[MUD-Dev] Player malleable worlds (was expected value and standard deviation)

[ceo]

Corpheous Andrakin wrote:

>> Why deny the ability to sit in a chair?  Why deny the ability to
>> put a plate of cookies on a table and allow people sitting around
>> the chair to "eat" the cookies?  Why deny the ability to write a
>> few pages of text in a book that can then be set on a shelf for
>> others to read later?  Why deny the ability to drop an object
>> (sword, ring, shirt, whatever) onto the ground and have it
>> actually look like its title rather than a bag?

>  Because each of those little things requires a LOT of coding if
>  they're going to work and work GOOD.  The graphics on the ground
>  thing is sometimes more of a network coding issue than a "we
>  can't do it" issue.  If you have to draw some huge magnificent
>  sword and a multitude of other stuff on the ground for 50 players
>  as opposed to a couple bags which do you think will provide a
>  higher framerate and which will give the player a lower ping?
>  This may seem like simple stuff but it's actually a huge pain in
>  the rear if you're going to do it RIGHT, because thats what
>  players demand.

Well, from the network-performance perspective, there's no real
difference between "lots of identical bags" and "any of 65536
standard icons". An extra 2 bytes to describe which icon to use for
the item isn't going to hurt your network protocol - especially
since these are static items, and updates to position, state, etc
need only be sent infrequently.

Actually, have a look at runescape.com - they've always displayed
everything you ever dropped. Looks ugly (you get huge
epilepsy-inducing flickering piles of items, becuase the 3D engine
had poor depth sorting), but the game was always designed to work on
low-end dialup conenctions, and the items don't seem to have been a
problem there.

Or Diablo2 - I think they limit it to one byte (256 possible
icons). So lots of swords look similar :). ACtually, they'll have
more by now, what with the expansions adding whole new classes of
item.

Obviously you're right that it's considerable extra work to support
extra features such as described, although I'm not convinced it's
all *that* hard.

Adam M
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