MUD Design : Spatial Environment

[krem]

In this post, I just wanted to discuss some of the different implementations of the environments that MUDs are represented as (note: spatial layout, not theme or genre).

Due to the telnet origins of MUDs, most MUDs are thought of as large room-based worlds. This is the easiest to write and provides the richest experience in that it tells a story that is hard to represent in non-textual fashion. Also, providing the user with these rooms, you can also better control the contents of the room. Who can enter, who can leave, who can attack what, etc. You can add commands that are specific to the room. It really does allow the developer to have full control over room.

To the extreme of that is your traditional grid/coordinate based environment. This is what your normal 2D RPGs use. You have a 2D-coordinate system and generally a player occupies one coordinate point within that world. More advanced systems allow for overlapping of objects/players on a single coordinate. These are also most often used when the visual immersion is given higher priority over the richness of the description that the text-based versions offer. With this system, the developer often sacrifices control over the environment for real-world physics and realism. It also allows some of the developer to focus on the game play with other developers worrying about presentation. Worlds also tend to be much larger as there is not a need to detail every step from point A to point B.

Some MUDs have utilized a hybrid system in which there is a coordinate-based world environment (sometimes referred to as the wilderness) with certain coordinates representing rooms or entrances to room-based areas. This allows for the 'best-of-both worlds' approach to environment design. It gives developers of an area the freedom and control of room-based environments, but the administrators of the MUD can still lay out vast worlds.

This is my summary of the 3 different types of spatial environments one may encounter when playing/designing a MUD. I find the general non-MUD public is often attracted to the basic coordinate system given that it gives the player instant visual feedback. MUD purists, however, would often skip these types of MUDs as they find the richness and depth of the room-based MUDs unmatched by the coordinate based systems.