[MUD-Dev] Game Economies

[Jp Calderone]

Albert wrote:
> 
> At 05:34 PM 6/11/99 -0700, you wrote:
> >On Fri, 11 Jun 1999, Adam Wiggins wrote:
> >
> > [snip orcs eating cats eating rats eating corpses]

> Which to me, seems kinda of a waste considering the players won't really
> notice all the behind-the-scenes work that is going on. Has there been
> any research into the idea of doing such complicated systems "virtually",
> meaning using a few simple calculations and affecting the appropriate
> system, instead of actually having mobs go around competing against
> each other?
> 

There are some ways you can get population sizes without making
your mud go out and breed rats, and then have cats eat them.
In fact, a very simple 2nd degree equation can give you most
of what you need.

F(x) = ax(1 - x)

As a varies from 1 - 4.  If you've ever seen a feigenbaum
plot, you know what this looks like.  Essentially, this gives
you a parabola that you can then trace orbits from.  With a
around 3, you get chaos.  With a slightly lower, you can get
all sorts of different population fluctuations, ranging from
2-year cycles up to pretty much infinite year cycles (there's
a proof of this, but I won't go into it...)  There's a page
that explains it more completely at 

http://www.gypsymoth.ento.vt.edu/~sharov/PopEcol/lec9/chaos.html

(The blue graph is the Feigenbaum plot, albeit at a very low
resolution)

With the right setup, it should be possible to just create a
table, around 300 entries, more if you really want it to seem
non-determinant, though I doubt players would pay that much
attention, of population sizes and their compliments.  Using
that, calculating the number of orcs vs. the number of cats
would be next to free, in terms of CPU time.  I hadn't thought
of this before reading your post, but now I really like the
idea :)

--
A sad spectacle.  If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery 
and folly.  If they be not inhabited, what a waste of space.
                -- Thomas Carlyle, looking at the stars



_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev maillist  -  MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
http://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev