[MUD-Dev] Re: regulating player-created objects

[Dan Shiovitz]

On Thu, 30 Apr 1998, Adam Wiggins wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Apr 1998, Dan Shiovitz wrote:
[large amounts of trimming done. might want to look at original post
 for context]

[on making objects from scratch:]
> That's all I've ever seen.  My first run in with it was the tanning skill
> on (I believe) the SillyMUD base, where you typed "tan corpse leggings" to
> get a pair of leggings based on the race of the critter that died.
[..]
> I would imagine the effect you describe here would be suited only for a
> graphical environment (realtime 3d to be exact).  There it's very easy to
> have an object "a chunk of uncut wood" that you apply a saw to and the
> player can shape new objects of whatever shape they want.  Making table
> legs is therefore you and your character's abillity to guide the saw the
> way you want it.  Making boxes for legs is going to be much easier than
> making nice rounded ones.  From there you attach them however you like to
> other pieces of wood.  The only thing that defines it as a "table" is
> whoever owns it; the server doesn't care.  The physics of the world
> (collision handling and gravity to be exact) will take care of the fact
> that a well-built table will have a level top where you can put whatever
> you like.
[..]

Hmm. I've been chewing on this for a while. It's pretty clear that the
latter isn't feasible. It occurred to me, though that you could get
some sort of in-the-middle compromise by not hard-coding all the
classes of objects that can be created. I guess you might want to have
some base ones defined, but beyond that you could let the admins
create "patterns" that players can learn and create. For instance, say
someone knows the "chest of drawers" pattern. This would be something
that an admin wrote in some sort of in-game coding language. According
to the pattern, say, the chest of drawers is composed of 3 large
boards, some nails, and three drawers. "drawer" is another pattern. A
drawer consists of 4 small boards and one medium board, plus some
nails. So eventually all patterns are decomposed into sub-patterns
which get decomposed into atoms. Atoms are things that don't have to
be specified how to make: "carve large board from log" will give you a
large board if the log is large enough. 

The advantage of this system is in the use of sub-patterns. For
instance, you could have the "arrow" pattern be made of up "shaft",
"arrowhead", and "fletching". Anything that fits into these categories
can be used to make an arrow; so you could make arrows with steel
heads, or flint heads, or diamond heads if you can find a way to chip
them, and so on. 

This doesn't let players create anything they want. If I want to make
a cuckoo clock with a secret compartment in the bottom, there has to
be a cuckoo clock pattern already existing (and presumably made up of
a gear pattern, a carving of an animal pattern (usually animal=bird),
a bell pattern, and a small base pattern). But if there's already a
base-with-secret-compartment pattern created, I can make my cuckoo
clocks come with secret compartments even if that wasn't the intent of
the original pattern creators. 

(Of course, the downside to this is every game object needs to be
deconstructible now. Oh bother.)

Anyway, am I reinventing a known wheel here?  

[..]
> Adam
--
(Dan Shiovitz) (dbs at cs.wisc.edu) (look, I have a new e-mail address)
(http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~dbs) (and a new web page also)
(the content, of course, is the same)













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