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

[Arnau Rossell=?US-ASCII?Q?=F3?= Castell=?US-ASCII?Q?=F3?=]

Hi, I'm getting out of permalurk mode to reply on this and be back
to my watch hole in no time, anyways, my name is Arnau Rossello, I'm
a code monkey for a small spanish game company, and have a liking
for virtual worlds, bonus if I can dwell in them.=20

Anderson, David wrote:

>     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.

> How does this all sound?

Sounds very interesting, but probably you should reserve some good
chunks of time to debug this, as it sounds it will be very unstable,
because it's tied too much to the actions of the players(one player
with some determination could genocide an entire species in one or
two days, and on the other side, if there's no killing in some time,
there could be an overwhelming number of NPC, both for the players
and the server).

I think that if you put generators, players will simple kill all
wandering critters and then camp the generator. One solution to this
is make the 0 generators invisible and make them "flee" from
players(of course they shouldn't 0 know the direction or even that
it is gone), so while they could spawn 0 sometimes in front of
them("you see a rabit jumping out from the bushes"), they 0 could
not camp them effectively.

For overcrowding, age is too dificult to adjust; If you have enough
rabbits 0 togheter the mating ratio will surge, and deaths won't be
enough to stop it. 0 Better i think is to put a fixed cuantity of
"food" units in a room, to be given to the critters on it randomly,
every fixed lapse of time. If a critter doesn't 0 get some of this
food in 2 or 3 lapses, it dies. For extra fun, if there 0 are "food"
items in the room, the food number for it increases a bit, so
players can breed critters. Mmmmhh probably you'll see groups of
mages putting critters 0 in a closed room and feeding them lots of
food, and when they have a lot, 0 taking some of them out and
casting a storm of something for a big bunch of XP. 0 Of course,
there will be the rogue mages that will find an opportunity to sneak
0 in the pen and kill all of them for a one time bigger XP loot.

Well that was all, I hope you found it interesting. Now back to my
hole.

--

Arnau

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