[MUD-Dev] Task Parsing

[JC Lawrence]

On Sun, 28 Dec 1997 10:17:38 PST8PDT 
Stephen Zepp<zoran at enid.com> wrote:

> 	As an aside, this all resulted from wanting to have a resource
> based economy, and not having many builders for my game persist (
> they all give up, it's too much work :P )...the system is designed
> to take a terrain map, and allow the system to build an explorable,
> operating "area" out of it, wether it be a city, cavern, ship,
> whatever.  All world objects are created using this system, and
> while very rough, the economy runs off of it at the moment.  Trade,
> including barter and regional exchange is in the works, along with
> pretty much anything that you would need to do as an estate manager.
> It's fun, too :)

And in effect we have SimCity revisited on a MUD, no?

One of the more fascinating aspects of this to me is the world seeding
you allude to.  Ideally, at the end of the day you as a world designer
could merely define the physical terrain and its resources, plop in a
starter population at the locations of choice, hit the "Go!"
button, and go away to come back later to a teeming populous world
full of interesting constructions.

The problem:  Your AI is of necessity going to be sub-optimal.  As a
result your system must be heavily weighted toward systemic explosions
or else it will fail far too often ("The colony, it died Jim!").
You're going to need that extra weighting just to ensure that even a
pretty crappy AI can at least hang on to the edges of survival in most
worlds.

The problem with this is that once you introduce players, they are
going to tend to be far more adaptable and inventive than your AI's
(expert systems to the side), with the result that they'll overrun the
entire system.  

Its rather like the old game of CRobots: its a good game as long as
only robots are playing.  Hook one robot up to a human player with a
joystick and overhead view of the playing field and the game becomes
RobotSlaughter.

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
                                           Internet: coder at ibm.net
----------(*)                        Internet: jc.lawrence at sun.com
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...