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

[lynx at lynx.purrsia.com]

On Thu, 9 May 2002, Anderson, David wrote:

> ... I also have mobs that can generate mobs on their own (asexual)
> for mob generating machines (ie, hole in the ground that's too
> small to fit in, but small bunnies keep hopping out sometimes).

This actually sounds more useful, if you suppose that such mobs can
also change into other, more powerful mob generators, over time or
as a reaction to player actions.  Maybe they could even change the
looks of areas to reflect their new status.

Picture this:

  An orc raiding party gets spawned in a border area, composed of an
  orc raider leader and some orc guards as his escort.

  It periodically spawns orc scouts that go looking around for
  either a human village or human players.  Alone, they're not
  difficult for the average low-level to defeat, but they're
  cowardly and will run back to the raiding party, which might be
  tougher to defeat.

  If players defeat the raiding party, killing the raider leader,
  well, fine, they've driven off an orc incursion all on their own.

  On the other hand, if the orc raiding party survives long enough
  and finds a suitable place to set up a village, well, then the
  raider leader settles down, builds a village, gets promoted to a
  cheftain, and his guards get tougher.

  Now the village produces warriors to defend itself, and more
  raider leaders to go out to eventually start more villages of
  their own.  In addition, we might let the orc cheftain migrate out
  (with his guards) to attack a human village, causing some minor
  damage and looting.  If players hadn't noticed the orcs before,
  they will certainly notice now, as the news spreads across the
  land.

  Once there are enough orc villages in an area, we'll pick one of
  the cheftains and promote him to a general.  His village becomes a
  fortress.  Now things get more serious, because the fortress
  produces orc patrols (tougher orc raiders) that wander around the
  territory, and the orc general will lead an army out against human
  villages.  If he succeeds in conquering a human village, it turns
  to an orc-controlled human village, complete with an orc
  slavemaster -- the players can free the village for bonus points
  later.  Yay for our heroes!

  At some point beyond this -- probably controlled both by time and
  by player actions, i.e. the more player actions against orcs we
  see in the area, the more we advance this process -- the orc
  general becomes an orc clan lord, and his fortress becomes an orc
  city.  (cue black smoke and greasy fires, and gutteral chanting as
  human slaves are brought screaming to the temples of doom) Now he
  stays at home, but he sends out generals to selected villages to
  turn them into fortresses.  Then those generals will start leading
  armies around in an effort to besiege human cities and turn them
  into orc-controlled cities.

  The land cries out to be freed, heroes!  What are you waiting for?
  Why are you still playing around with puny rabbits? ;)

At any rate, the down side of this is that if the players have their
act together, they can extinct the orc population, and then we'd be
down to high-level players pouncing lowly orc raiders as soon as
they spawned.

  (I loved Shren's comment with Aragorn, Gimli, and Frodo. ('gryn))

To balance this out, I'd look at some ratio of player-levels
currently on-line to the monster population.  If the current monster
population falls short of the player weight by so much, then we
could spawn X 'monster-levels' of spawns, weighted toward low-level
entities.  Thus, you might have 20 scattered raiding parties across
a long border, to entertain the low-level players, and then an army
somewhere in there, to attract the high-level players.

The lower the population gets, the more spawns, and the higher level
spawns, you drop in so that at least some has a chance to thrive
where players aren't playing attention.

A steady diet of orcs would soon pall?  Well, there's no reason you
couldn't construct more similiar ecologies, and create interactions
between them, both alliances and antipathies.  You could even turn
human success into a new war game by introducing politics and a
natural tendency for any kingdom that is too large to spawn
dissenting lords that eventually split off to become rival kingdoms.

It'd be an interesting project.  Sort of a cross between a MUD and a
RTS.  You'd want to build in more of the RTS notions of structures
conferring abilities on the towns to which they belong, so players
would have a motivation to protect towns and help them grow.

Inevitably, someone will want to play an orc...  Hmm.

The other thing I'd suggest doing is having population changes be
responsive to whether there are players in an area or not, so you
don't waste CPU cycles on areas where no one is paying attention.
The trouble with running a simulation that looks for male/female
monsters standing around is that, well, the simulation has to
iterate through the monsters even if they're out of sight of the
adventurers, which may be more granularity than you really need.

Not of course, that they should be spawning when they're *within*
sight of the adventurers, if only to avoid the inevitable charges of
moral laxity against the author of the game.

-- Conrad

_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev