[MUD-Dev] There can be.. only ONE!

[Vadim Tkachenko]

Richard Woolcock wrote:
> 
> J C Lawrence wrote:
> >
> > On Sat, 11 Apr 1998 18:26:30 PST8PDT
> > Matt Chatterley<matt at mpc.dyn.ml.org> wrote:
> >

[skipped]

> A predictable map would result in long-term players having an advantage.
> Ever played Doom2 against someone who knows the areas better than you?
> Predictability and stability can become boring over time.
> 
> >   -- When the remapping occurs all players are informed of the fact
> > (despite the fact that they see the world change about them).
> 
> Are you talking about something like:
> 
>    A stone wall slides out of the ground, blocking the east exit.
> 
>    [x second delay]
> 
>    The ceiling shimmers for a moment, then fades out of existance.
> 
>    [x second delay]
> 
>    The ground crumbles beneath your feet.  You fall downwards...
> 
> Or more like:
> 
>    [long delay]
> 
>    The world seems to shift and distort around you!
>    A stone wall slides out of the ground, blocking the east exit.
>    The ceiling shimmers for a moment, then fades out of existance.
>    The ground crumbles beneath your feet.  You fall downwards...
> 
> It would be more interesting IMO to have a constantly shifting world...

Yes, but my prediction is it would be pretty annoying to play in a
_rapidly_ changing world. Just my personal opinion, hope I'm not the
only one, I like to explore the world slowly and step by step, until I'm
familiar with it, and then start to take advantage of the knowledge. The
world you describe, though, will completely diminish the value of such a
behavior, and will make the systematic exploration useless, thus giving
the benefit to the people who prefer to hack-n-slash around instead of
putting some effort to explore the world.

But, from the other side, I completely agree that the world should
change, as in the RL, so there's a possibility to make those changes
gradual, slow and gentle, and incremental (probably what JCL described),
and make the world change slowly enough to motivate, once again,
systematic approach.

> How about really obscure maps?  A quick example of something I coded by
> accident...My mud uses x/y/z coords for dynamic rooms, but I've also left
> the option in to map static rooms over a specific location (so that I can
> have pretty descriptions if I so wish).  One unintentional side affect of
> this is that you can actually map a room onto different x/y/z locations.
> This means that you could, for example, have a map like:
> 
> 1 --- 2 --- 4 --- 1
>       |
>       1 --- 3 --- 5
> 
> This means that Bubba could walk onto the map (from the left), drop a pie,
> walk three rooms east, and be back in the first room with the pie.  Another
> player might walk in from the south-east, walk west twice, and they would
> be in the same room as Bubba.  Should Bubba walk west (into room 4), and
> the other player try to follow, they would find there was no exit that way.
> 
> Just imagine the chaos you could cause if each player/team had their own
> 'version' of the map ;)  You could also have things like deathtrap rooms,
> anti-gravity rooms (fall upwards), pits (fall downwards), teleportation
> rooms, and so on...depends how obscure you want the world to be.

But the question is, do you really want the world do be SO obscure? What
is a point? Once again, IMHO it should be predictable enough to motivate
the exploration - well, probably the things you're talking about just
shouldn't be accessible for newbies, because it may just repel them (you
get tired quickly, if you don't feel you're in control or at least have
a clue of what's going on).

> KaVir.

--
Still alive and smile stays on,
Vadim Tkachenko <vt at freehold.crocodile.org>
--
UNIX _is_ user friendly, he's just very picky about who his friends are