[DGD] Persistance

[Par Winzell]

Shevek writes:

 > Does anyone think it might be possible to have a blueprint type thing? What 
 > I mean is an object the player can use to design a set of rooms for 
 > themselves as a series of string outputs/command inputs etc without any 
 > objects ever being created within the game environment itself. Then once 
 > the player is happy with the look/feel of their blueprint they could hand 
 > it over to one of the wizards/admins for approval. Then if approved throw 
 > it over to a wizard for coding.

One of our very earliest ideas at Skotos was to create a large
number of 'flowcharts' for the creation of objects -- any kind
of objects -- at each branching point of this chart each sub-
tree would have a certain probability of occuring. This way an
ur-cow object would have not only the ability to appear like a
whole range of different kinds of cows -- through the use of
dynamic attributes computed from properties -- but it would
also have this flowchart associated with it, and thus have a
built-in way of setting those constituent properties.

A trivial example: root node -> 80% chance of cow being brown,
10% chance of cow being black, 10% chance of cow being pink.
If cow is brown, weight is in the range 400 lb to 1200 lb in
a linear distribution. If cow is black, 500 lb to 1600 lb.

etc etc etc

There'd have to be ways to tie subtrees back together into a
common descendant node so the size of the tree does not blow
up in an exponential fashion, but that should be doable.


So. Presume that we have such a flowchart for the creation of a
house; there are 30 basic properties that determine what kind
of a house it is, and all the descriptions are dynamically made
out of these properties.

One way to make a player-run economy would then be to allow the
players access to these fundamental properties. They could vary
the various construction materials (roof, ceiling, walls, floor),
lots of different pre-configured building styles... but even more
importantly, they would fill it with hundreds of other objects,
from fireplaces to bed-side tables, which in turn generate their
contents with pseudo-random choices for all their constituent
attributes... which the players could be allowed to fiddle with.

I think we're going to end up doing this at Skotos, though it is
needless to say a rather massive undertaking and won't happen
just yet. The idea is nothing terribly new in itself though, so
please, go ahead and roll your own. :)

Zell
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