[MUD-Dev] Re: MURKLE: Wot it is

[J C Lawrence]

On Thu, 21 May 1998 20:37:15 +1200 (NZST) 
Oliver Jowett<oliver at jowett.manawatu.planet.co.nz> wrote:

> On Wed, 20 May 1998, J C Lawrence wrote:
>> On Tue, 19 May 98 23:13:33 MST Chris
>> Gray<cg at ami-cg.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA> wrote:
>> 
>>> "Sharks and fish wage an ecological war on the toroidal planet
>>> Wa-Tor" - A. K. Dewdney, "Computer Recreations", December 1984
>>> Scientific American.  The issue has a gold-coloured scorpion on the
>>> cover.

>> A windows version of the game at:
>> 
>> <URL:http://nhsbig.inhs.uiuc.edu/educational/>

> Another version: xlock (well, at least the version I have here) has
> a wator mode.

> 10 mins of watching it leads me to suspect introducing a TC predator
> won't necessarily solve wild population swings..

Ahh, but I need and want the wild population swings -- that is
precisely the idea of the entire system (even outside of the TC's).
The problem I have is that the TC population explodes and collapses a
few times to result in their entire world drowning in TC spores.  The
problem is that the population collapses are thru starvation not
predation, the rate of TC spore release on starvation death is too
high, and too little that consumes TC spores.  

What I want is a population curve that follows the path of a long slow
build to a reasonable population size (they start to be annoyingly
common)), a sudden almost vertical population explosion, and an
almost-to-zero collapse shortly after that for the whole cycle to
start over again.

Underlieing this is the model that TC's are very useful and pleasant
to have about in small numbers, the world becomes painfully messy when 
they're not about (eg after an explosion), and the world becomes
almost unlivable during an explosion (cf lemmings).  

The make life so much easier, they make life so much more complex and
painful, their absence makes life almost unbearable, their
over-presence makes life almost intolerable.  Ya love 'm, ya gotta
have 'em, ya can't live without 'em, ya can't live with 'em.  They're
TC's.

Need to play some more and to introduce some TC and TC spore
predators.  

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
(Contractor)                               Internet: coder at ibm.net
---------(*)                     Internet: claw at under.engr.sgi.com
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...