[MUD-Dev] Spawning and quests (was Sony ban)

[J C Lawrence]

On Mon, 17 Apr 2000 16:27:51 -0500 
Jeff Freeman <skeptack at antisocial.com> wrote:

> If there are not a finite number of locations where THE mob with
> THE magicthingie spawns, then EQ would need to redesign all their
> dungeons, I think... because that's sort of the way they have them
> setup.
...
> The dungeons just aren't big enough (for 1500 to 2000 players) for
> you spawn mega-wimps in random spots through rooms one through
> ten, "just right" mobs in rooms 10 through 15, then you're done,
> because there are no more room.

> Issue being, there's one mob or one VERY small area in this entire
> dungeon that has a mob you can kill, and that you'll actually get
> xp for killing.  It can't be spawned somewhere else because
> there's no where else to spawn it.

> Ideally, as a player, I'd like to be able to travel to a remote
> dungeon, explore the thing from top to bottom fighting various
> critters all the way down.  This just isn't possible in EQ (unless
> you're so high level that you can kill everything in the dungeon,
> in which case you might as well trot down to the bottom and kill
> the bossmonster over and over - which is what happens).

The fairly obvious solution to me is:

  -- Upon a party of people (one or more) entering an "area" or
"quest path" a unique and distinct copy of all the rooms and objects
in that section is created.

  -- This copy persists until no more players are present in the
"fragment".  Once it is fully empty, it is deleted/recycled.

  -- The copy can be customised in some fashion, perhaps tailored to
the people in the party, or just random seed factors so that no two
copies are ever quite alike.

  -- The party can then do whatever they want in that area,
unaffected by what is happening in that same area by people who
entered earlier or later (and thus got their own private areas).  

This is of course rather similar to what Nathan Yospe talked about a
while ago in an effort to resolve a not entirely dissimilar problem.
(Nathan, want to expound?)  Ardent archive searchers are challenged
to find the relevent threads (my memory is too sparse to give good
key words).

--
J C Lawrence                                 Home: claw at kanga.nu
----------(*)                              Other: coder at kanga.nu
--=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--


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