[MUD-Dev] Graphic MUDS/Ultima Online

[Koster]

Another belated reply... lots of snippage.

On Thursday, July 31, 1997 2:13 PM, Matt 
Chatterley[SMTP:root at mpc.dyn.ml.org] wrote:
> On Wed, 30 Jul 1997, Koster, Raph wrote:
> > I hadn't ever thought of regarding equipment limits as a way of 
saving
> > game state. It is, of course. But naturally it has so many 
limitations
> > and issues with it that it doesn't really address the underlying
> > reasons to save game state in any significant way...
> Yup. It also only makes sense in certain situations and from 
certain
> angles. A plain "There can be only 12 shortswords made of Fredium in 
the
> world at one time!" doesn't work. "There is only enough Fredium at 
any one
> time to MAKE 12 shortswords!" is better. Limiting for 'unique' items 
is a
> rather more obvious way to apply this.

This is what we do in UO. We track raw materials and even abstract 
qualities (spookiness, for example, there's only a fixed amount of 
spooky stuff in the world). and have a fixed total in the world (well, 
fixed except that it increases as playerbase increases). We call these 
"resources" and we also base our AI on them.

> Not sure why saving corpses is particularly useful. ;) I intend to 
have
> them rot slowly, be buried, traded for cash, chopped up for food,
> skinned.. but they will probably not save over physical reboots. Why 
not?
> Partly for efficiency reasons (think how many corpses you could have 
if
> they took a long time to rot!).

Well, a good reason to do it is that players bitch a lot if the mud 
goes down between a death and corpse recovery, because they lose all 
their items. :) That is, at least, the reason I have always seen given 
on Dikus for doing it.

-Raph