[MUD-Dev] Cognitively Interesting Combat

[Peter A. Harkins]

On Wed, Sep 08, 2004 at 12:37:04PM -0400, Zach Collins (Siege) wrote:
> On Tue, 7 Sep 2004, cruise wrote:

>> The main qualities I was aiming for:

>> Choice and strategy.  Variation - sometimes complex, sometimes
>> quick and simple.  Easy to learn, but hard to game, with no
>> guaranteed win.

> After looking at this, the only question I have, is how well will
> this work in realtime?  In PHP, it's a matter of "respond when the
> player acts"; and I already thought it would be a pretty good
> system for turn-based games.

This is not a limitation of PHP, it is a limitation of the
non-interactive nature of HTTP. My PHP mud Hennepin is realtime, and
can schedule single or repeating events with the same precision as
any other mud. That is, you can write your main game loop to poll
for scheduled events with a resolution down to a couple dozen times
a second[1] with the limitation that if an event takes too long to
compute, you might delay some events. This can be trivially extended
to require each command to take a certain amount of time and to
optionally queue up commands.


  [1] This is just an offhand estimate, because ten or twenty times
  a second is really all you need to provide the illusion of
  realtime to players over networks.
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