[MUD-Dev] Re: BUILDERS: Ferries

[Derrick Jones]

On Sun, 7 Dec 1997, Marian Griffith wrote:
> On Sat 06 Dec, s001gmu at nova.wright.edu wrote:
> > On Fri, 5 Dec 1997, Sauron wrote:
> > Amen.  :)  I think having a full world map also makes solving the problem 
> > of long distance travel a little easier.. at least it's easier to keep it 
> > a realistic solution.
> 
> Having a map is not the critical issue. You need to have a lot of back-
> ground information of  how areas look,  how they interact  and how they
> came to be to be able to create a consistent world.
> You also run into a problem of scale. Certain areas have to be more de-
> tailed than others and to keep everything into scale you will find that
> you end up with countless rooms of 'wilderness'.  E.g. to create a city
> you need rooms that are no bigger across than a couple of meters  to do
> it justice. The same amount of detail on your 'plains of the east' will
> leave you with an area of thousands of rooms across.  And if you decide
> to make rooms in the plains  bigger by a hundredfold  than those in the
> city you have effectively shrunk the plains to city size.  And lost the
> scale of the mud.  Crossing the plains is no harder than walking across
> the city. There's a more elaborate summary of this topic on the website
> in case you want to discuss this more elaborately.

Of course, most clients have an equivalent to #2000 east to move a
character 2000 rooms east.  (you'd have to add in breaks to prevent the
mud from cutting you off for spamming?)
The trick with scale is to increase the time it takes to travel larger
rooms.  (You can replace 'rooms' with 'areas' or 'locations' for different
designs)  Therefore, a player can walk across a small town almost
instantaniously, but the 'plains of the east' may take 2 full minutes to
cross, even tho both sections have the same number of areas described.

Many muds I've seen use a 1:48 time scale (30 min RL to 1 mud-day), so the
plains would be crossed in 1.5 hrs mud-time, and the town in less than a
minute (most players wouldn't notice a 1 second delay over the course of a
dozen moves).  Now neither of these times is anything close to realistic,
but realistic times (3.5 hours per week walking) would be unplayable.
Fast travel times can be a 'Good Thing' for two reasons...walking isn't
all that interesting, and the mechanics can be hdden from the players.
Also it increases the chance of a character performing a dramatic rescue.
(They can act more quickly on information, and can get to the 'scene'
before all te action is over.)

[snip rest]

Derrick