[MUD-Dev] Creative guy seeking a MUD

[Sasha Hart]

[Frank Crowell]

> I tried a couple of times to recruit people for a bot-dominated
> mud.  I even invited the AI guys over a couple of times.  But no
> one ever showed any interest.

That is really too bad. Do you have any work done? What was it like?
I have been fantasizing about such a game - I had a long period
where I did nothing but play games which allowed scripting and try
to make my group-bot as autonomous as possible.

My blue-sky idea for a bot game used players as generators of little
scripts for running bot-critters. These critters' basic fitness is
their use of computational resources (cpu, memory, etc) and somehow
(e.g. by gratuitous slayings together with reproduction of the well
behaved) blame is assigned to hungry designs. Of course, this is
already technically not the easiest thing (for me, anyway). The
twist I had on the idea was that in addition to keeping resource use
low, bots' fitness and reproduction would be regulated by their
ability to fill certain niches. E.g. by player feedback (like a vote
for funniest bot or whatever) or in some cases by more automated
means (e.g., I don't know, encouraging players to attack them). By
altering the contribution of different sources to the fitness
function it would be possible to change the rules of the game over
time.

Would it work? I have no idea.  I had the feeling early on that the
audience for it would be pretty limited. The main thing that has
stopped me, other than my own finite resources, is that it is a
little bit beyond my technical expertise to construct a server
flexible and fast enough to do this. I have gotten as far as
designing something like a silly assembly language, and broken down
in discouragement.  I can't imagine how long it would take to make
this satisfying, even if it could be done at all.

But I would love to know what you had in mind with your project.

Sasha

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