[MUD-Dev] A flamewar startingpoint.

[coder at ibm.net]

On 10/11/97 at 08:44 PM, cg at ami-cg.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA (Chris Gray)
said:

>Having a tedious requirement to 'eat food' is not hard to implement - it
>would probably take an afternoon to add. I'm all for having atmosphere in
>a game, but there are lots of players (often including me), that don't
>care to spend a lot of time doing things that don't move my character
>forward.

>I wonder if it is feasible to have a "detail switch" in a game. Players
>who want to go through the motions would turn it on, and so would have to
>choose and buy food & supplies, and use them periodically as appropriate.
>Other players could turn it off, and just have a small steady drain from
>a "food counter", and would automatically stock up when they go into a
>store. The former player would have to 'eat food' (or something possibly
>a lot more detailed involving setting up camp, taking out utensils,
>filling a pan with water, building a fire, choosing what to cook, paying
>attention to the cooking, eating the result, washing the pan, putting
>things away, etc.), while the latter would only have to occasionally
>check their "food count" to make sure it doesn't get too low.

You may have got something there.  Consider:

  Eating food is not generally interesting.  Have a deafult configuration
which debits your monies appropriately when needed, and otherwise ensures
that your body is reasonably well fed without any interaction with or
reports to the player.  Extremes will be brought to the player's attention
(eg starvation, poisoning etc) for direct handling.

  The control can then be varied among a range of settings, possibly even
subject to user programming.  It could for instance be set to be exactly
as above, but to also ensure that the body is ideally fed, excercised, and
cared for (with appropriate costs levied).  Or it could be set lower such
that the player would have the ensure that his character body was
approriatetely cared for in its minutae.

Where this gets interesting is in the advantage that can be taken of such
a system:

  Bubba runs at the default "don't bug me" setting, but also has a case of
food poisoning.  The poisoning isn't bad enough for the system to alert
Bubba directly with a message, just bad enough to be gradually
debilitating.  For Bubba to regain his health he will have to deduce the
cause of his ill health (with the help of a medic/cleric/doctor?) and then
handle appropriately.  This would likely enclude having to take over the
absolute minutae of the care of his body until he has recovered, covering
such details as ensuring that he drank/ate the various tonics at the right
times and periods, ate the correct foods to help restore condition, etc.

This same construct of forcing the player to descend to lower levels of
control can also be used to other, more positive scenarios:

  Bubba is about to try and find the Heretical Holey Hermit at the top of
Mt Perforation.  Of course Mt Perforation is about as tall as Everest, and
Bubba is going to need to train and condition his body so that he can
function at that altitude/oxygen level, as well as withstanding the
weather.  Here Bubba would likely set his control level way down and take
over the details of his conditioning in order to make the ascent and
search.

This also has a more general scope:

  We've discussed before the general case of the a player walking thru a
scene being able to see more than the same character running at full tilt. 
The perception level and chance of perception is higher.  The general MUD
solution is to attempt to model this thru drowning the detail in spammy
long descriptions.  The approach we discussed before was to instead
register a "level of expectation" (LOE) value for the character's
perception, and then report only those items which are either of enough
instant impact to register above the LOE, or which trigger the LOE
directly.

  Thus Bubba would be trailing Boffo at very high speed.  He would not
notice a whole host of very good friends waving and screaming at him from
the sidelines as they would fall below his tailored LOE.  However he would
notice the fact that Boffo's trail now indicates that Boffo has a hurt
right leg and is limping slightly...

The problem with this as we discussed before, is in determining what is
expectable, and that what is the actual LOE function.  To a large extent
this falls into the question of intent which is unanswerable (Is Bubba
following Boffo, or merely going along the same route at speed?).  
 
I'm begining to suspect that this needn't be answered, and that this is an
area where even a half-arsed attempt is good enough.  The following is
something I have proposed before, and is what I currently do, if not quite
to the level described:

Lets take the entire game and strip all default or automatioc descriptions
or textual outputs.  There are no more long and short descriptions, or
anything else of that type.  Instead, every single piece of data sent to
the player is the product of the player's character determining that it is
aware of said item, and that said item has enough import or noticability
to be reported.  The result is that all touput is dynamically generated. 
Nothing is pre-set or default -- it is all contextual.

This much I do currently.

Now have the character keep track of its own history, long and short term,
and from that history attempt to deduce what the player's current
intentions are.  

A lot of this can be resolved down to verb and command choice.  For
instance if a recent fommand was "Follow Boffo", then that, at a micro
level, can be assumed as a statement of intent (I'm not going to worry
about the macro level).  Many other verb and command forms follow
similarly.  

The character then keeps a mesh of these deduced intentions, resolving
them as appropriate where they conflict, but also ressurecting older
intentions when a short-lived one dies out.  eg:

  Current intent is deduced as "follow Boffo".

  Character is hungry, and side-tracks off to get food. and resolve the
problems that raises including the intent of "follow deer."

  Character is now fed.  "Follow Boffo" intent is resurrected in stack-pop
fashion, and compared to current player actions for a while for
validation.

This intent web can then be used as the matrix to drive the LOE function
in a fairly straight forward manner.

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
----------(*)                              Internet: coder at ibm.net
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...