I am in the process of writing a science fiction game and I am debating privately with myself during the design process. I know I want to add a sport (or maybe multiple sports) to the game, but I wanted to know if anyone here had any input about how I could implement a somewhat real-time sport and if there are any sports today that would translate well into a MUD system.

Secondary question is...How would I write a room-based world with room tiles accurately ?

I want to write a room system that, like I said, has a map of the room, it's objects, and contents. I am trying to think of how it would work from creation to modification. I want it to be capable of being other shapes besides squares and rectangles and it has to be geographically accurate for the flight system I plan to add.


Thank you.

I think first you need to figure out (and share) what platform you're using to code this with. Lots of types of MUD codebases out there, after all, with different capabilities.

I know what codebase I was using, and it is a bareboned codebase with databasing, sockets, and command interpretation. It is written in C++, though.

Hrm. This is still fairly general and thus hard (for me, at least) to offer advice on how to go about this, since it sounds like you're effectively making your own codebase from scratch. If you used PennMUSH, you could get HSpace - - as a possible spaceflight engine. It automatically handles movement/spatial dimensions, etc. But with other codebases, you could possibly program a system of rooms to represent 'space', have ships coded to move from room to room, set up coordinates ... there are *lots* of possibilities, and that's just talking about spaceflight. It doesn't even get into the idea of sports and how to incorporate/manage them (What skill system will you be using? Do you intend automated or refereed interactions?)

Before anyone can help you in detail, I suspect you're going to need to be a little further along in development. Otherwise, we're just sort of flogging the boards with what-if statements.

Honestly, my intentions for this post where not to have to go in to detail about my particular game. I was curious as to how you guys would do it, on any platform you run your game on. Because I had a feeling this would happen, but forget about my game for now. Just tell me how you would do it on your platform. So just tell me what sport you would implement, either from real-life or from another work of fiction. Explain how you would want it to work, too.


About the room system, I probably do need to clarify that. I want to create a room system which is based on yeah..rooms. Each room contains a grid, which is sort of the map of the room. However if I have one room that is shaped like this:
_|

I want the rooms around it to make sense geographically. Because in a real building, there are no big void spaces between rooms. One of the reasons it will need to be that way is because of the flight system (which I'm going to extend to allow players to fly ships on the planet) will display the actual tiles of the room it is flying over depending on the altitude of the ship.

Well, since it's a science fiction environment, consider the idea of no-grav polo. On my platform, I'd more than likely establish a set of rules for the game, the physics behind them (within reason/playability), and a set of skills applicable to the game using our FUDGE-based system. I might have a coder set up a widget that has a command like +poloroll to automatically compute one player's roll, using a referee-assigned modifier based on the situation.

For example, let's say Player A is trying to knock the ball through Player B's hoop. The ref watching notes that Player A is trying a particularly difficult maneuver, so he assigns a modifier (call it -2) to account for the difficulty. Player A uses +poloroll at -2. Player B uses +poloroll at 0. The higher of the two rolls wins. A tie would favor the defender.

But my platform is more RP-focused, so we do a lot more with referees. You might want to have something more automated that works without referees, in which case you would probably need to have a system that determines where a player is in relation to the enemy's goal/hoop, in relation to other players and in relation to their own goal/hoop. It can get as intricate and involved as your coders can tolerate.

And as far as not specifying codebase is concerned, you were absolutely correct - as stated in the FAQ for this forum, "An appropriate thread should almost never be codebase-specific, and it should not be easily answered - a mud "concept" is very rarely "right" or "wrong", but instead has as many answers as there are posters".

Personally I think I would tend to favour blood sports, as they'd be more in keeping with a bloodthirsty theme and would allow me to build upon the main strength of the mud (combat). Perhaps some sort of gladiator arena where players can fight against each other, or pit themselves against animals, convicts, and that sort of thing. I previously created a small codebase based on that concept, so I may well end up having something similar within my mud. I'd also be interested in contests of skills, such as archery matches and the like (either against targets or living creatures).

For a less combat-intensive mud, you'd probably want to focus on something else - but I'd be wary about building something completely separate from the main infrastructure unless it was intended to be the main focus of the mud.

But either way, you might want to consider avoiding "rooms" and instead use some sort of coordinate-based system (even if just for the playing pitch itself).

See, the only reason I want to avoid full coordinate system is that I believe that room descriptions are a powerful tool in roleplaying games. I also think some sort of visual representation would help as well, but I can't think of a way for it to work cohesively. Like I get stuck on how these rooms would be built or like above how would they be represented if someone was flying over them in a spacecraft.