[Opinion/Discussion] The Standards for Rooms Uniformity

Realm & Areas
#1

A spinoff on the capitalisation discussion!

Titles

I think we need better standards for titles. Here’s a good starting point:

Capitalize the First and Last Word

In all three styles, always capitalize the first and last word of any title. These examples will help:

  • How to Land Your Dream Job
  • Of Mice and Men
  • The Cat in the Hat

Capitalize Nouns and Pronouns

You should capitalize nouns and pronouns in titles in all three styles. This includes proper nouns. You can see this rule in action in these examples:

  • Visiting Beautiful Ruins (noun)
  • As She Ran Away (pronoun)
  • Little House on the Prairie (nouns)
  • For Whom the Bell Tolls (pronoun)

Capitalize Verbs and Helping Verbs

No matter which style you are using, you’ll also need to capitalize verbs. This includes helping verbs and variations on the verb “to be.” These examples will help:

  • To Kill a Mockingbird (verb)
  • The Sun Also Rises (verb)
  • Their Eyes Were Watching God (helping verb and verb)
  • Tender Is the Night (verb)

Capitalize Adjectives and Adverbs

You should also capitalize adjectives and adverbs in all three styles. You can see this rule in action here:

  • All Quiet on the Western Front (adjectives)
  • The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (adjective)
  • She Quietly Waits (adverb)
  • The Poky Little Puppy (adjectives)

Do Not Capitalize Short Prepositions

Each style has its own rules for how long a preposition needs to be if you’re going to capitalize it in a title. However, no matter which style you’re using, prepositions of three letters or fewer are lowercase unless they are the first or last word in the title. These examples will show you:

  • One Year in Paris
  • The Book of Disquiet
  • A House for Mr. Biswas

Do Not Capitalize Articles

In all three styles, you should not capitalize articles in the title unless they are the first or last word in the title. Articles include “the,” “a,” and “an,” as you can see here:

  • Through the Looking Glass
  • The Portrait of a Lady
  • The Sense of an Ending

Do Not Capitalize Short Coordinating Conjunctions

Short coordinating conjunctions like “and,” “but,” “or,” “for,” or “nor” are lowercase in titles in all three styles. Here are a few examples:

  • War and Peace
  • The Once and Future King
  • Franny and Zooey

Personally I like the Oxford style (page 6).

Exits

I feel it generally helps the navigation if you can lay out the map on a grid so that there are six generic exits (NWSE, up, and down). Granted, that’s not the case for most of Sinder (and also why I find it a bit confusing). I don’t think we can unify it without major rework but for the new areas it’d help to think how two rooms relate to each other in space and use one of North, West, South, East, Up, Down (in addition to single letter shortcuts). That would also help fast walking if @Accipiter will implement that.

Otherwise it would be helpful to keep the exits sorted (NWSEUD is the order I saw elsewhere and it seems reasonable). The gut feeling tells me the ‘back’ exit should be the last.

Opinions?

#2

My issue with the grid standard is that in many cases it creates unnecessary rooms.

As a for instance you have an east-west street with buildings along either side, with a pure cardinal system that would mean for each pair of buildings, one on the north one on the south, you would need a seperate room, and this can be reduced by a factor of 3 if we allow diagonal directions as well. The issue then comes when you have more buildings than 3 on each side before you find a natural exit point off to the east or west. Now that requires two rooms for this street, seperating people between two rooms, and making travel take longer, as every travel node takes away 5(? Maybe 3) seconds off of your antispam allotment (there is a limit on how much activity you can do at a single time without waiting, I’ve hit this limit a lot, both with bots, and trying to make large sweeping changes at the Prism).

Moving to a real case, the Prism is currently set where the hallway circling the building is obfuscated by the exit list. This means that any room connected to the hallway can access any other room connected to the hallway. With a grid standard, that would require extra rooms for the hallways, and more places for people to get lost. Unless you are in one of the saunas or on the 2nd floor of apartments, the lobby is available and and at the top of the list.

As for the order of exits. I am honestly of the opposite opinion, the exit (or back, out, etc.) should be listed on top. If you want to be able to spam out of a building, the quickest way to do that (outside of a teleport) should be to just click on the top exit. Assuming you have the room descriptions collapsed it’s always at the same spot on the GUI.

Sorry if this at all comes off as antagonistic, I’m just on the complete opposite side of the aisle on this matter it seems. :sweat_smile:

#3

I don’t think I have strong opinions on capitalization style, and will happily adjust to whatever folks think is best! The one thing I’ll note is that we don’t necessarily need to use the same conventions for both rooms and exits, if different things feel better for each.

I do have some opinions about grid layout and navigation!

I am not in favor of forcing directional exits. I think they can be useful in areas that fit them. I think people building rooms should absolutely think about the compass directions. (I love the fact that Wolfery has a map, because it encouraged me to think about physical layout and how I’d draw things onto that map!)

But, using six directions as the primary navigation is also limiting. It makes it harder to make rooms that ‘contain’ other rooms. For instance: a lake with an island in the center. If exits have to be directional, either I have to make multiple rooms depending in what side of the lake someone is on (which makes it harder for people to figure out where to go for their ‘swimming in the lake’ RP), or have a ‘weird’ exit that will confuse people all the more because they’ve gotten used to always being able to navigate with directionals.

I’m also in favor of making people think about the semantic navigation. It’s possible to learn ‘the forest is north of Sinder’, but it’s also possible to learn, ’the forest is past the stable’, which is - I admit! - slightly harder, but also encourages a richer understanding of the world. I tend to think about travel in terms of a set of nodes for ‘interesting’ locations, and am happy to have the ‘boring’ ones collapsed so I can just follow a set of mental landmarks.

As far as order of exits… I’m going to add a third opinion entirely! I don’t think it’s ideal to force the back exit to be in a particular place. I tend to use exit order to suggest what the most ‘important’ exits are, by showing them first in the list. To my mind, we already have the uniformity we need simply by having a consistent name attached to that exit - but that may be my programmer talking, and we might need to consider ordering to be more friendly to folks who aren’t as comfortable with a command line.

1 Like
#4

Hopping into this conversation with a few thoughts:

Grid standard / navigation

Rather than thinking in terms of exits, I want to suggest that we think about how we want to use rooms, and then create exits that support that. I think it’s important that each room represents a distinct space; people in the same room should reasonably feel like they’re in the same sort of place. I’ve seen this standard lead to rooms that vary a lot in size: someone’s bedroom and a hundred-mile stretch of desert both work pretty well as a single room! In that same example, I would need to think very hard about the compass directions for my bedroom (and, after thinking hard, I realize that both exits from my actual bedroom are on the north wall!) but I often have a sense of the direction I’m traveling when moving around town.

A directional grid tends to encourage rooms that are roughly the same size, instead - that huge desert becomes a grid of dozens of rooms, to try to represent all that space. With that in mind, and for the reasons Xetem and Kai mentioned, I think a directional grid works better for MUD-like games, where movement through the space is more of a game-mechanic and less of a roleplaying prompt.

Text and capitalization

I think a good starting-place for this might be to try to make areas internally-uniform, and see how different standards work when applied at the scale of a connected cluster of rooms. That’s easier than trying to get everything uniform in one pass, and it lets us build up a style-guide.

One other thing to consider when style-guide writing:

  • What is important in the style, that we want to check and fix?
  • What is recommended, where we have a suggestion but we don’t object if someone varies?
  • What is irrelevant, where we aren’t going to recommend anything at all?

The more rules there are, the harder it can feel to create new things. Excessive rules can also stifle a lot of the interesting personality that comes from different people writing the world. I think we want to make sure that our actual enforced style is straightforward and leads to clarity, and we give some good recommendations for people who aren’t sure what to do so that they don’t feel lost.

I’m definitely in favor of us starting to get some of this guidance discussed as a group, though!

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#5

I do agree with this. And for the most part, the most important place to get to, for the Prism, is back to the lobby, as it is the hub of the area, it’s the only way to get to Chippy’s office, the only way to get upstairs, and the only way to walk out. My opinion on listing the exit first is more of a suggestion than a guideline proposal, I am all for having the order of rooms be in priority order. There was a time right after the central Sinder Road room was first opened and the park was listed fairly low on its exit list, it bothered me so much that I almost changed it right then and there to be on top. Luckily someone else has gone an done that for me. :joy:

#6

That would be me :grin: .
On an early suggestion from @Windchaser that I liked, I put the exit that (eventually) lead back to Station Park as the top exit, so that if you continue to just click the top exit, you’d end up in the park.

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#7

Ah, this runs counter to how I’ve been placing exits since I’ve been wanting to encourage people to go deeper into areas. I’ve been placing the road back as the last exit listed. positioning, it does make sense to have them at the top for easy clicking I guess. Something I’ll muse on.

#8

I’ve been using North, South, West, East, Up, Down, Others as a general order. For the Forest it works fine because the main stretch runs North (deeper) and South (back) so the first option is always deeper into the Forest and the second option is always back out. But I also make sure that back, out or Sinder are available as options to return wherever possible so no one gets lost. It already gets hard enough to navigate once you’re in the trees! I might eventually make a map though, so that movement is matched up to a visual. For now though, things keep changing too fast to cement anything. Theater of mind, EEEEEEEEE!

#9

So many valid points! I’ll love to eloborate a bit more then!

For the titles; I think I only care about those being different when they are part of the same area (and the only major issue with that seems to be the town itself). Looking at the Town of Sinder locations it just stands out how some things are capitalised when others are not. I don’t say we must have a single standard for all of the Wolfery but I’d want to see Sinder a bit cleaned up.

As for the exits – I do love the named exits, they make movement very organic. But at the same time they make busy areas very confusing. I think most of that is Sinder again – the Sinder Town Center is a bit messy. You can go SOUTH, EAST, and WEST; but also to PARK, CLOCK, CROSSING, CAFE, and HOSTEL.

The cafe is technically north of the Center but there’s no exit. The directional exits are mixed up with the buildings. You can enter the tower from both the park and the center but you can only leave to the center (hummm; send a request to add the second exit so it’s less insane).

Having the filler rooms is a very good point: in MUDs they’d have an occasional mob to fight or something to look at. But then, I think about how e.g. the SlothMUD’s Bal Harbor is structured and it’s so nice to see a clean and easy to grasp layout.

Maybe we need persistent objects to look at, mm? Personally I prefer a couple extra filler rooms (where you can still give out some nice expositional stories about the place) to the layout that is confusing.