[MUD-Dev] Re: Spell components, chemistry, and the like...

[Hal Black]

On Wed, Nov 11, 1998 at 10:22:28PM -0800, quzah [sotfhome] wrote:
>    [Hal Black]
> >> material is what it's made of.  Could be a mixture, complex structure,
> >> or pure molecular/elemental type.  Lots of room for development here,
> >> depending on how involved you want to get.  (are animals and plants the
> >> same or different subtypes of "organic", etc...)  There are mixtures,
> >> alloys, all kinds of neat stuff.  Go to your college book store and sit
> >> down with a Chemistry 101 book and thumb through it for a while for
> >> ideas.  There is some neat stuff in there. 
> 
> 
> For starters, I'm dropping in the element table, from there, I'll add in
> some common compounds, and I'll take it from there. There's no way I'll
> be able to make it so you can combine X and Y and X in the correct amounts
> and produce every possible compound/solution/whatever and make it be able
> to be used correctly, so I am going to have to fake it and put in what I
> can think up (with their correct proportions of X,Y,Z as reference) so you
> can create things from my list.

A simplified chemistry is definately in order...  You will spend all your life
trying to simulate real-world chemistry (as some people have)

An interesting reference (which has been referenced here before but yet again
becomes pertinent) is Greg Egan's novel _Permutation_City_  In it, there is a
simulated chemistry system called the autoverse where there are 31 elements and
no quantum effects.  Not a lot of technical detail, but a fun read.

It would be rather ambitious to get a whole world working this way (And indeed
computationally intensive! 8') But just at the level of alchemy, you might
want to consider making up elements yourself, or just making only some of the
elements (or fundamental molecules) be involved in alchemy...  or a mixture
of the two.

I'd try to pick some representatives of the different types of elements.  Maybe
one sodium-type metal, one noble gas (helium), a few metals (silver, alluminum,
gold, copper, lead), some nonmetals (calcium, nitrogen, chlorine) and of course
hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon are very important.  And I'm probably forgetting
some fun ones like phosphorus.  But with just that limited amount, you can do a
decent amount of chemistry, say make some acids, salts, some organic
compounds...