[MUD-Dev] AI's in MUDS and Online Gaming

[Ryan P.]

At 08:59 PM 12/8/99 -0800, Matthew Mihaly wrote:
>On Wed, 8 Dec 1999, IronWolf wrote:
>
>I'm no expert, and barely even a novice, at AI, but keep in mind that in a
>one-player game, you really only have to worry about mobiles around the
>person playing the game. That's a very limited set of mobiles. AI is, as
>has been noted many times, extremely processor intensive, especially when
>you are talking about thousands of mobiles in a game. That fact is, as far
>as I can tell from my own experience, the single biggest limiting factor
>in making more interesting mobiles
>--matt
>
If you were really serious about making NPC life, it would not be a problem.
I'm sure we've all heard the question "If a tree falls in the forest, and
there's
no one there to hear it, did it actually fall?" Take this approach with making
NPCs. Monsters are generally very low forms of life (such as animals) and
really don't need any complex behaviors. So on a mud that has 100
players on average, a guestimate would be that 40 players are near a
complex NPC. If there are several players in one room, well that takes the
NPC count down even more. To get even more into it, if the NPC isn't
generally attacked by a player (such as a shopkeeper), they really can
be simply text messages. Showing an NPC light all the torches in town
at night really only needs text messages to the rooms *where there are
players*.  If there are no players, no message is sent. When a player
attacks the NPC, a monster could be cloned into existence (talking LPC
terms but you get the picture). This could all be accomplished with some
sort of daemon that controls all the text NPCs in an entire area.

Shrug, just a few thoughts
--Ryan 



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