[MUD-Dev] Re: Dynamic muds

[Chris Turner]

On Thu, 23 Sep 1999, Ilya, Game Commandos wrote:

> On Fri, 24 Sep 1999 05:28:54 -0700 (PDT), Katrina McClelan wrote:
> 
> ))A typical diku mud merges like items as it is, which is
> ))more CPU intensive, either in pre-sorting or in run time sorting than it
> ))would be to splice text.  It's an ugly algorithm to implement in code, but
> ))that has nothing to do with its run time performance.
> ))
> ))-Katrina
> 
> 
> I've seen our friend at The Eternal City implement this the
> other way around (and was fascinated by it) -- that is, there
> are group objects.  You can look for things in this group.  At
> the time someone does that, one particular example of a member
> of that group is created.  Until then, the group objects are 
> all that exist.  And eventually, the individual instantiations
> are subsumed into the group, if possible.
> 
> I have a few ideas to extend this, but that's the core idea.
> 
> Anybody else doing this, or have thoughts about this?

This is something I'm definitely planning on doing, but on a far larger
scale.  Like Katrina's idea about how the world is structured, my world will
have objects of forests and cities.  These large scale objects get expanded
upon the more the players pay attention to them.

If you take a forest as an example, to start with it is a single object.  It
knows what kinds of tree live in it and thats about it.  If a player walks
past, he'll get a basic description ... "you can see a forest to the north."
As he moves closer it'll start fleshing out the details - adding random tree
objects to the outlying visible part of the forest.  The more the player
looks, the more detail it puts into the trees and the more trees it creates. 
The more detail the trees get the longer they last - the player could come
back later expecting to see the same trees.

A trawl through the archives for articles about "virtual objects" should
contain more information on this kind of thing.

This can despite all it's complexity, make life so much easier for your
builders.  Who wants to spend ages describing a forest that no-one might
enter?  Your builders can just build a basic forest object, fill in a few
parameters and only when players start exploring the forest will it becoming
a part of the world for real.  I can already tell people are going to reply
back saying that this kind of thing results in lots of similar looking
forests, but that is why you make sure there are plenty of paremeters to
change.

Chris
PS Most of the articles I wrote back then were under the address
maddy at fysh.org
--
christ at rd.bbc.co.uk   #include <stddisclaimer.h>   http://www.fysh.org/~maddy

   "So this is really me? A no-style gimbo with teeth druids could use as a
       place of worship" - Duaine Dibley (Red Dwarf - "Back to Reality")




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