[MUD-Dev] Unique items vs. item references

[fred at clift.org]

On Mon, 12 Aug 2002, shren wrote:

>> These are far more fun to make, and far more interesting to see
>> in use...  at least to me...

> Ahh, but you made those up, thus they're not random.

Yes -- I was saying that making them yourself is more useful and fun
and more enjoyable for the players than making random ones, for just
the reasons you stated -- unless you are _very_ careful, 70% or 80%
of what is generated are curiosities at best. Basically this is just
another stab at mechanized creativity.  This is a Hard computer
problem to solve so you might be better off having people do it.

That said, I have some ideas on how, if pressed, I'd try and make a
system like this.  Templates (as you suggested) are one approach.

Or...

You could have some people generate a lot (say 100) of the type of
item you were interested in and then use princeples of genetics -
crossover/mutation to randomly generate 'varations on the theme' to
make say 10x more objects.

Still I wouldn't expect that you'd get anything really cool out of
this, but at least most of them wouldn't suck or be curiosities
only.

There have been many discussions on the list in the last year about
randomly generated items/stats/names - it's a hard hard problem :).

Fred

--
Fred Clift - fred at clift.org -- Remember: If brute
force doesn't work, you're just not using enough.



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