TriadCity Message of the Day
2016-06-15

As you no doubt already know, our tireless world authors have been systematically retrofitting the entire game world with tertiary descriptions, sometimes more simply called "nouns". These are the subsidiary data you'll access if you Look at one of the nouns in a Room description. For example, if the Room description is, "A very full space with lots of things in it.", you can "look space" or "look things" to gather more info. This level of detail adds realism to the game world. But as you can imagine, it's very labor-intensive to achieve.

We didn't originally start off with the concept of tertiary descriptions. Largely through player requests we learned they're necessary. If you type "look things" in the hypothetical example above and the server tells you, "If only there were a 'things' here to look at", you might find that experience disconcerting and eventually off-putting. So we set out to fix it.

All new Rooms for the last several years have included their full complement of tertiary descriptions, smells, sounds, and so on. Around half of the game world has been built following this paradigm. It's considerably easier for world authors to do it this way than it is to go back to existing Rooms adding absent tertiaries.

But, there's the problem of all those thousands of older Rooms without tertiaries. So, we're adding them, little-by-little, when we get to them. It's a seriously ginormous project.

How ginormous?

This ginormous: 2,940,154.

Yah, you read that right. As of today, there are 2,940,154 tertiary descriptions in the game world. Just shy of three million, about half of which have been added by hand one-at-a-time.

Crazy. Perhaps literally.

Poobah has Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and is in hospital with both wrists in casts.

Meanwhile. You'll find that many older neighborhoods around the center of town haven't yet been tertiated. We'll get to them. Soon as Poobah gets his casts off.

No seriously: 2,940,154. Really. How about that!

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