[MUD-Dev] Building histories off civilizations automatically

[adam Martin]

Whilst looking for something else entirely [ now isn't this an
unsual situation ;) ] I came across the following site:

   http://jendaveallen.com/builder/nation/

Its an interesting little application to "create histories" for
worlds, currently simulating the growth of civilizations on
arbitrary input worlds from 4000BC to 1000BC, with events such as
"discovery of fire" and "use of bronze" programmed in to trigger
when appropriate conditions are met. The approach it appears to use
is to model the "flow of knowledge" across the map, and where, say,
"knowledge of smelting" and "knowledge of location of bronze"
overlap, things can happen. Knowledge spreads and shrinks over
time. (This is all guesswork, I haven't looked deeply at all at how
it is doing it, and it isn't open source).

Seems an interesting and powerful mechanism for building up
"automatic world history"(s). Sorry if it's an obvious technique
you've all seen before ;), and I'm the only one who hadn't noticed
it before. Still, you might find it good to be able to download an
implementation and start playing with it (although NB it is
shareware).

Some possibilities that come to mind:

   - apparently advanced simulations of populations of
   critters/monsters, but faked using growing/shrinking "areas of
   knowledge" and "patched of resources/dangers", and spawning
   monsters / whatever else you want to do, according to a
   probability which is derived from which "knowledge areas" etc
   intersect/overlap at that point.

   - automatically create ongoing MUD storyline, without the need
   for a team of content developers working 24/7 :) - I know, this
   has come up before, but IIRC the best concrete suggestions were
   pure random-seeded, and I have many doubts about the viability,
   based upon experience having to hand-tweak generation algorithms
   to be more interesting than "random noise".

Adam M
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