[MUD-Dev] People were talking about resets..

[John Buehler]

David Anderson writes:

> Problems I've seen:

>   1. People will empty out the areas really fast and then we'll
>   have an empty mud.

>     I'm hoping that long standing players will realize that they
>     should always leave a few creatures in the area.. and the
>     lower level areas will probably have mob generating things
>     (such as rabbit holes, etc).

Don't rely on the generosity of players.  They will empty the areas
if they can.  Your choices are to make it very difficult to remove a
creature or to crank out so many of them that the players can't kill
them all.  The spawning technique in current games goes the latter
route.  Making a creature difficult to remove can mean a lot of
things, not just giving them lots of hits points.  Make them
difficult to find.  Make them difficult to catch.  An invisible
highly maneuverable supersonic bird would be pretty difficult to
wipe out.

>   2. Too many mobs in an area if they're never killed.

>     I'm thinking I could use the age of a creature to kill it off
>     at it's maximum age.  But still assuming creatures will breed
>     fairly fast, I'll probably need to put a safety cap on each
>     type of mob, to make sure they stop reproducing at some point.
>     And I'm thinking a lot of areas could have mobs that kill each
>     other to keep the population down.  IE lions & tigers and
>     bears, oh my.

If you establish that there are resources that are required to
maintain an individual creature, you would want them to either
spread out (if non-communal, like bears), or to travel in roving
groups (if communal, like herd animals).  If you vary the resources
that they use over time, you can get interesting behaviors, such as
non-communal bears coming together when the salmon spawn.

The use of age only ensures that the oldest creatures don't remain.
If you go with a resources approach, so long as the creature is
healthy and able enough to obtain the resources that it needs, it
will survive.  This includes age, injury, disease and any other
impediment (floods preventing migration, etc).

JB

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