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

[Ted L. Chen]

John Robert Arras
> On 23 Oct 2002, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 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...

> 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.

Okay, my initial response to Ola was of the "heck nO!" variety (see
other post), but what you said here reminded me of Tradewars.  It
might not be totally representative of a current MOG, but it did
have a regular reset interval specific by the BBS sysop.

The systems and links between those systems were always reorganized
on resets so that easily defendable nest you found in sector 325
might not be there in 6 months.  The fun was indeed the early to
mid-game land-grab, before people could fortify and establish
themselves so well that only 007 could penetrate their impregnable
fortresses.  ;)

I'm not sure how much this can apply to current MOGs though since
Tradewars did have a rather simplistic representation of the world
and a frighteningly low barrier to entry compared to today's
standards (30mins max per/day!?!)  It's just something to throw out
there.

> 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.

True, you get 1000 odd zones that aren't repetitive.  But they are
still 'generic' and at some level, the it appears to be repetitive
to the human mind.  Walk down any street in any city and you'll see
buildings that aren't repetitive.  If you're paying attention, each
one has different combinations of features that set it apart from
the one next to it.  But the end effect is that a row of individual
buildings is a row of buildings.  Of course, there are exceptions to
the rule and those end up as landmarks.

Likewise, from zone generation algorithms, the usable
distinguishable set turns out to be much less.  I'd probably say on
the order of a dozen or so.  The more instances that a feature is
used, the less impact it has as a distinguishing characteristic.

For a RL analogy, look at the city of San Francisco, (look at the
Richmond first)

  http://www.dreamworld.org/sfguide/Neighborhoods/Richmond/

All those pictures are of different street intersections.  However,
each building in those streets do follow a common generation
algorithm (i.e.  building codes, neighborhood styles, etc) and the
end effect is that all streets in Richmond look pretty much like one
another.  The delta from one building to another on 8th street is
the same as that on 10th.

However, if you compare it Richmond with another neighborhood though
(say Chinatown for instance), which uses another set of algorithms,
then there's enough delta between streets from both sets that you
can see a difference.

Tying it back to the question at hand, I think it'd be more prudent
to either generalize your system up to the level of neighborhoods
(fewer nodes), or at least concentrate on providing game mechanics
on the level of neighborhoods instead of individual zones.

In Tradewars, all sectors can have some permutation of
links/planets/starbases.  Those features are used everywhere so they
serve as little use as differentiators; to the player, a sector is a
sector.  The true useful information is the meta-layer, the link
structure or neighborhood.  There were many user-created programs
that analyzed the sector information and reported such things as
5-link dead-ends, 4-link dead ends, rings, etc.  In a way, these
became the neighborhoods (the differentiating delta was their
accessibility) and the game always became a grab for those rare,
easily defended neighborhoods.


TLC


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