[MUD-Dev] Introduction Systems

[Federico Di Gregorio]

Scavenging the mail folder uncovered Kwon Ekstrom's letter:
[nice arithmetics snipped away...]

> Now, all said and done, I don't think a single player's record
> should ever get much higher than perhaps 100k or at the very extreme
> 500k (I know of a mud that had a problem with infinite containers
> where players had on occassion taken up a mb of space until the
> problem was fixed, after acquiring litterally thousands upon
> thousands of items)

for aedon (http://initd.org/Software/aedon/) i plan to use a
hierarchical naming scheme, where an object id is a variable length id
string and the names a player associated with objects are kept in a
sorted n-tree.

for a generic object, like a flower or a sword, you have something
like:

  1011 1001 1011 1100 : 1001 1010 0000 1011   a rose
  1011 1001 1011 1110 : 1001 0101 1110 1111   a sunflower
  ---- this means a plant
       ---- this means a little plant
            --------- and this one specifies what kind of plant
                        ------------------- this is *the* flower, see below

now, every player has 2 different trees of knowledge, one is generic
and is valid for *everybody* born in a certain area (and we keep only
1 instance of it for all the players) and another one is dynamically
create via the 'name' command. let's take Sytara, born in the desert,
she has the following global tree:

  0010  object
        ....

  1011  plant
        1000  tree
        1001  flower
        ....

  1010  animal 
        ...

and no personal tree (better, no branches regarding specific flowers)
when she encounter a rose the description is just "a flower". then,
after somebody tell her that this particular flower is a rose she does
a:

	name red flower as rose

and gets the following entry in her name tree:

  1011  plant 
        1001  flower 
              1011 1100  rose

form now on the object will be described as "a rose" to her. but what
if Sytara does not even know what a flower is? after naming 2 or 3
different flowers the situation will be as follows:

  1011  ???
        1001  ???
              1011 1100  rose
              1011 1110  sunflower
              1011 1000  violet

then she encounter a "bubunabobo", a very strange flower (1011 1001
1011 0010) that will be described to her as "something like a
sunflower" because of the 2 bits in common. we can suppose she grasped
the idea of "flowery" and just complete her tree by referencing the
right entries in the global tree or by asking her how to name
something that is "like a rose, a sunflower and a violet" letting the
player decide.

now what's the bit string after the ':' above? this is generated by
the server and is object dependent. for a charachter, for example, it
depends partly on an initial random generated value and partly on what
she's wearing. if i name a guy 'Gandalf' (because he told me that's
his name), the next time i see him, the system will compute a
difference between the saved value and its new value and i will be
able to recognize him only if the 2 values are not so much
different. this allows for nice tricks like thieves being able to
impersonate someone else by just wearing the right robes or using
special skills...

ther is a lot more to this system and i will be glad to discuss it if
somebody htinks it is interesting enoguh.

ciao,
federico

--
Federico Di Gregorio
MIXAD LIVE Chief of Research & Technology              fog at mixadlive.com
Debian GNU/Linux Developer & Italian Press Contact        fog at debian.org
   God is real. Unless declared integer. -- Anonymous FORTRAN programmer
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