[MUD-Dev] Re: Scaling a world.

[Patrick Dughi]

On Sat, 22 Jul 2000 Saereth2000 at aol.com wrote:

>  
> 	First off, I am sorry if my format is incorrect in this letter,
> as it is my first time posting to this list. I am wondering if anyone
> knows of a MUD which actually has 50k or more rooms. The reason I ask is
> in the MUD that I am currently developing one of our main features is
> going to be the geography. We have worked out a build system which will
> hopefully incorporate this and right now we are aiming towards around
> 60k+ rooms when we open. Any feedback would be nice.

	I know of a few, but they're not traditional room-based muds.
Most are 'map-based'.  It's easy enough to generate a 1024x1024 bitmap,
and write a set of functions to interact with it.  If you're going 3-d
you've even got more rooms.  Write a function to generate a randomish
description based on the zone type (represented by an individual color on
the bitmap).  To keep with scale, you have a world map scale, and a zone
scale.  When you enter a given tile on the world map, you're thrust into a
zone scale.  An entire town could be a zone.  A mountain could be
represented by 4 tiles, on each side of the geographical feature (enter
from the west, continue east up and over, and exit from the east side).
Etc.

	Of course, these are not normally usable as 'ecosystems' as most
are phased in and out of memory as needed.  With area spanning a million
rooms, it's too memory-costly to keep it all in memory at once.

					PjD




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