[MUD-Dev] "short" Introductory Message (fwd)

[coder at ibm.net]

On 06/06/97 at 07:42 PM, Martin Keegan <martin at cam.sri.com> said:

>I've been asked by Chris to write a "short" introductory message,
>which I've completely failed to do as this introduction runs to more
>than a hundred lines. 

This list has long been the recipient of "short" posts which
challenged the Discordia for size.

>Anyway, a few notes on Island, what I'm doing now, and miscellaneous
>ideas of mine ...

Will Island ever arise again?  It would be a great loss to have it
dissappear.  It did too may things far too well to lose, (and enough
things far too stupidly to tolerate its loss as an example).

>...Island did this through the
>introduction of a harsh regime of compulsory quests. The quests
>tended to be quite elaborate, and provoked fierce competition. It
>took me more than six months to complete them all.

And were for the uninitiated, utterly superb.  <I bow in their general
direction>

>Eventually, it became apparent that the quest-oriented nature of the
>game was driving players away. Crucially, it was driving away the
>idiots and powerlevellers. "Strong in Spades", is how Island was
>described in the light of Bartle's HCDS paper. (Spades being the
>"Explorer" types). Every year or so, the quests would be updated, and
>made more numerous, and (we hoped) more intellectually challenging.

<cheers>

>At the moment I'm writing a mud (from scratch, unsurprisingly) which
>allows building at a proportional cost to the player, rather than
>being based on rank. (Or letting everyone build, or no-one at all).

How do you intend to scale the cost of construction?  I've been
thinking about this one a lot and have yet to arrive at a decent
model.  Best idea to date:

  All newly created objects inherit by default from $NEW_OBJECT

  All $NEW_OBJECTs have a definite life span before the system deletes
them.

  The more a $NEW_OBJECT is used, and the longer its list of users.
the longer a $NEW_OBJECT will stave off deletion.  

This of course does not limit the rate of production, just the
persistance.  

>More interesting to the design people is that the system incorporates
>a language called 'E', which looks a bit like Inform. 

Would you describe in more detail?  Examples?

>To the end of making sure the text is not repetitive, I've designed a
>system for randomised generation of non-boring text, which got an
>airing in rec.games.mud.admin in a thread about creating consistent
>names for newborn NPCs. 

Descriptions, definitions, or just names?

>Named "EricGeneric", it has been described as
>everything from "An invention more significant and useful than time
>travel" to "Prolog for Poofters" (really!)

I recall the thread (sound of binary digging).  Oh yeah -- got the
macro file too.  But that was specific to building character names per
a template of sorts.  Has it changed?

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