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

[ceo]

John Buehler wrote:
> Adam M writes:

>> 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.

> My current thought is to define object classes and derive the
> exact properties of the members of the class based on a seed
> value.  A simple use of the seed value is to prime a stable
> pseudo-random number generator for the various parameters of the
> class member.  But the point here is that the network sees the
> class identifier and the seed value of the member.  The client
> generates as much of the member's data as is needed for the task
> at hand.

A nice idea. Did you invent it yourself, or follow a text on
compression? From an entropy / information-coding perspective, I
think it's a fairly standard form of compression.

Although I'm intrigued at ...

> This approach removes hand-design of objects from the artists.
> With this approach, they only control the general parameters of
> objects.

...because surely you could just say "well I just need a bit of code
in the object-properties editor that regenerates seeds until it
finds one that reproduces this particular set of atts". So I may
have misunderstood you...

I presume you would just allow both? Artists generate an item, and
the editor fits a seed to the specified values, and then says "and
I've auto-generated the following values for the attributes you
haven't specified...if you don't like any of them, override them and
I'll try to find a new seed that will fit the slightly-more-precise
new criteria".

...or have I misunderstood completely :) ?

Adam M
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