[MUD-Dev] Dynamic muds

[Asmodeus]

On Mon, 20 Sep 1999, ryan wrote:

<snip re: Ryan's past experience etc>

> Are truly dynamic
> rooms, in your opinion, worth spending the extra
> effort? In dynamic, I mean that the description changes with day/night,
> seasons, etc. It obviously requires extra work, but not an
> entire re-write. I want to make sure that, when my mud does go alpha on the
> internet, that builders will be willing do to this and
> not be daunted by the task. There is more than dynamic rooms too, there are
> intelligent NPCs among other things. But what is
> your opinion? As for administrators, if you have gone the dynamic route,
> what was the feedback from your builders? And players,
> what do you think of dynamic rooms and how they add to the atmosphere of a mud?

 I spend some of my spare time puttering around with a LPMUD of my very
own (and which I always end up adding new low-level code for, but no areas
:-) and IMHO, dynamic (as in day/night, weather cycles) is a must, if just
to create more possibilities and a more realistic ("Hey, why is it always a
bright, sunny day here?") environment for the players to run around in.

 I think intelligent NPCs will always be more of a goal on the horizon 
than a goal which is realized (kinda like Write Once Run Anywhere Java),
but one which I'm also pondering about (specifically, NPC memories, common
knowledge, gossip, and so on).  I think its also a worthy goal, mainly
because I'm sick of "dumb" NPCs :-)

 Making things dynamic, like day/night cycles is (IMO again) a Good
Thing(tm) but it also puts more of a burdon on the coders, because they
have to put more effort into their areas in order to keep the standards of
your MUD up (ie: not having some static light levels, and some
time-dependant, especially for interconnected rooms).

 To sum up, adding all these dynamic things to a MUD (IMO) makes it a
better MUD, but your coders also have to be better, and you also need to
have more documentation for them (how else will they ever learn how to
_use_ all the cool coder-toys on the MUD?).  That's also another point:
If the builders/coders don't actually use your hard-implemented features,
its a moot point.  You either have to make it easy for them to use your
MUD's features, or force them to (by QA/forced standards), or both
(ideally).

Just my $0.02 CDN... nah, make that $0.03...
.Shawn





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