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

[Patrick Dughi]

On Tue, 29 Aug 2000, KevinL wrote:

> 
> Other features - rivers with boats, chasms requiring spell-casting to fly 
> across, etc. and so forth - scatter them around, and travel is fraught with 
> danger and event, rather than being a string of "n,e,n,n,ne,e,e".
> 
> Does that make sense?  Is it reasonably, or is it all likely to be worked 
> around/annoy the players?  I'm just throwing ideas in here...
> 
	I was trying to think of ways to defeat myself, if I made it hard
to attempt speedwalk, just as an exercise.  The problem I kept coming back
to was exemplified in a script I obtained a while back.  It's an expect
script containing the solution to zork I. 

	That is, it actually goes through the entire game for you, beats
it, and then gives you a file with all the output.  Takes a couple of
seconds to run.

	Now, that'd be a bit tougher to run around with things like stat
or item based movement restrictions, but in most cases it wouldn't be too
difficult; you'd just add a trigger on the words "You are too tired to
move." or whathave you, and you rest for 5 cycles before moving on again.
The worst part is that the harder you make it to speedwalk/etc, the more
likely that one person will sit down and eventually 'break' the system.
Nowadays that means passing on the info to friends, and suddenly, any work
you made to make your system interesting is ignored.

	Maybe this isn't so bad - after all, it's only so novel for so
long.  By the time they find friends with the autowalk script, they've
probably done it at least once... but still, anything that can be
auto-scripted means that my game is better played by a program than a
person... is there a good way to stop this sort of thing?

						PjD

	




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