[MUD-Dev] Mounts and Vehicles

[Frederick Nacino]

Greg B wrote:

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

Back in middle of 95 for DikuMUD Nilgiri I created a ship that was
essentially an object that you could enter.  The object was tied to
a zone so when you enter/exit the object you enter/exit the zone.
There was a field on the object where I could script the object to
move in all directions and echo messages to the room or zone the
object was in or internally to the zone the object was tied to.  You
could do things like 'look out' of the ship to see the room the
object was in.  When the object moved from room to room a message
appeared that you were moving.  When the object stopped it could
announce to the zone the arrival of the ship and announce internally
that it has stopped at a particular place.  I think that was widely
successful in transporting people across water and from city to city
as carts.

Next step.  In 2000 I implemented a warship object.  This was a bit
more complicated as players had to have some control of the ship and
be able to do ship to ship battle.  I won't go into details but the
idea was that a captain had to stand in one place within the ship
zone and yell out commands which the ship obeyed.  "Hard to port!
Steady as she goes!" and all that good stuff.  You could mount
cannons on a various parts of the ship and they could only shoot out
the dierction they were pointing in.  So a cannon mounted on the
right side of the ship cannot shoot over the left side.  It took a
person to load a canon with canonball and then take a lit torch and
light the canon in order for the canon to shoot.  Canonballs could
go careening into other ships and appear in the enemy ship zone
exploding in random rooms and had a chance of hitting a player where
they would have to roll for damage and likely die.  The general idea
was you'd have a team of people working together.  Unfortunately it
didn't work out as well as I had wanted.  They are popular during
planned quest skirmishes to see who has the better team.  However,
there weren't enough things for ship owners to do in the normal
sense of the game and people lost interest in it and evntually just
bombarded the cities for fun.

Fred Nacino
_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev