relative, especially in this case.  Popular would be more accurate, which then became the standard.

Which is probably why Lloth said "correct as per cartographer standards".  

[Lloth]

Correct denotes fact, not perspective. And it is fact that the proper listing of cardinal directions is clockwise, starting at north. How that standard came to be is irrelevant. It is the standard.

 

I know you like to play the devil's advocate, I like it too. Frankly, though, a strictly aesthetic change like this would be, in my opinion, a monumental waste of Erelei' s time.

[Magick]

I don't think anyone was suggesting a change either in the digression or OP.

One was, as the title suggests, what could have been.  The other a point of view.

 

Still boggles the mind that people would see FL what to me would be upside down.  Turn right to go to Val Miran from Maelbrim instead of going left?  Witchcraft.
Though that brings a question as I write this.  @Fireman, do you see Tarandue as up or down in relation to Maelbrim?

And we can move this to another thread if it's too much of a digression again.

[Trick]

Down. Also, when I see WM, I don't read it as the initials W.M., but I read it as War M... Dunno why lol

[Erelei]

22 hours ago, Fireman said:

Speaking of... Am I the only one that has directions backwards in their mind because of how the directions are labelled?

Can you explain further what you mean by this?

[Trick]

East is on the left of the direction bar, so in my mind when I go east, I'm going left. So, Miruvhor, for instance, is left of Maelbrim, not right.

[Erelei]

That's.. weird.

I guess it's kind of like how I learned 'Months' in school. When I think of how the Calendar is laid out in my head, I think of it this way:

 

Sept Oct Nov Dec
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug

 

Instead of

 

Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec

 

The brain works in mysterious ways.

[aaa]

I wasn't suggesting making FL 3D.

It was more of a "imagine a 3d fl that looked like a 2003 ea sports game" 

I've been reading the old forums quote a bit and this thing grabbed my interest and thought it could be a funny discussion. 

Some of the old pk logs are incredibly eye opening too, I do suggest people take a look at some.