[MUD-Dev] Rooms, 3D arrays, etc.

[Miroslav Silovic]

Ling <K.L.Lo-94 at student.lut.ac.uk> writes:

> This reminds me of vehicle combat on muds.  Esp Battletech MUSE and Star
> Trek MUSE.  They both had wonderfully designed coordinate systems which
> required exact numbers to be typed in.  Not that, as a pilot, one would
> care about the precise heading.  I just wanted to position myself in the
> forest or between the two ships and I spent most of my time picturing
> things in my head.  It wasn't much fun.

To me it was (but it could be my background, I'm mathematician after
all). Especially when some newbie challenged me and took a slow, but
super-armed mech. I took a lightie. Effect: Within 60 seconds, I
charged him, fired all my weapons, then jumped on him. He didn't last
long enough to say *ouch*. :)

Coordinates are good if your connection is fast enough to allow you to
display maps often enough.

> I'm hoping to solve this by providing the players with set maneovres coded
> into the conveyance computer.  A set of primitives could be provided,
> allowing the player to invent more moves.  A basic programming language,
> perhaps.  Should make dogfights more fun, I hope...  Players could swap
> programs...  Rig them too... 

There is *good* reason why this never happened on Battletech: They had
100 people in the sim, and even with hardcoded sim, it took all the
CPU all the time. In fact, players tried to write the robots. It
lagged the game so badly that they were banned.

So I'd say that what you propose would work with 20-30 players around,
but not on the game of Battletech size, unless you run it on a
*hugely* powerful server.

So I think that the best you can do is something like 'head toward *'
type of command, and then give more descriptive names to the features
on the map. But unfortunately, if you played Battletech long enough,
you'd know that the last thing you wanted to do was to head toward (or
opposite of) the opponent. It was BAD tactics! What you'd typically do
was to head 60 degrees to left or right, and fire with rotated torso
or arm weapons. Simulating this ('head 60 degrees to the left of
Mantis'?) wouldn't be any easier than using just plain coordinates but
would be quite ridiculous, IMO.

	Miro