[MUD-Dev] believable NPCs (was Natural Language Generation)

[Malcolm W. Tester II]

Matt Mihaly wrote:

> Well, how far to take world persistence differs from game to game
> but I don't think I'm saying anything controversial when I say
> that having persistence defined by a game crash or a reboot is a
> very poor idea. A game crash is an accident...the world should be
> as little affected by it as possible. A reboot may be needed for
> reasons that have nothing to do with world persistence, so why tie
> persistence into such unrelated factors?

I don't believe crashes or reboots should affect persistence in any
way.  It's a conflict between a mindset from 1990 when reboots
happened at least once a day, and crashes not far behind, and 2004
when my driver of choice has become extremely stable and robust and
hardware is sufficient to keep a game running for months without
reboot (in terms of RAM).

In 1990, there really wasn't any persistence in anything in an lpmud
other than saving players themselves.  That remains a fact in 95% of
lpmuds (and probably most other muds too) today.  This isn't a fault
of the established muds.  They have quite a legacy to maintain, and
it's doubtful they have the willing manpower to go through and
update all the code necessary to implement much persistence.  But
today, the ability to create persistence in a new mud is quite easy.
The question I ask myself is "How far do I take persistence?"  Do
you take it to the point that NPCs always remember interaction with
players?  Do you take it beyond that to the point where once a quest
is solved, it changes the landscape forever?  If you have an orc
invasion, does the town stay scarred forever?  Or do these events
reset themselves periodically?  This is where I wrestle with it.
I've thought of different strategies, but none of them make me
happy.  I could have full persistence on a quarterly schedule.
Reset the mud (excepting the player base) 4 times a year.  Could do
it once a year.  Could never reset, and have partial persistence.
Or never reset and only have persistence for things like NPCs
memory.  I'm leaning towards the latter one, but I think it's a fine
line between doing it in a good manner, and doing it terribly.

-Malc
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