[MUD-Dev] Morphable worlds, Reset based systems revisited

[John Robert Arras]

On 23 Oct 2002, Ola Fosheim Gr=F8stad wrote:

> Why not design a flexible world that allows designers to rearrange
> the entire world, gameplay rules included? Then you can massively
> improve the world and relaunch every six months...

> Yes, there are some obvious gamplay and balancing issues. Still,
> in static world designs, a reset-like world-morphing relaunch
> approach has certain advantages.
 
>   (Expansions does not count, they only address current hardcore
>   players, not casual ones)

If you had the ability to massively rearrange the world every few
months, then why wouldn't you have the ability to add new
interesting areas to the world? Or, are you saying that you really
want to rearrange the world to the point that a medieval fantasy
game becomes as futuristic world game? I think an alteration like
that would be too much for me.

But, if you're talking about keeping roughly the same genre of game
so that the players don't feel like they have to wrap their minds
around a whole new game design, why not use it to expand the
world(s)?

I think what you're talking about is algorithmic or procedural
generation, which is something I am attempting to figure out right
now. I hope that if the Myst MUD comes to be and if they really do
strive for a new zone every week or so, that they invest in making
some tools to automate this process.

This may start going off topic, tbut here is something else out
there.  It's been discussed here before as
procedural/geometric/algorithmic area/zone/content
generation. Instead of making a zone with 10 good ideas, you put
those ideas into a pool and tell when those ideas get used, they get
used when appropriate within zones that get created
automatically. Instead of building 100 zones that each have 10
ideas, these 1000 (probably much less due to overlap) ideas get put
into a databank with rules when they get used, and a world is
generated that will hopefully look decent.

As an example, I like to have farms in my wilderness zones. Why not
create as general a template as possible for a farm, and then once
in a while if you create zones, you create a farm. The farm has all
of its necessary components like the fields, the barns, the houses,
the fenced areas, and each of those areas has details that can be
used to create it such as objects and object placements, and the
farmhouse can have rooms defined within it and the objects within
those rooms and so forth.

Then, you use some fractal/recursive algorithm that searches the
tree of details being generated and creates a farm where you want it
to. After that, when a person comes up with a good or unique idea
for a farm, instead of making it once, this idea gets incorporated
into the whole farm algorithm, so that it gets created at
appropriate times from now on.

I think I will get good results when I am able to come up with
enough of these details that each area can have a few interesting
things, but I won't have to be so repetitive across areas.

I also know that a lot of people don't like this idea, but I'm
terrible at building. The code I have now makes better areas than I
could make by hand, and it will be interesting to see how far I can
push this.


John


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