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

[Brandon J. Rickman]

On Fri, 30 Jan 1998, Adam Wiggins <nightfall at user2.inficad.com> wrote:
>I didn't cut any of this, as I find it all relevant (not to mention quite
>interesting).
>
>First of all, the idea that you check for an object being created
>every time someone takes a step seems a bit odd to me.  Does this mean
>that running back and forth over the same patch of ground 10,000 times
>increases your chance of finding the key to castle krak by 10000x?
>This doesn't quite seem right, and has the problems of sucking down a
>lot of CPU time, as you mention.  Why not have an object population
>pulse (similar to what's found in current muds), where the system
>runs through the list once, decides which (if any) objects will be
>created, and then finds a suitable place to put them?  This has
>the object actually placed into the world, just as if someone
>had dropped it there.  Then it starts to decay again just as it
>did the first time, until finally it disappears to be recreated at
>some later time.
>
>This will should cause these items to pop into the world fairly frequently,
>but the chance that they will be found on a given run of existance is
>pretty low.

My criticism of blindly popping objects in and out of existence is based
on my opinions about simulation in general: why model all of 
this stuff when absolutely no one is going to see it?  Of course, you
can't know an object will never be seen, and you can't determine
if an object is of interest either.

There is an expectation that a simulated forest would be filled with
simulated leaves and sticks.  In most cases those leaves and
sticks are of very little interest, and some executive voice says
just leave them out.  Someone looking for sticks obviously
thinks they are interesting, but this is usually considered rare,
especially in a world where the main activities are: killing
monsters and resting from killing monsters (One might say GoP,
I'm not quite comfortable with the term).

You _could_ constantly add random sticks to the world at regular
intervals, on the chance that someone is looking for them.  But 
after considering the number of possible things that could possibly
be found/sought for in a specific terrain, and the number of terrains
in a large mud world, this becomes messy.

But back to the question, does running back and forth 10,000 times 
increase the chances of finding the Key by 10,000x?  Yes, certainly,
if the Key hasn't already be found, and if you have the time to run
back and forth 10,000 times (that would probably take about three
hours if the server doesn't boot you for spamming).  And if the 
discovery chance for the Key is 1 in 1,000,000 your chances are still
pretty slim.

Of course, while your chances of discovering a specific item are small,
the odds are in favor of discovering _something_ of value.  Like maybe
a handful of copper coins. :)

There should be some mechanism that increases the chances of 
discovery of things in relatively unexplored areas.  So while running
back and forth does increase one's chances, wandering around will be
much more rewarding, and that is a key reason as to why this might 
be interesting: to encourage players to explore or at least to make
occasionaly forays into unknown areas (where they will be summarily
killed and eaten by horribly twisted monsters).

>This seems to solve every problem - Bubba's key will not suddenly turn into
>the key to castle Krak (as the key's properties are determined at
>time of creation), and CPU usage is very low, at the slight expense
>of extra objects in the world.  I would say that this method would not
>be ideal for piles of leaves and other such extra junk, however,
>and also the indeterminacy thing as originally conceptualized, above,
>seems to have a slightly higher 'neat' factor, for some reason I can't
>pin down.

This solution was designed for use in an extremely large (vast, even)
virtual world.  Take all the zones from a standard mud and consider
that to be the "recently explored" part of the world.  If the unexplored
world is 100 times as big then there is a serious problem with object
bloat, if you are actually trying to keep track of the state of things
in an unexplored area.

As the players migrate across the world (if they refuse, burn down
Midgaard) they explore new areas, and older areas become forgotten (the
devastated ruins of the goblin castle).  In exploring new areas the
indeterminacy of things is applied on a different scale: houses, farms,
dungeons are placed by probability.

In such a case, the role of builders is to create highly modular pieces
of scenery and write some nice code to put the pieces together.

>FWIW, Arctic has a similar random creation method for spellbooks and
>prayerbooks.  The number of locations are a bit too small, however, for
>it to seem very random - longtime players have learned them all, even
>though the admin regularly fiddle with the load percentage tables.
>Also, the lifetimes of these books are very short - usually they appear
>someplace (raning from inside an old tree to the inventory of a tough
>NPC) and then disappear within 30 minutes.

I'll have to make time to visit Arctic and find out just what they think
they are doing.

- Brandon Rickman - ashes at zennet.com -
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