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

[Adam Wiggins]

On Fri, 1 May 1998, Dan Shiovitz wrote:
> On Thu, 30 Apr 1998, Adam Wiggins wrote:
> > 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?  

Long quote, but I think all of it is relevant.

Actually, now that you mention, Orion and I tossed around this idea a few
years back.  The idea was that the basic object types are only shapes.
These basic types can only ever be made of one material.  Thus you can
determine the number of sub-objects something should have by the number of
distinct forms, and the number of distinct materials.  Thus your average
axe has two objects: an axehead made of steel, and a shaft made of oak.
'shaft' and 'axehead' are both primitive object forms; oak and steel are
two possible materials one can extract from the game world.  We originally
came up with this because we wanted an easy way to damage objects in a
specific way.  I wanted to be able to burn the axe and have a pile of ash
plus a charred axehead.  All objects in the world are defined this way,
including creatures.  No object can exist that is not a primitive - all
non-primitive objects are just containers for their primitives.  A human
would contain a whole bunch of limbs, for example.  A specific limb would
contain primitives in the form of a bone, some muscle, and some skin.
This makes things like damage a no-brainer.  It also makes it easy to add
cool effects like a 'turn bones to adamantite' spell.  Now you get all the
bonuses you'd expect from adamantite bones.

I see this as being very feasible in a text-based environment, but it
would require a pretty serious amount of attention to creating basic
objects.  Just getting the thing to a playable point would be a serious
chore, but at that point you'd have an incredible amount of freedom with
how your objects interact.

Adam



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MUD-Dev: Advancing an unrealised future.