[MUD-Dev] Re: Re[2]:[MUD-Dev] Re: MUD Design doc (long)

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

-----Original Message-----
From: J C Lawrence <claw at under.engr.sgi.com>
To: mud-dev at kanga.nu <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
Date: Monday, December 21, 1998 3:56 PM
Subject: [MUD-Dev] Re: Re[2]:[MUD-Dev] Re: MUD Design doc (long)

>Excellant.  I like.  A lot.


I wish I could take full credit for it, but the game system itself was
created by someone else in the late 80's. In conversations both here and
elsewhere, I became more and more acutely aware that what I really wanted
was not some new MUD server, but *this* game on a net-accessible box. It
passes all seven "addictive game" razors, and there really is nothing else
like it... so I hunted down the author and acquired the rights. There are
still some minor IP issues we're hashing out, but these are trivial.

Now I'm crawling through a meg and a half of the ugliest source I've ever
seen, all Borland Turbo-specific and nonportable, much of it badly
implemented by modern standards, none of it ever intended to be scaled
beyond a hundred players, and assuming a full shutdown and restart at least
every 24 hours. I am trying to port this source from DOS modem-based
executables to a monolithic Linux server daemon. It's not a trivial task by
any stretch of the imagination, especially since I want this to run under
Win2K as well. (I have scrapped plans to run under 98, mainly because 98 is
not long for this world anyway.)

>I specifically want human player skills to be more important than
>game-character skills.

As do I, but I see this as a potential trap wherein you can make the game so
hostile to the new player that no new players arrive. Inevitably, your old
players leave slowly, and you eventually have no players. I am attempting to
deal with this in various fashions, including documentation, online help
facilities, and in-game structures to discourage newbie-bashing.

Some of these already exist; you are fined heavily for attacking players who
are new to the game under the current configuration, but the fine isn't all
that big a deal once you get really powerful. I am tempted to include
something I think makes a lot of sense, specifically the statement of fines
as a percentage and not an absolute -- so when you get fined, instead of
having some arbitrary value, you get hit for X percent of your current
worth.

I am also contemplating auto-seizure of assets, just in case someone thinks
they can run around and not pay their fines... a common strategy for
avoiding this problem in the older versions was to maintain your holdings in
a commodity format, and liquidate only when cash was needed. Since I can
easily determine what you own and what it's worth, I may as well take it if
you owe the government money anyway. Eminent domain and all that.

The initial goal of the game (as stated by the author) was to create a world
so flexible and rich in possibilities that the designer could compete
against other people on a reasonably level playing field -- i.e. knowledge
of the internals and game logic is not a significant advantage. I am
attempting to build a corollary goal in which a *lack* of knowledge about
the game's systems and structures is not a significant *disadvantage*. I may
not achieve this to any reasonable degree, but I still intend to try. ;)

I'm tempted to write a full description of the game and how it operates, but
I don't know if anyone would be interested. If people would like to hear
about the general concepts involved and how it was implemented under DOS,
along with my initial thoughts on how to migrate it, let me know.

| Caliban Tiresias Darklock            caliban at darklock.com
| Darklock Communications          http://www.darklock.com/
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