[MUD-Dev] Graphic MUDS/Ultima Online

[Koster]

On Tuesday, August 12, 1997 2:02 PM, clawrenc at cup.hp.com wrote:
> In 
<c=US%a=_%p=EA%l=MOLACH-970805184845Z-15089 at molach.origin.ea.com>,
> on 08/05/97
>    at 07:17 PM, "Koster, Raph" <rkoster at origin.ea.com> said:
>
> >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.
>
> This presents an interesting idea:
>   Various players are doing their player stuff dealing with various
> spooky items.
>   Bubba summons a massively spooky demon.
>   All the spooky items immediately/gradually dissappear from about 
the
> other players?

No, he simply fails to summon the demon. :) However, keep in mind that 
the zero-sum total is not kept on a global level, but rather locally 
in large regions. So whereas in a cemetery you may not be able to 
muster enough spookiness to summon the demon because it is all in 
place in the world already, in downtown, there's a lot of pent-up 
spookiness waiting to be expressed.

Actually, though, this is a bad example, because summoning a demon 
comes from a different "bank" than the items (which have greater game 
permanence) do... a better example is, if the cemetery has some unused 
spookiness, that's a great reason for it to either attract creatures 
that like spookiness and seek to "consume" it (ravens, bats), or to 
spawn some creatures (assuming that they have food and shelter 
available in the locale as well (such as maybe some undead).

[snip issue of keeping the zero-sum game elastic]

We do something like this too. We call it "overdrawing the bank." :)

-Raph