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68: Re: Just a bit of musing

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From: coder@ibm.net
Newsgroups: nu.kanga.list.mud-dev
Date: Wed, 26 Feb 97 22:11:14 -0800
References: [1]
Organization: Kanga.Nu
On 26/02/97 at 02:31 PM, Nathan Yospe <yospe@hawaii.edu> said:

>OK, I'm not sure how many of us are back up here... and I'm not sure if
>this is even going to get through, as I've been having very slow response
>times for this list... but here goes on a little free pondering.

Sorry about the response times.  As I mentioned earlier this is running
off my dialup account, and while I try to poll for mail every day,
sometimes the wife and I conspire to miss a day or so.  (Aside: My ISP has
also been having mail backups recently which bit rather hard over the
weekend and late last week).

I'll try to keep it flowing better, but no promises on anything better
than a 24hr turn-around time.

NB I'll address the 3D continuous space concept in another reply.  I need
to go conspire not to do mail right now.

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw@null.net
----------(*)                              Internet: coder@ibm.net
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...

n collect all you want, but you then spend all your time trying to maintain it. Sure you can get the NiftyMagicalSwordOfSemiUltimateBeheading, but it requires LOTS of mana, and if you carry any other magical objects, they and the sword will decay at an increased pace. Carry four or five super magical objects and the half life start getting close to low single digit minutes. Want to keep them? It will take all your time just collecting or making enough mana to keep them up to par. >This is what I made up for a CRPG some years back: The HQ which the >platoon should have reported to realises something has happened so sends >a scout to figure what's up, if this immoral killing of hapless soldiers >continue, the HQ would report back to it's regional HQ which will send in >the cavalry. Errr, and so on. So everything has a limit, if the 23rd >platoon just got vapourised, it shouldn't come back unless the regiment >reformed it. Maybe this doesn't really apply to muds too well coz it was >originally planned for a computer game. The OrcCaves: There is a set of underground caves and tunnels. A certain (small) set of those caves have no entrances, and cannot be teleported to. Such caves contain "breeders". Breeders produce new baby Orcs at a rate proportional to the current Orc population. New Orcs "appear" in the accessable caverns. Baby Orcs produced fall into one of four types: grunts, new breeders, fighters, and nobles. The ration of the types produced is based on the current general mortality rate, mortality rate in the caverns, total population (crowding) etc. An Orc of any type can and will mutate into an Orc of the next higher or lower type should the current environment request i. (eg caverns under attack, breeders start turning into fighters to defend their spawn). Individuals of any type will tend to group with individuals of the same type, breeders with breeders, fighters with fighters, nobles with nobles. If nothing else is around, another type is better than nothing. A single noble will preferentially group with a sufficiently large group of fighters. Should their already be a noble in residence, the nobles will fight for control (one dies). (And thus there were clans) A noble/fighter group will generally ignore all other groups -- except for noble-less fighter groups, which will attempt to join it. Noble groups are unstable, and will tend to split up every so often. One noble per cavern will become a "King". If the King dies, then noble groups will congregate and mutually annihilate until a surviving Orc is tagged as King. Result: Normally the Orcs breed like rabbits. Once the population builds up enough to get crowded they start producting more fighters. Fighters are wanderers, and tend to both group and attack a lot (slight preference for grouping). Thusly, left alone the Orcs wil overrun their caverns and start boiling out upon the outside land with hordes of nasty unpleasant types that chew on the wrong ends of fair maidens. Should such a doughty band find a new set of caverns, they may decay to breeders, with their keys set to the new cavern system. (ie a new colony which _can_ be eradicated)) Should the caverns in any state be invaded by slaughtering players or mobiles, the breeders will start producing more and more fighters to repell the invasion. Etc. A simple enough system that provokes all sorts of interesting patterns. Take the same base and extend it with a few twists and extra behaviours and now you have mining dwarves, elves in the forest, the human King's castle and outlieing farms etc. Rool a bunch of theese all into a shared land, and you start getting an active animated universe which runs itself. -- J C Lawrence Internet: coder@null.net ----------(*) Internet: coder@ibm.net ...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...