[MUD-Dev] Re: Levels versus Skills, who uses them and when.

[J C Lawrence]

On Wed, 13 Jan 1999 17:35:09 -0600 
Koster, Raph<rkoster at origin.ea.com> wrote:

>> From: Mik Clarke

>> At the moment I'm working on quests and the like to give players
>> some way of getting xps without having to kill things.

> Quest XP is a classic tactic. XP for merely visiting rooms (or for
> visiting specific rooms), which we always termed "explore XP" is a
> nice tactic too, until the rooms become known. 

Yes, the term I'm familiar with for this is "travel points", which
originated on a MUD (don't know which) where rarely entered rooms
periodically and sporadically (ie unpredictably) spawned invisible
"travel point" objects inside themselves.  There were then two
requirements for advancing in level: sufficient XP and sufficient
travel points.  This resulted in players wanting to level actively
searching out remote parts of the world in hope of finding/gaining
travel points there.

> [And yes, right here someone is going to say they implemented
> remembering every room visited, or every room remembering who
> visited it, and don't have that problem, and once again I'll
> shudder at the data storage their mud entails. 

Aaargh, even I wouldn't attempt that.

> Am I the only one who is paranoid about memory usage?]

I doubt it.  I'm just careful to distinguish between working set
data (which must be in memory, even if its virtual) and other data
which is usefult o have at hand but can be keep nice and cheaply on
cheap disks.

<<I got to play on a machine recently with the better part of half a
terrabyte of RAM (600Gig and some change IIRC).  'Twas heady>>

--
J C Lawrence                              Internet: claw at kanga.nu
(Contractor)                             Internet: coder at kanga.nu
---------(*)                    Internet: claw at under.engr.sgi.com
...Honorary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...