I'm having trouble deciding how I want to handle terrain in my MUD. Traditionally, you have "rooms" that are grassland, mountains, swamp, ocean, etc. My biggest dilemma is the mountain and hills part—do I declare spots as "mountain" or "hill," or do I set an elevation at every point and interpolate hilly areas. The latter is how I believe most MMOs do it, because they have a graphical client, so they use a height-map and let the user see the hills or mountains.
If I use the height-map, then it's difficult to tell you're "on" a hill unless you scan the areas around you and look for regular changing elevations. If you use a simple "hill" designation (such as 'H' on my ASCII map), then how big is the hill?
I really need to think some more about this before going forward…