[MUD-Dev] Wilderness

[Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Freeman, Jeff [mailto:jfreeman at verant.com]

> I guess what I'm shooting for is changing the routes from point to
> point (slowly - and ideally as a result of player activity because
> I like that sort of thing), rather than changing the points
> themselves.

That would certainly be possible, I guess an intersting approach
would be to use a quadtree type methodology where the designers
paint in broad strokes, but as you subdivide lower, it all becomes
fractal. So you can paint the world in terms of climates and terrain
etc.

> In other words, there'd be no sense of direction.  Players
> wouldn't travel "North".  They'd travel "thataway", and that might
> take them to some location (by a shorter or longer route) than if
> they'd traveled their normal route.  Within a point (a specific
> town, forest or swamp), they could travel north, south, east,
> west, whatever.

> Say, here's a town, with a forest next to it, and a road to a
> castle.  From the castle, you can travel to the town, or to the
> swamp.
 
> You travel to the forest from town.  Now you can wander around in
> the forest all you want to, but unless you discover some
> previously unkown route, the only place you can go from the forest
> is back to town.

Surely the low quality of so many of the old maps was a scale based
problem though? As a relatively intelligent human, I would expect to
be able to infer the directions I was travelling in a reasonably
accurately fashion.  Even if you don't have compasses then I'd hope
the stars were accurate enough etc. Hell even autorun could be used
to maintain an artificially straight line from a known point.

I guess my main concern is that a lot of the fuziness of people's
world perceptions stemmed from the arduousness of travel. A game
which makes travel equally arduous might be really tiresome. I know
the running from A-B bits of current games certainly bore me now.

> Someone else might discover a route from the forest to the swamp.
> Now from the town, anyone could travel from the forest to the
> swamp (and vice versa).
 
>> The areas changing is great, but changing the spatial
>> relationships in the world seems odd.
 
> Yeah, I want a way to do it without it seeming odd. :)

I think whoever it was who commented earlier (sorry forgotten who it
was) and suggested your world would need to be build upon this as a
premise is correct. A world made up of floating islands which move
in relation to each other would be interesting. Especially if you
could only get between them when they drifted close enough. It will
be nice when commercial products get a little bit more creative in
building the world context - they are all too earthlike right now.

Dan
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