[MUD-Dev] Vast areas in muds

[Mike Sellers]

At 01:23 PM 1/19/98 PST8PDT, John G. wrote:
>Ling wondered:
>: [with regard to representing rather big areas in muds]
>: I've always wondered...  For a real 3d movement sort of
>: mud, imagine the player got shrunk into a 1 inch high 
>: stag beetle and gets transported to a desert.  Does this
>: mean the player will sit there watching a blank screen
>: as the character attempts to traverse a few thousand 
>: miles of desert or does the occassional message appear:
>
>One solution would be to change the game perspective.
>If your mud recognizes an area as 'vast' then the units of
>  distance per time and resources consumed per time
>  can be increased.

How do you handle time re-synchronization then?  You enter a vast, boring
desert (NevadaMUD! :) ), traverse it slowly in the shape of a tiny stag
beetle, and emerge weeks (and a few paragraphs of text) later -- only to
find that just a few minutes have gone by for everyone else.  


--

Mike Sellers   Chief Alchemist -- Online Alchemy   mike at online-alchemy.com

"One of the most difficult tasks men can perform, however much others 
may despise it, is the invention of good games.  And it cannot be done 
by men out of touch with their instinctive values."  - Carl Jung