[MUD-Dev] MUD implementation issues.

[Marcus Johansson]

On Sat, 15 Dec 2001, Bruce Mitchener wrote:
> Marcus Johansson wrote:
 
>> Is there any web site out there that discusses implementation of
>> MUD systems? I mean algorithms, data-structures, script-language
>> runtime interaction with the MUD database etc. Most sites seem to
>> regard MUD world development as opposed to the technical aspects
>> of MUD servers.

> I've been away on vacation and in the midst of catching up on
> email.  I saw that others have already pointed you towards a site
> that I've started.  I hope that you'll find things there that
> interest you and to which you may want to contribute.

I certainly did, it mentions many of the technical aspects I was
looking for.

> But, your questions are relatively unstructured above.  Is there
> some specific thing or subject area that you're interested in
> seeing discussed or investigated?  There's a lot of good ground in
> those topics that hasn't been well addressed on the list (or
> elsewhere).  What sort of MUD are you looking to create?  What are
> your guidelines or restrictions?

It sure was quite unstructured, I'll try to explain what I'm looking
for.

I have been interested in MUDs for a number of years, though I
haven't really played any more than for an hour or so. I have these
nostalgic memories of the good old Infocom games, like Zork and the
Hitchhiker's Guide and so forth. 10 years ago or something I used to
develop small single-player adventure games in BASIC, you know the
ones where all rooms where coded in DATA-statements like:

1000 DATA "The Kitchen", "It is a beautifully painted kitchen."...

Still in most MUDs today I have a feeling that wherever in a MUD
game you current are, you are IN a room, not on a specific position
within it. A year ago or something I came to think about combining
the MUD concept with that of the first-person action shooters. In
those games your characters state and options are not so much
controlled by the room you happen to be in as by the physical
coordinate of it. If we apply a coordinate system to a MUD room we
could type:

:examine the lamp

As the lamp happens to have the coordinate (10.0, 20.0, 1.5), the
character would start moving towards that coordinate (this would be
the natural behaviour when "examining" an object). When the player
comes close enough (geometrically) to the lamp, the lamp gets aware
of this and sends an "impression event" of type "look" towards the
character. The character can receive this kind of events as it has
eyes and the description can therefore be sent to the player. The
lamp also sends a "smell-impression", but if the character has no
nose, the impression event would be discarded.  Perhaps, on his way
to the lamp, the character also passed a tripwire, which was
notified of this. In this way, the room designer would not be
required to install any kind of hook code to make the tripwire
trigger a bomb when the lamp was examined. He/she would simply place
the wire in front of the lamp.

I have a feeling that this geometrical approach could be very
powerful, but it also would make it harder to design rooms. They
would actually need to be drawn with some kind of a CAD
program. But, as we're still in a textual world, I think that it
does not require very many geometrical details to be constructed.

Any ideas?

Brgds,
Marcus

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