[MUD-Dev] MMORPG, buildings, is it bad to be just props?

[J C Lawrence]

On Wed, 19 Feb 2003 15:32:17 -0500 
Lee Sheldon <lsheldo2 at tampabay.rr.com> wrote:

> I also remember a Star Trek adventure game ( I forget the title
> though!) that allowed you to "jump cut" your character (or party) to a
> distant visible location.  It was a nice steal of a common film
> technique to dump reality in favor of drama.

The problem is implementing that in a MUD.

Single player RTS games have traditionally done that in either of two
ways:

  1) The jump either succeeds or is interrupted by a series of events
  which require player reaction before the jump either succeeds entire
  or is aborted.

  2) The jump takes RL time (so its essentially a set of marching
  orders), but frees the player to manipulate/track other game tokens
  while it is progressing.

The problem for MUDs is that the player is controlling a only single
token at any time (his character) making #2 inapplicable, and attempting
to use the interruption model of #1 fails as the most common source of
interruptions is other player activity (which requires that RL time et
al).

Walking to the corner store to buy eggs each day is (likely) boring, but
that same chore also presents the opportunity for other more interesting
things to happen in that time.  The problem is creating sufficient
density of interesting events in walking down to buy eggs without making
the trip a foray in its own right.

--
J C Lawrence                
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?		  
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.

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