Resets and repops

[claw at null.net]

On 22/03/97 at 12:05 AM, Adam Wiggins <nightfall at inficad.com> said:
>[Nathan Y, on not reseting areas until PCs enter]

>> :Thusly you could have a mobile ctor which creates a baby/child and
>> :launches an event stream which slowly "grows" the mobile from infancy
>> :to old age and decrepitude, with any deaths along the way just leading
>> :to the (semi-) randomly timed creation of new infants to take up the
>> :progression.
>> 
>> Hmmm. Never thought of the grow from an infant model... nah, too costly.
>> I'll leave support, if anyone wants to do it with my code, but hardly
>> needed for sci-fi.

>Probably not really necessary or interesting for _any_ mud, but it
>does solve some problems (like making 'resets' essentially
>unnecessary) and brings in some interesting elements:

>Ollihute the old human shopkeeper is here.

>(next week)

>A young, sandy-haired man is tending shop here.
>You say, "Where's Ollihute?!"
>A young, sandy-haired man introduces himself as Brendrik, son of
>Ollihute. Brendrik says, "My father passed away this week.."

>Just adds another layer of detail to absorb the player.  This isn't
>terribly relevant to gameplay, but it certainly brings a sense of
>humanity to your mobiles if they are generated like humans instead of
>like clones on an assembly line.

Precisely.  While I probably won't go to the infant level, it allows
mobiles and characters to age fairly uniformly.  Thus you can watch
you characters (and ememies characters) age and become decrepit, or
work to rescue them via the appropriate rejuveninators.  "You want to
be young?  It will cost you!"  This in turn adds another twist to the
mana wars.  Now you can have objects, spells, etc which accellerate or
decellerate aging.  You could even link the mana system to the aging
system such that mana use accellerates aging and (something else) acts
as the restorative.

This raises the spectre of a whole new insidious form of warfare: 
accellerating the death of your enemies thru aging.  Along with mana
attacks such as dropping an invisible mana sink (eats mana endlessly)
in their inventory, this could get really interesting

>> :Handling minor details like closing opened doors, re-locking chests,
>> :and resetting traps and the like is similarly handled, with the
>> :secondary event either doing it directly ("A sudden strangely cold
>> :breeze slams the dtor shut"), to the animation and trekking of a
>> :work-horse mobile to the door/trap/whatever to reset it "manually" (cf
>> :MirrorWorlds "man in a white lab coat")..
>> 
>> Ugh. Lets just have it happen when no one is looking. Incidentally, I have

>Agreed.

What about when someone is always looking?

>> recall bob
>You think back to your memories of Bob the male human.
>He sure is a good friend.

*THIS* I like.  I'll have to implement this as a side effect of user
naming.

>Suppose it wouldn't be too hard to toss in a clause for death or POW,
>ie:

>You will miss him, and cherish his memory.  R.I.P.
>
>or
>
>You wonder whatever happened to your good old pal Bob...

This gets messy as the Bob object no longer exists, so your name can't
resolve any more...hurm.

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