[MUD-Dev] Re: Biosystems & simulation [RAMBLE]

[Ben Greear]

J C Lawrence wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 10 Dec 1999 16:09:52 -0800 (PST)
> Marc Hernandez <marc at ias.jb.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 9 Dec 1999, Dundee wrote:
> 
> > Faking is certainly good when you have a commercial deadline or
> > somesuch, but this is MUD-DEV.  Who knows what can be accomplished
> > with more complete simulations?
> 
> Ahem.  Let's not take ourselves too seriously, Okay?
> 
> While this is MUD-Dev, and we do tend to stretch the limits of
> conceivability and infinitely distant possibility far more often
> than we probably should, that doesn't mean we also can't just trot
> out, discuss, and implement nice, safe, well known and
> unimaginatively workable solutions that just do the job cheaply and
> efficiently.

Yeah, the cheapest, cheesiest solution -- implemented is almost always
better than the perfect complex one that you never quite get to boot :)

<RAMBLE>
Speaking of unbootable ideas:

I have pondered in the past making a system that basically tried to
mimic the macro properties of the universe/solar system (ie ignore
the thing that is the next order of magnitude bigger).

I wanted to, for instance, plug in chemical makeup, mass, orbit characteristics,
sun statistics, and have a planet generated.  To take it farther, just do a
spinning disc and let it create the planets from that!  As far as object/energy
interactions, I think that you could get away with just saying:  fuel X in engine
Y can produce thrust characteristics Z.  (Ignore the chemistry & rocket science.)
Macro effects, like global warming and resource depletion could be modeled easily,
as long as you took lots of short-cuts.

If you could just get this basic system working and stable (and somewhat dynamic
& interesting), I believe you could customize a great number of things on top of it.

You could trade in comodities, mine asteroids, be a real pirate, invade & colonize,
and/or do ship-to-ship combat (hand to hand is to complex to do it right, but geometric
ships and well defined weapons shouldn't be too hard.)  Or run out of fuel on a distant
rock, with no battery power to communicate back home, and only enough food for a month
or two..real time!!

Oh, and every object needs a unique identifier, galaxy wide, and wouldn't it be cool
to distribute the servers (one per solar system?) so you could do the gravity
& trajectory calculations in real-time?  The system should never reboot from scratch,
once there is a change, it cannot be un-done by a magic reboot.  This means huge,
and rapidly updated database, with a heinous amount of code to keep it both fast
and reasonably synchronized, at least to the point where it can boot up again.

And of course, a predictive, and 3-d graphics accelerated, client that can somehow
implement this beautiful thing over 56k!

If I only had more time!!
</RAMBLE>

--
Ben Greear (greearb at candelatech.com)  http://scry.wanfear.com/~greear 
Author of ScryMUD:  scry.wanfear.com 4444        (Released under GPL)
http://scry.wanfear.com



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