[MUD-Dev] Alright... IF your gonan do DESIESE...

[clawrenc at cup.hp.com]

In <9705270229.82b7 at ami-cg.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA>, on 05/27/97 
   at 08:14 AM, cg at ami-cg.graysage.edmonton.ab.ca (Chris Gray) said:
>[Chris L:]

>:Yup, this is why I'm not making the multiple bodies etc etc etc yada
>:yada a fundamental part of the initial approach to the game.  I intend
>:for the game to be initially playable from a single-character
>:hack'n'slash monty haul PoV.  All the rest comes in as the players
>:find out that that bumph is but surface dressing on the real meat and
>:feature set of the game.

>Sounds good. Its tough to have a game that will keep the attention of
>both beginners and pros. Hopefully you've found a way to do it.

I know.  <sigh>  Too many ideas.  To few methods of tieing them
together.  To little time.  Too much code.  <sigh>

<<insert suitable pithy Rorschach quote>>

>[Fortress Fract, Blue Grass Path]

>I read your description of those with a mixture of fascination and
>horror. Fascination from the implementor part of me, and horror from
>the potential player part of me. 

I'm *very* interested here.  What specifically fascinated you, and
what horrified you?  Was there anything that attracted you as a
player?

The BGP worked pretty well.  Users learned fixed maps from place to
place.  Few bothered with any form of universal map.  It was all of
the form of, "Get on at XXX, do the following sequence of moves, get
off, and now you are at YYY."  They also learned very quickly that
getting somewhre was only half the problem -- getting back was the
other.  Trading of such maps became a HUGE thing -- there was a lot of
argument as to whether it constituted giving away the answers to
quests/puzzles (I was on the side that it should be encouraged via
ignoring the "problem").

Fortress Fract was not such a great hit, tho I thought it the best
thing I'd written at the time.  The main problem I had with Fortress
Fract was that the tile games for each floor were impossibly complex
for the players.  It came out to an array of 8x8 tiles which is
non-trivial for most Homo Sap to solve IRL.  If/when I do it again I
expect that 3x3 will be more likely just for playability.  The next
biggie was that there were just too many floors and too many ways to
get (seemingly) inextricably trapped.  It was seemed too easy to
wander there for days trying to get out.  Were I to do it again I'd
probably make for easier egress ("You climb into the water chute to
get shot out into the middle of the lake, there to test whether you
can swim better or faster than the many monsters in the lake").  Sort
of a I-give-up-gemme-outta-here/bail system

>However, the fact that so many
>players went after the puzzles proves you were doing good!

We were running a dial-up game with a total user base running well
under 100, and a max simultaneously online of somewhere in the low
teens (a roaring success for those days) with an average online user
base in the high single digits.  We were also one of the very few MUDs
in the area (even local calls are toll in England), which gave us
something of a captive market.

Things are bit different now.

>:  1) The game kills you.  Do something stupid like step the wrong way
>:into quick sand and drown.

>[Little penalty for the explorer.]

>:  2) You kill yourself.  Do somthing stupid like pick on the wrong
>:player/mobile and get yourself slaughtered.

>[Serious penalty for the deliberately dumb.]

>That sounds right to me. I don't like getting killed randomly (I'm an
>explorer - I like to see what's out there), but getting killed by my
>own deliberate risk-taking I don't mind.

Its essentially what Shades did.  There you lost nothing for walking
into a spike in the East Tower, lost a bit for getting killed by a
mobile or other player, and lost a LOT if you tried to kill something
and got killed instead.

>:		     Get a second body, park is somewhere safe and just
>:ignore it to have semi-guaranteed immortality. 

>Yes, that'll work. Then people will ask why the system doesn't do it
>for you automatically.

<Mona Lisa Smile>

>:				   I'm not fond of the lego-class
>:stuff, and so tend to ignore that.

>Laugh! It turns out that in the last couple of years I've aquired
>Lego as a hobby. There is an 8 foot Lego skyscraper just behing me as
>I type. 

I will carefully not mantion the legal size file drawer box of lego
(all carefully assembled into one huge brick-like lump) that I have
stashed with my mother in the Netherlands.  Yup, very carefully.  I'll
stay mum here.

>It went like this: there is a 3-D maze in my AmigaMUD
>scenario. I wanted it to be topologically consistent, etc., and was
>having trouble doing that to my satisfaction on paper. Someone
>suggested I buy some Lego bricks and build it, so I did. It worked
>out pretty good, too. Later, for another MUD system, I coded a fairly
>large castle. A year or so later it occurred to me to try to build
>that in Lego, too. Well, that would take a *lot* of bricks, so I've
>been collecting, and sort-of got hooked on the way.

Last time I came to do that I was working at a Microstation shop -- I
grabbed a dual-headed Interpro and drew the samn thing in 3D with full
collision detection and 3D fly-thrus (and a lotta help from one of the
CADOps I was carpooling with).  Took me about a month of weekends only
to lose all the files when the damn machine got dropped down a
stairwell.

A little while ago we went out to buy toys for my then 18 or so month
old son.  'Nuf to say that we wandered home with several thousand
pieces of Lincoln Logs.  Perfect castle building stuff.

>See newsgroup rec.toys.lego for lots of overgrown kids.

The thing I don't like about the new LEGO are all the little men,
curvy bits, pieces at different scales (doors, windows etc), and other
such.  I always liked the fact that with the plain blocks I could
chose the scale and proportion of the whole model.  All the little men
and rockets and boats and funny looking windows etc sorta spoiled that
for me.

--
J C Lawrence                           Internet: claw at null.net
(Contractor)                           Internet: coder at ibm.net
---------------(*)               Internet: clawrenc at cup.hp.com
...Honorary Member Clan McFUD -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...