[MUD-Dev] RP thesis...

[Chris Gray]

[Ling:]

:More sophisticated techniques involving fractals could be used if you have
:the mathematical ability to take advantage of it.

Fractal's aren't hard. I've been playing with simple terrain generation
for quite a few years now. I'm not up to what commerical software can
do, but with a few attempts and parameter fiddling, I've made some not
bad looking worlds. Adding very large fractal landscape to an AmigaMUD
scenario has been on my list of things to do for several years. Maybe
some day I'll get around to it! My thinking on representation is something
like a hierarchy of smaller planes. Only the planes on the path down
to locations someone is in would actually exist. If someone modifies
a location, then it would become fully instantiated at the bottom level.
The whole thing is an attempt to let changes happen anywhere, but at
the same time to scale well, and not consume too much db space.

:Dunno how it'll work in practice. :P

My guess is that it would be not bad. The more smarts you can put into
the fractal stuff, the better. Someone familiar with some of the
commercial scenery generators could supply lots of hints, but I suspect
much of that technology is still fairly proprietary.

--
Chris Gray   cg at ami-cg.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA