[MUD-Dev] Re: PK and my "Mobless MUD" idea

[John Bertoglio]

-----Original Message-----
From: Caliban Tiresias Darklock <caliban at darklock.com>
To: mud-dev at kanga.nu <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
Date: Tuesday, April 28, 1998 6:30 PM
Subject: [MUD-Dev] Re: PK and my "Mobless MUD" idea


>On 05:47 PM 4/28/98 -0700, I personally witnessed Jay Sax jumping up to
say:
>>
>>  You want a dungeon? you build one.
>>
>>  You want a castle, you get the money (or influence over a
>>  large enough group, or both), you get the materials,
>>  you build it, you staff it, you protect it.
>
>Hmm. I was just thinking, what if some sort of 'point' system like they
use
>to construct Warhammer armies were used to rate areas? If something like
>that could be standardised, then MUDs could theoretically exchange areas
>automatically... would lead to some intellectual property issues, I'm
>sure... what if some particular type of MUD server were to send lists of
>its areas, their sources, and their modification dates to some central
>database, along with some point values for the various areas... I know, I
>know, I'm very room-oriented and many people here prefer
>coordinate-oriented systems, but call me a dinosaur.

I believe the best system is a combination of both. We use a global map
with meta area cells evenly spaces across the world. (They used to be the
same size, but then KaVir, Hal Black and other in r.g.m. came up with so
many good ideas about global mapping I had to scale them.)

The large map allows for distance to create barriers to travel which can
lead to the a more "natural" development. It their is a big resource cost
to get to the new world, it will be settled slowly and by people who can
cooperate. You don't have to worry about PK's if no one knows where you
are.

However, when you drill down inside a meta area, I think the traditional
mud room concept works well. I don't want to be constrained by reality if
it gets into the way of game play and world building. Say a town has 100
player dwellings. If you mapped it out carefully, you would find that the
town's walls were full. Pop up a menu and, poof, there are now 50 more
homes inside the same space. (Bad example, but you get the idea).

>Imagine if you had
>servers that would provide lists like:
>
>Vampire Hills:RotMUD:05/05/96:540:27:63:4
>
>Where the breakdown would be name of area, source, date, total points in
>area, number of rooms, highest room value, and lowest room value... given
>certain parameters on matching servers, a MUD could go to RotMUD and
>download the area if it found the proper criteria like no areas of more
>than 80 points in one room, etc. This could also allow MUDs to maintain
the
>latest version of an area.
>
This is essentially what we are doing with our system. If you had a similar
server, I could export the contents of the various data tables to a number
of files. With a simple import utility, you could say build the town of
GoofyVille in my cell 567,800. The world would renumber everything grab
your last room id # and if a few seconds GV would be working in your world.
I have considered building an input parser for mud area files but have been
warned off because these "stock area" are considered low value. Any
opinions here?

John Bertogio
>
>--
>MUD-Dev: Advancing an unrealised future.
>



--
MUD-Dev: Advancing an unrealised future.