[MUD-Dev] Dynamic muds

[Ronan Farrell]

On Mon, 20 Sep 1999, ryan wrote:

> I've only been reading this mailing list for about 2 months, so forgive me
> if something similar to this has been asked before. . .
> I've been programming an LPMUD for about 4 years now, I believe in quality
> and perfection, not mass marketing and trying to get
> a mud out there to test the waters before it even has toes ;). I've only
> been doing it on my home computer and have not really
> had any others start programming/building on it yet. As I said, I want it
> to be of high quality, and something I think that affects
> the quality of room descriptions are those that are dynamic. Most of you
> appear to be mud administrators or hardcore players, but
> this is aimed at people who build lots of areas for muds. Are truly dynamic
> rooms, in your opinion, worth spending the extra
> effort? In dynamic, I mean that the description changes with day/night,

I think that dynamic rooms are of great interest.  The simplest example is
... midgaard.  Midgard in the day we all know.. but midgard at night, with
only the occasional street-light would be such a change.. where you needed
to have a light source.. etc.

So all in all, changing your room desc, and not only desc, but the
attributes of the room can change the way a zone is played.  I am
developing a mud (early stages) but one of the things I am going to
implement is a system where the room changes with time, day, temperature.
I must admit that I am going to go for a large degree of hand-scripting
for the rooms (for quality).  Not all rooms need change for each
characteristic.  I think retro-fitting this to an existing mud would be
difficult but it fits in neatly with some other ideas of mine.

As for response.. I've tested the idea on some players, and they like the
idea, especially the explorer type people.. but the key is not just to 
change the description of a room, but to change room features, etc.


Example: Summer a large river, winter freezes over.. hence provides route
         Mountain pass... impassable in winter
         Night-time its dark everywhere except indoors
         

Ronan






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