[MUD-Dev] Questions about my MUD design

[Christer Enfors]

Hello. My name is Christer Enfors, and I'm a long time lurker on
this list.

I'm working on my own MUD, and I have some questions about its
design that I thought perhaps the list members, most of which are
way more experienced than I, could help me with.

But before I can get to the questions, I must give you some
background. I'd say I'm an intermediate programmer, coming mostly
from a C background. I've played MUDs since 1994, and I've been a
wizard on an LPmud since 1998. I'm using the MudOS driver, and the
Lima mudlib (so it's an LPmud, for those of you who are unfamiliar
with these names).

For the past two years, I've been working on the design of my MUD
(mostly in my head, unfortunately). I have some working code, but
not much. Playing will be free. The world is fantasy, but not based
on any books or movies. There will be no classes or levels, only
stats and skills, both of which improve with use. Hence no exp for
killing things. Combat will be turn based, as opposed to the
real-time systems used in most MUDs. Equipment will decay with time,
eventually to the point of destruction. This is to avoid the
problems inherent in Everquest-style economies.

Everybody (players and NPCs) will need food. You won't die from
starvation, but your stats and stamina will take a penalty, making
it preferable to eat unless you're just logging on to chat with your
friends.

Your stamina will go down when you move, eventually to the point
where you have to rest before you can move any further. While I know
this isn't popular, I'll implement it anyway as an incentive for
players to create roads (you will loose less stamina when moving
along a road). Also, if there was nothing to stop macro movement,
then traveling merchants would be able to move from one end of the
world to the other in the blink of an eye.

Roleplaying will probably be required, I'm not sure yet.

NPCs will probably have some semblance of intelligence. They will
not simply stand around waiting to be killed. They will go about
their daily routine, and will be capable of simple learning. For
example, if an NPC is attacked by the player Bubba in the forest in
the middle of the night, then the NPC will learn several things:

  1) Being in the forest is dangerous.

  2) Being outside in the middle of the night is dangerous.

  3) The player Bubba is dangerous.

  4) Creatures of Bubba's species (I absolutely *refuse* to call it
  "race") are dangerous.

This knowledge will then carry on to the NPC's children, to some
extent. This kind of learning will be applied on many levels,
hopefully allowing a kind of primitive "evolution" of the NPCs over
generations.

There won't be many areas, at least not initially. When I open for
beta (yeah right, as if I'll ever get that far), there will probably
only be the starting town. However, there will be the "wilderness",
which is basically a "virtual" 256x256 room area (using MudOS
virtual objects as rooms). As is popular these days, there will be
an overview map visible next to the room description when you walk
around in the wilderness, like this:

---start---
  [*]-=-=-=-=-=-[*] You find yourself standing in the middle of a
   |^^^^^^^^|..^^|  road through a pitch black forest. It is hard
   |^^^^^^,-'.^^^|  to follow the narrow road in the dark. The
   |^^^^^^|^^^^^^|  road is almost overgrown with bushes in some
   |^^^^^^@FFFFF^|  places, threatening to trip unwary travelers.
   |^^^^^^`--.FFF|  The forest continues to the south and east. A
   |....^^^FF|FFF|  narrow pass penetrates the mountains to the
   |--......f|Fff|  north. Looming mountains block movement to
  [*]-=-=-=-=-=-[*] the west. The road leads north and south.
          Obvious exits are east, south, and north.
----end----

  (Yes, I know I shouldn't be using the word "you" in room
  descriptions. Sue me.)

The @ at the center of the map represents the player. The map is
colorized based on terrain type. The verbal room description is
automatically generated, based on the terrain type of the room
you're in, and the surrounding rooms. Using a tags system similar to
SGML, the description can also vary depending on the time of day,
weather, etc. Example:

---start---
  <night>It is pitch black. </night>
  <night & clearskies>The stars shine brightly from the clear
  night sky. </>
----end----

These two parts, the wilderness and the tags system, are two of the
few things I've actually finished coding so far.

There will be an extensive tradeskill system. This is how all
equipment enters the world. NPCs will not be born carrying any
"loot". If they want equipment, they'll have to buy it from a local
producer like the rest of us.

Apart from creating equipment, players will also be able to create
larger things, such as buildings, roads and bridges. It takes raw
material to build things. For example, let's say Bubba wants to
build a house.

He will first have to acquire an axe. He then goes into the nearby
forest, and promptly chops down some trees. He loads the logs onto a
cart, and wheels it off to the local saw mill. There, he will get
his logs sawed into wooden boards, for a price (the saw mill can be
owned and operated by a player). Then, Bubba loads his boards onto
his cart, and wheels it off to the spot in the wilderness where he
wants to build his house. There, he grabs his hammer and starts
banging away, erecting his two-story house wall by wall, room by
room. Once his house is complete, he goes to a furniture carpenter
to buy some furniture to decorate his new home with.

Buildings will decay with time, so if they're not maintained (which
consumes more raw material) they will eventually collapse and cease
to exist.

(I'll get to my actual questions soon, bear with me.)

The MUD will not be combat-oriented, although combat will exist.
Instead, the entertainment must stem from other things. This is what
I've come up with so far:

  1) House-building and decorating (think The Sims). This should be
  relatively interesting, since you build houses wall by wall, you
  have a large degree of freedom to create your house in any way you
  want. Build your house next to your friends' houses, and create
  your own town.

  2) Tradeskills. But for every item created through tradeskills,
  there has to be demand. As described above, there is demand for
  furniture, because players enjoy using them to decorate.  There
  will also be demand for combat-oriented items, because even if the
  MUD is not centered around combat, it will still exist, and it
  will hopefully be entertaining.

  3) Owning a business. Players will be able to make money by owning
  a shop, a saw mill, a bakery, etc.

  4) Farming (as in growing crops, not Everquest-style "loot
  farming"). Plant a field with the type of crops you think there
  will be the most demand for, build irrigation networks to make
  sure your crops have enough water. Harvest, and sell the crops to
  a miller, who makes flower, which he sells to the baker, etc.

  5) Become a traveling merchant. Buy cheaply in one end of the
  world, sell it expensively in the other.

  6) Band together with your fellow players to build a road to that
  new player-built town, or build a bridge across a river. When the
  MUD opens, some parts of the world will be unaccessible, until the
  players realize that they should cooperate to build bridges to
  reach those parts.

  7) Become a politician. Each town will have a mayor, who is voted
  into office. The mayor has control over local laws and taxation
  levels. If the players in your town don't like the way you run
  things, they will move to another town, meaning your town looses
  some tax revenue.

And now, finally, here are my questions.

  1) Please help me come up with more entertaining things for
  players to do, besides the things I've listed above.

  2) As is probably obvious to most of you, this is one of those
  over-ambitions projects that are never finished. I know, I've been
  there before. What can I do to overcome this obstacle? One thing I
  will probably do is aim for an early public alpha, when only the
  most basic features are implemented. If I get even just a few
  players into the MUD, I think their feedback will help keep me
  motivated. Or would that be a bad idea? Will I just make a poor
  first impression by allowing players into a half-finished MUD?

  3) Can you see any glaring problems in my design, as outlined
  above? I'd rather not start implementing something that has
  obvious problems in its design that I just haven't spotted myself.

Any help appreciated. Thanks in advance.

--
Christer "Dannil" Enfors

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