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

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad <olag@ifi.uio.no>]

John Robert Arras <johna at wam.umd.edu> writes:

> 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.

No, you should stay in the same genre. The idea is to cut
development costs and recycle all the handcrafted elements,
rearrange it and change the laws-of-nature.

Simply expanding the existing world has 3 unfortunate side effects:

  1. the world becomes too big for socializing

  2. there is no level playfield which puts off newbies

  3. you are stuck with all the horrible design decisions of the
  previous design

> 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.

No, I wasn't. Algorithmic content is only interesting if good
artists make the selection (unless the designers are esthetical
programmers which they most likely are not). So, yes I am of course
implying good tools. Good tools, good basic elements.

Procedural generation pose no problems though, that is just a
parametric model with meaningful parameters (height, breadth, width,
skin etc). So, yes, that should be included in the toolset.

> 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.

Only if you have a human moderator of whatever your algorithm
outputs. Or let the users rate the areas produced.

> 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.

Sure, you could let your users "nuke" bad areas. You can actually
produce relatively good pictures using genetic programming (look up
"genetic art" in a search engine). The good/bad ratio is likely to
be 1/100 or worse though... (For NPCs, look at the works of Karl
Sims)

--
Ola - http://folk.uio.no/olag/

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