[MUD-Dev] Sustainable Ecosystem
Jon A. Lambert
jlsysinc at ix.netcom.com
Fri Jul 21 03:42:15 CEST 2000
> ERI wrote:
>
> I'm currently designing what I'm calling a "virtual world". Basically I'm
> trying to create a simulation of a low-fantasy world, keeping it as close to
> reality as I can without sacraficing game-play. The ecosystem is my primary
> project right now.
>
> The way I'm handling it currently is a base "seed" population exists behind
> the scenes. While characters can explore parts of a forest, it's assumed
> that they can't explore all of it. A mob populates itself behind the sceens,
> and once it reaches a certain threshold (a dynamic number based on the
> species of animal, weather, season, and food supply) the system starts to
> release that particular mob into the "playing" environment.
>
Bingo. Search the archives for "population containers". My thoughts
have been along these lines:
There may be thousands of deer in any given forest. A player is not likely to
see but a very small portion of them. Now this is realism. There's no need for
thousands of mobile critters consuming processing time. Have deer appear
randomly out of the population container at a predefined rate and have them folded
back into the container at a predefined rate. A container that holds "deer" can
grow and shrink according to genetic algorithms, and according to other
containers in range (a wolf container for instance). Define a neighborhood
or range for population containers. Define population container dependencies
on other containers. Call them resource containers. Maybe you have
a grass container or some such dependency for deer. Define a migration
threshold, etc. Bleat...gotta run... sorry for the half fininished thoughts.
;-)
--
--* Jon A. Lambert - TychoMUD Email:jlsysinc at ix.netcom.com *--
--* Mud Server Developer's Page <http://tychomud.home.netcom.com> *--
--* If I had known it was harmless, I would have killed it myself.*--
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