[MUD-Dev] RP thesis...

[Adam Wiggins]

[Matt C:]
> I'm impressed by your level of research here! Not quite what I want.. but
> still, very impressive. Diseases, and drugs are both interconnected with
> food (well, the former in part), and are something else I'm looking at
> setting up in conjunction. This more 'realistic' approach to things
> does look like making the game a tad harder to get to grips with.. but
> more rewarding once you are used to it.

This goes back to what I think is cool and fun about muds, and what I
want to take even further.  What first addicted me to muds was the sense
of a full, functioning world, so vast that I could never explore it all...
I was blown away at the number of things that you could do, characters
you could be, places you could go...and it was all a world that functioned
completely on its own and whether you were there or not, unlike conventional
computer RPGs.  This is without even counting the coolness of having
hundreds of people all playing the same game, at the same time, with you!
Of course, eventually I explored the world to its limits, started to
discover little holes in the illusion.  When I finally got to coding status
I was pretty disappointed...the whole thing looked like one giant hack
to me, rather than the carefully crafted system I had envisioned.
So...now I'm writing the mud that I thought I was playing in the first place.
Thus, what is *good* about it, is that there's always something else to
check out; some little (or big) element that you haven't encountered before.
This is why I demand this level of detail.

> > > We have both normal rooms, and our own mappable virtual room areas, you
> > > can create a map such as:
> > > 
> > > XXXXXXXXXX	X = impassable terrain
> > > **########	* = swamp
> > > *######@##	# = grassland
> > > XXXXXXXXXX	@ = a lake
> > > 
> > > and set a scale for each room - this map would be converted into normal
> > > rooms with randomly set sizes, descriptions, weather suited to the area,
> > > and so forth.
> > 
> > How is this displayed?
> 
> The map exists in a textfile, which is interpreted by the mud and turned
> into rooms (larger than normal in 'theoretical' size, with movement which
> is costly in terms of endurance and such, representing a longish journey).
> 
> One of the # squares above might turn into:
> 
> Grasslands (Name-of-area)
> Plains of grass stretch out as far as the eye can see in all directions.
> 
> Although the final descriptions will be more detailed, and pulled from a
> random bank, with items (and modifications) based on any scenery.

Ah, yeah we have something almost exactly similar.  Allows us to put
'16.8 million rooms!!!!1!!1' in our mud ad.  (Never mind that most of
them are pretty darn boring, since the large majority of them are either
underground, underwater, or in the sky.)  We actually paint the elevation
and terrain maps straight into the game; the files are currently just
stored as PCX.  Kind gives you a little god-complex...'and with a swath
of my brush, the Forest of Mists is created.  Another swipe and we have
the Cliffs of Insanity...and now - <clicks on paintbucket tool> - the vast
Eastern Ocean!'