[MUD-Dev] Mounts and Vehicles

[Koster, Raph]

Greg B wrote:

> I have been thinking about the implementation of mounts and
> vehicles that are separate from the main character in persistent
> worlds.  I was thinking about this in the context of both
> text-based and graphical virtual worlds.

> This was on my mind when I was reading some military simulation
> papers lately involving coordinating multiple jet fighters in
> combat simulations.  This seems to have been going on in graphical
> simulations in the early 1990's.

> Would anyone like to think out loud about when they remember first
> seeing an implementation of vehicles and mounts (text-based and
> graphically)?

Keeping in mind the "separate from the avatar" restriction...

I'm sure there were some forms of vehicles in LambdaMOO. Wasn't
there a hot air balloon ride? I am unsure whether it was "real" or
faked.

LegendMUD had multi-person sailing ships when it officially opened,
I think (I want to say they went in during the beta
period). Basically, there was a GROUPBOAT object type that worked
like boats but worked for whole groups at a time. There were even
some shipping lines reminiscent of today's gryphons in WoW or DAoC's
horses: a mob that moved in the world between two points (the
longest route was London to Macao via Bengal, doing the tea trade
route) and ferried along players who joined his group, for a modest
fee. Groupboats have hold space for cargo, but I think nobody ever
really used it.

Some time later (maybe a year or less, a quick Google Groups search
shows me talking about it by mid-1995) it added full vehicle support
that covered anything from bicycles to submarines to biplanes with
mounted machine guns. It's not all that widely used except is
specialized building areas such as World War I.

You can check it out here: www.legendmud.org or mud.legendmud.org
9999.

UO had mounts and boats upon launch. The mounts were faked by this
process:

  - create a horse mob with a special set of tame-able data on it.

  - create a pair of pants that looked just like a horse walking.

  - when a tame horse was double-clicking, move the horse into the
  invisible container space inside the player (which caused problems
  when the horse started walking around inside the player and
  neighing!)

  - create the "horse pants" and tint them to match the original
  horse, and force-equip them onto the player

Reverse the process to get the horse back, of course.

Boats were multipassenger vehicles that used something called the
'multiobj' system. This was the same system used for houses. UO is a
tile-based world; a multiobj was a single object that had a
client-side definition encompassing lots of tiles, so that a house
or boat could be sent down to the client as one object rather than
as all the individual tiles.

The first pass of a moving multiobj was actually a magic carpet that
you could ride and that used the Z axis. It was never released to
players.  It was based on the prototype of a flying house. :) Moving
multiobjects originally had real trouble crossing server boundaries
and moved very jerkily until some code was added to make them scroll
a bit more smoothly than on tile boundaries.

-Raph
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