[MUD-Dev] Something complete different

[Marian Griffith]

On Tue 16 Sep, Brandon J. Rickman wrote:
> On Mon, 8 Sep 97 21:53:33 MST, cg at ami-cg.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA
>  (Chris Gray) wrote:
> Making things decay is tricky without introducing a weird kind of
> physics.  I'm thinking about Wizardry VII where monsters vaporize when
> you kill them.  Imagine how disgusting a mud would be if every room
> in the newbie area looked like this:

> Happy Forestland
> You stand in a clearing in the middle of Happy Forestland.  The sun is
> shining on the happy green trees.
> Your movement is slightly hampered by the rotting corpses of several
> thousand dead bunnies.
> A fluffy bunny is here.

I would hazard that in any situation remotely resembling reality a corpse
would not stay around very long. Scanvengers would soon finish the bigger
parts of it,  then worms and insects  would remove the remaining  eadible
stuff.  By that time things are already so small that they are subject to
being moved around by small animals  and even by wind.  Unless the corpse
was very large, e.g. human sized or bigger, it is unrecognisable within a
matter of days.
Another problem here is,  of course,  where all those fluffy bunnies come
from. They ought to be either extinct, or evolve into killer bunnies that
hunt newbie characters.
 
> While this would make a mud quite novel it probably wouldn't be too
> appealing to a large number of players, and the type of mud where such
> a situation would be most likely to actually occur would probably 
> want to have more than a few players.

Truth be told is that the vast majority of players has descriptions set
to brief and won't notice the room full of corpses anyway.

> So should we dismiss corpses as being relatively uninteresting details
> (aside from special corpse-related activities (hey!) like looting and
> sac'ing)?  I guess it depends on the situation.

There is use for corpses if it is going to act as 1) food source for
(invisible) scavengers   and 2) as a gruesome kind of fertiliser for
the soil.
After a war the population of crows and vultures ought to prosper :)
and grass should grow more abundantly on the former battlefield.

> (Somehow I have gotten obsessed with the specific case of corpses as
> opposed to the more general case of decaying the effects of players 
> upon the world.  But perhaps the answer is hidden in the details?)

Things decay unless repaired. Living creatures repair themselves
continuously until they stop being living.  Metals and rocks are
very resilient against decay so they stay around longer. Nothing
mysterious about it in my opinion. Of course I am not the person
who has to code this :)

> So corpses aren't as interesting as the components that corpses are
> made of.  Those components are then just probabilistic combinations
> of sub-components, and so on down to some quantum mud level.  If
> we can easily generate and modify the, ah, probability curves for
> various sub-component levels...

[snip]

??? Does this mean something or can I safely ignore it?

Marian
--
Yes - at last - You. I Choose you. Out of all the world,
out of all the seeking, I have found you, young sister of
my heart! You are mine and I am yours - and never again
will there be loneliness ...

Rolan Choosing Talia,
Arrows of the Queen, by Mercedes Lackey