[MUD-Dev] Task Parsing

[Stephen Zepp]

JC Lawrence wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 28 Dec 1997 10:17:38 PST8PDT
> Stephen Zepp<zoran at enid.com> wrote:
> 
[snip]
> 
> And in effect we have SimCity revisited on a MUD, no?

Actually, yes, or Dune II, or Heroes of Might and Magic II, or Civilization ( anyone seen Fantastic
Worlds Scenario disk? Get it :) ).
In effect, that's the goal, but this is a sub-game, and not designed or expected to be used by
everyone, just those interested.
> 
> 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.

In fact, yes, that is the final goal.  Will the world created be fully logical and max productive?
Probably not, but then again, name a real world city that is? :)  I'm currently working on a terrain
map creator that takes seeds for temp, altitude, water, pressure, etc., and constructs a rough
terrain map, then seeds with vegitation and resources, let it "evolve" for a few game centuries,
then plops it into an "area" format for use.

> 
> 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.

Sure, this is a problem with any ai driven game. One of the advantages the ai will have is that it
will have been "operating" a lot longer than most players ( pre-opening time ).  In addition, as is
seen in most games, ai's will of necessity have a few "extra advantages" to help them along.  Please
note that I am ( as a player ) not fond of this, but you're point is very valid...it would take
years and a hell of a lot of resources to make _one_ ai learn enough about the system to be optimal,
much less a few dozen.

> 
> 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.

Sure, but then again, "human" controllers have disadvantages of their own:  not online to "tweak"
their estates full time, temper driven in many ways, ego instead of logic tend to control their
goals, etc.,etc.  And a big controlling aspect I see is the desire for most human players to
maintain status quo when their estates are stable...they are not gonna want newcomer estates to take
over their trading partner's territory, etc.  It's got a lot of issues that are mostly found by
playing, me thinks.

> 
> 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.

Ahh, but if all the robots that are ai driven recognize the threat, and team up, it can become
rather interesting just the same..