[MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN] How big is enough?

[David Johansson]

On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 9:45 PM, Ian Hess <ianhess at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I've been hacking at a hobby project for some time,between playing and
> administrating various games.  Ingoing back to work on my db schema
> again, I've runinto questions about how big to make the world, andthe
> obvious fallout in performance and storage, as wellas population
> density.
>
> I've been thinking about a world size in terms of howlong it could take
> a determined character to walk fromone side to the other.  I was curious
> if there are othermetrics that might be better used to determine a
> maximumscale to plan for.
>
> Thanks,
> Ian Hess


In my opinion, do not strive to mark a territory and then fill it with
content, fill it with content from inside and out, then see after you have
added all your content, if the world feels large enough.

If it feels a little too small, you can stretch out your content, increase
the distances between the points of interest, generate random areas in
between or something like that, but I always found that assigning the size
of the area before placing the content ended up in catastrophies.

Traveling is boring since it "wastes" time. If traveling is eventful, the
time is not wasted, it is lived and experienced. Handcrafted content is
always more pleasant than randomly generated one. If you have the ability to
instantly travel long distances, whatever you place between the points of
interest, will not be experienced by the players, and then you don't even
have to have it there.