[MUD-Dev] The Virtual Ecology

[Marian Griffith]

In <URL:/archives/meow?group+local.muddev> on Tue 27 Jul, Tony Wilkinson wrote:

> I would hate to make animals invulnerable to player attack until a certain
> age since that is not realistic but perhaps by not giving rewards for kills
> (or even a small penalty) then this would encourage people not to harm
> them. Of course I could be giving far too much credit to the population as
> a whole :)

I am afraid you are :) If you condition players to kill animals they will
do that,  even to the point of extinction  of otherwise meaningless crea-
tures.
Besides, the world around is filled with mind boggling numbers of animals
and there is no way you can even begin to simulate that. On the serengeti
which is big,  but not so big  on an earth scale,  there are thousands of
large predators  and hundreds of thousands of large prey animals.  If you
include the small animals you have a couple of thousand every square mile
or so.  If you include the minute species,  well, every ant hill has some
thousand ants. You can find a hundred thousand parasite in a single tree.
Sticking to those numbers  you would need for a game with hundred players
(the top predator) ten thousand prey animals, and they in turn would need
a thousand fold increase of -their- prey.
Unless you make the game so big  that it can accomodate such numbers  and
still allow the population appear sparse  there is simply no way the ani-
mals are going to outbreed their predators.

Marian
--
Yes - at last - You. I Choose you. Out of all the world,
out of all the seeking, I have found you, young sister of
my heart! You are mine and I am yours - and never again
will there be loneliness ...

Rolan Choosing Talia,
Arrows of the Queen, by Mercedes Lackey




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