[MUD-Dev] Transportation (was: UO rants)

[Chris Lloyd]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mud-dev-admin at kanga.nu [mailto:mud-dev-admin at kanga.nu]On Behalf Of
> Brad Wyble
> Sent: 01 January 1601 00:00
> To: mud-dev at kanga.nu
> Subject: Re: [MUD-Dev] UO rants
>
> > Time delay from last kill to allow warping back?  Certain portal
> > locations?   Steal and run to safety, the ever popular trick.
> >
>
> Not if the PVP- zone is the size of the united states, and you can't
> teleport, or teleport spells have a 10 minute casting time.  I should
> have made this more explicit I guess.  Got any more?
>
[Snipped]
>
> I don't think any PVP solution will work in UO as long recall and gate
> spells exist.
>
>

Hm... This raises another topic - Transportation.

There are plenty of games worlds that are said to be 'big', and yes, they
might contain thousands of rooms and hundreds of objects, but in terms of
time, can be quite small. I'll take a DikuMUD as a typical example - There
is one city, and lots of outlying areas. The game 'area' is several hundred
rooms wide. One side is a desert, and the other side is artic waste. Bearing
in mind that the game is played in real-time, why is it that it takes a
player only 15 seconds to travel from one side of the globe to the other?
The use of macros to enter the directions makes this even easier, and I know
players who remember unfeasible numbers of routes across worlds with just
the letters N, S, E and W.

Then we have recall spells, portals... And the rest. In EQ there were
portals to all parts of the world (fair enough, since I don't believe all
the lands were connected, anyway). This was part of the plot, and a reason
was given to explain the existence of such magical, naturally-occurring
doorways. But in a text-MUD, people can walk/swim/paddle their way across a
continent in seconds.

Solutions? Well... We could put in an arbitrary one-second delay for moving
between rooms, but do players want to have to count the rooms they go
through? Or should we simply invent a good reason to have a waypoint or
portal at regular intervals?

C.




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