[MUD-Dev] Graphic MUDS/Ultima Online

[Michael Hohensee]

Jeff Kesselman wrote:
> 
> At 07:43 PM 7/30/97 PST8PDT, you wrote:
> >
> >Well, there's a couple of other approaches. When we started out, the
> >choice was basically between tileset graphics or pseudo-3d engines,
> >and tileset seemed to offer greater flexibility and variety. Now that
> >3d hardware acceleration is the industry norm, I imagine choosing
> >anything other than a full 3d engine for a mass-market product would
> >be far riskier.
> 
> Well, terhe are at elast 2 otjher advantages to tilesets...
> 
> (1) Extremely low bandwidth download.  if yo uare going to serve maps from
> teh sverer this can be a major advantage.
> 
> (2) Easier for non-traiend to build.  if you want to at some point supoprto
> user-drafted maps, this might be an issue.
> 

Well, there's also the one-time-download-of-a-short-file option.  As I
suggested earlier, you can use raytracing to make better pictures than
you will ever see in a quake game (due to memory overhead, if nothing
else-- though that may change in a few years ;).  Although you *would*
be limited to still frame pictures, that isn't so bad, from a mudder's
point of view.  After all, the text interface provides the same thing.  

Each time you look around, you see what is in the room at that time
only.  Updates are much less detailed, of the "X walks in" variety.

It's what I'm working on now-- currently setting up the networking
system to deal with parallel processing and transmitting of data (joy). 
Anybody else doing anything of this nature?  Or have you all passed on
to the realtime 3d graphics? :)

--
Michael Hohensee       michael at sparta.mainstream.net
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Heights/9025/
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