Resets and repops

[Furball]

Hiya folks,

Hoped you had a gorgeous weekend!  Right, I was thinking about the concept
of resets (LP) and repops (dikus)...  It's kind of tacky.  Won't it be
much better to be able to explain why the 23rd platoon which some 'ard
Arnie character just vapourised came back?

This is what I made up for a CRPG some years back:  The HQ which the
platoon should have reported to realises something has happened so sends a
scout to figure what's up, if this immoral killing of hapless soldiers
continue, the HQ would report back to it's regional HQ which will send in
the cavalry.  Errr, and so on.  So everything has a limit, if the 23rd
platoon just got vapourised, it shouldn't come back unless the regiment
reformed it.  Maybe this doesn't really apply to muds too well coz it was
originally planned for a computer game.

Here's another example:  Honest Sammy owns an antique shop in one of those
twilight zones just outside the city centre district.  One day, a party of
players gets involved in a firefight and obliterates his poor old shop.
Now, the game driver stores the fact that the shop was closed down because
of something violent and the crime rate in there is something close to a
warzone.  When it comes to a 'reset/repop', the driver rolls a dice to
decide if there is gonna be some other gullible shopkeeper (not
necessarily an antique store) or should it stay with boarded windows or if
the local gang thinks it would be quaint to use it as a den...

I was gonna write this for a computer game so that the entire world is
created from a few seeds and the actual world changes depending on what
the player does to it (I had Megatraveller in mind at the time).

Other concept from the same project, I would have released the game as
shareware and to encourage things, every few months, I would release a
module for it.  A module would have contained a timeline of what has
happened to the game world and any advances in technology, new places to
visit and the changing politics (well, political factions' changes in
attitude and possible actions coz the player could change the way events
go).  I think this would be quite cool to add to a mud, every few weeks or
so, you write a module which the mud reads in and adjusts the mud world.
Reasoning behind this is:  Most muds are static, every set hours, the mud
reboots and the same old things are there in the same old places.  This is
extremely silly in muds which keep their own mud dates.  Especially if it
is something ridiculous like 5 mins real time = 1 hour mud.  I suppose
this doesn't apply so much in fantasy muds where events happen once a
month anyway.  For a sci-fi one though...

In case you're wondering, the computer game never did got off the
ground...  I started mudding.  Asides, I worked out the save file for
it woulda been starting at 4 megs (on an Amiga).

Okay, the above is sort of complex, care to cut it down to something
implementable?  I've noticed there's a post that things which don't have
any bearings on the player direction should not be processed at all by the
driver.  I have to disagree on this one for the reasons above.  There
should be something happening in the background.  Then again, maybe it's
because I'm aiming for a universe (d'oh, stupid ;)

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