[MUD-Dev] Planes of existance

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad <olag@ifi.uio.no>]

"T. Alexander Popiel" wrote:
> Personally (due to a peculiar religion), I view death as
> at worst a nuisance, rather than as something to be feared.
> In most cases, it is something to be cherished.

Christian.  It is common.  Don't worry.

Hmm... Norroen (=E5satro/Odin) too.  Ok, maybe you should worry!!

> >Who remember's Infocom's "Floyd The Droid"? (I forget which game
> >he was in.) I remember being saddened when he 'died'.
>=20
> Floyd is in both Planetfall and Stationfall.  His death scene
> is in Planetfall... and I was saddened not by his death, but by
> the beautiful prose that it was described with.  I was actually
> quite glad he was gone, since he was a ruddy nuisance, always
> wandering in or out at inopportune moments, rarely there when
> you needed him.  As useful as relying on a stray cat.

I think I played a game called floyd the droid on my C64, but it was abou=
t
cleaning up sewers. (we tried to crack it) Actually, it was kinda MUD-lik=
e.=20
It is one of the games I remember for some novelty. It allowed you to
program the robot using a simple iconic language. So you could program
sequences of actions, thus trying to make the optimial strategy for killi=
ng
bats and other monsters.  It wasn't very well-balanced, but it could make=
 a
nice hobbyist graphical mud.

jump
zap
sit
zap
jump
stomp
stomp
stomp

Not too difficult, but it is more fun with graphics.  Looks funny.  Silly
funny.  I believe the perceptual/visual feedback is an important reward
which can motivate people to program.  Maybe easier to tell what you do
wrong and plan for changes with visual feedback than it is with just text=
ual
descriptions. "I just need one more jump to get into perfect zapping
distance".

I don't really think one need to make such macro programming very clever.=
 If
aiming for the average user, then one probably should avoid difficult
conditional structures and such.  Ok, that would be another one of the ma=
ny
I-have-always-wanted-to-make-this projects which I will never do.
--
Ola (have I said this before?)


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