[MUD-Dev] Graphic MUDS/Ultima Online

[Matt Chatterley]

On Tue, 5 Aug 1997, Koster, Raph wrote:

> 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.

Your line-width seems to be playing silly burgers, Raph :) Either that or
mine. Hrm.
 
> 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.

Yeah. I'm pondering a sort of system where when resources are permanently
destroyed, new ones are introduced (there is a thematic premise for this
in a sort of "overseer" of the world), to avoid any sort of cataclysmic
approach at any time in the relatively near future (some resources will be
very rare), and to recycle resources of 'unused' objects back into the
world (eg, a sword thats been sitting in the shop for a month will
disappear, having been bought by an NPC, and be reconverted to base
metals?). I'm still pondering an approach to globally limited materials -
I may make them theoretical, flexible limits enforced by smaller localised
limitations.
 
> > 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.

Heh, thats true. Mind you, if you die in my world, you ain't gonna recover
your corpse. For a newbie it'll take approximately an hour to get back to
life (perhaps two or three if you do silly things - but there will be
elements to try and guide newbies away from doing this).

Plus a lot of NPCs are going to corpse loot, and some will perhaps even
eat you. ;)

Regards,
	-Matt Chatterley
	http://user.itl.net/~neddy/index.html
"Speak softly and carry a big stick." -Theodore Roosevelt