[MUD-Dev] Unique items (was: Graphic MUDS/Ultima Online)

[Chris Gray]

[Ling:]

:My major downfall at the time was being a wee bit too ambitious.  It was
:for an Elite-type game and I wanted information like passenger lists for
:airlines to be pseudorandom as well, the player could scan the passenger
:list for the past year and a half and obtain a list of all regular
:passengers.

That would be the chief problem, I think. It's one thing to be able to
pseudo-randomly generate terrain, races, communities, npc's, etc., but it
is quite something else to be able to generate a detailed history of all
of them. Doing that pretty well requires doing the initial generation at
the time of where you want the history to start, then letting everything
run upto the present time, saving everything in full detail as it runs.
You can likely bound the physical areas of your world that you would need
to run through, but this is still a massive amount of CPU time and storage.

It would be nice to be able to run backwards when needed, in order to
generate the present form of just those things you need, but I can't see
how to do that. If there are ways, this would be much more efficient, but,
as you say, consistency might be quite difficult to maintain.

--
Chris Gray   cg at ami-cg.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA