[MUD-Dev] Re: Dynamic muds

[Robin Cloutman]

On Monday 20-Sep-99, ryan wrote:
[snip]
> 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'm a long time ex-player writing a totally new custom mud, and one of the
things i'm designing into it is a sort of "world", which is a flat-map of
the entire planet at a certain scale, and each cell inside it (1/4 mile)
can contain another area. The cells have data associated with them
including terrain, height, longitude and latitude (from map coordiantes -
will effect temperature among other things), and some basic contents like
roads and rivers. The one thing I should mention is that it's going to be
a minimum of 1024x512 cells... (a planet about 80 miles across) which will
take up a fraction of the memory with dynamic descriptions. I'm planning
on allocating about 2-3 megs for them, whereas half a million rooms with
standard descriptions would probably take tens, or even hundreds of
megabytes of space (either memory, or disk space if spooling from disk).
The main thing I feel is a decent system for overriding the dynamic
description, If it contains a city do you want the terrain, or just the
city, if it only contains a signpost you will probably want to leave the
description alone (though that won't matter if the sign is an object
rather than an addendum on the description...)

Rycochet
--
· Phone: (+44) [0]1865 311846
· Email: rycochet at free4all.co.uk
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