[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
> Patrick Dughi
> Sent: 28 August 2000 21:50
> To: mud-dev at kanga.nu
> Subject: Re: [MUD-Dev] Transportation (was: UO rants)
>
> 	Before you look for a solution, you may want to look for the
> problem.  You notice that someone can go from the two furthest points in
> your world in an unbelieveably short amount of time.  Is that a problem?
>

The reason I brought it up is because of the discussion on PKing. If my
character is happily walking along, and notices his arch-enemy (who will
kill me on sight) enter the realm, he should get a reasonable chance to find
a safe area - A city or no-PK zone. If that enemy can travel from his home
to my position across a desert/mountain range/sea in seconds, something is
wrong with the way the game works in this sense. This, of course, excludes
the use of any sort of portal/flying/magic spell to propel him.

>
> 	As an example, I'll bring up my girlfriends recent most favourite
> game, Diablo II.  After watching her play it incessantly, I noticed that a
> great deal of time was spent in travel.  It was actually a higher priority
> to find the waypoint portals, than to kill monsters/get stuff/enter
> dungeons/etc.  Time was spent backtracking in case a waypoint was missed.
> After all, if you quit and restarted, you don't want to have to deal with
> all the creatures you beat before, or all the now-worthless
> treasure, etc.
> In real world terms, it was an investment of perhaps 5 minutes per map
> (with monsters), and that was severely annoying.
>

Travel in Diablo II isn't so bad. You go to a waypoint, and spend 4 or 5
minutes running to the next dungeon. Stopping run around/kill a couple of
monsters is really only an inconvenience unless you are seriously out of
your depth in that particular land.

>
> Maybe you have movement points which come back only with rest.  One mud
> even killed your connection if you spammed movement/skill commands too
> quickly.  You can slow them down, in any number of ways, but why bother?
> What do you get from it?
>

Yes - Movement points are good, and I think that's a start - But what about
when players want to haul around the hundreds of corpses/gold/several sets
of spare armour/weapons that they do? Remember Half-Life, and carrying
around all that junk in a tiny pack?

OK, so players don't want lag in their movement, but I have also had players
specifically ASK for some sort of encumbrance system as well, for the sake
of realism.

> 	Example:
>
> I wouldn't allow any character to swim across the ocean from my virtual
> America to my virtual Spain.  If you want to travel there, you'll need a
> boat.  So, you can run to the coast, and then you're going to spend some
> time finding and provisioning a ship before you actually cross.  You might
> even have to wait till the harsh winter storms are over.  It takes the
> same as if I would have made them stutter-step across the world in half
> second increments, but they're never idle or bored.
>
>

Good. You outfit your ship, hire a crew, then what? You type SAIL SHIP TO
SPAIN and you are there? I'd think it was a lot of effort for nothing,
somehow.

C.




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