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Old 12-03-2012, 05:45 PM   #20
camlorn
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Re: A huge grid world

Well, not exactly. Sectors are probably pointless-ish here.

I mean, 99% of the world the way you want it won't be seen or used. Avoid sectors, and to be quite honest, "towers" can be built by allowing one to simply extend beyond the "top" of the sky. That eliminates rather a lot of rooms right there.

I honestly think that most players won't admire this kind of set-up. It depends on what you want from it specifically. If this is going to be hack and slash with building, well...nononono.

I have considered making an rts mud, crossing it with godwars2 like movement (it'd be a hybrid, because you are a god, and if not inhabiting a body move around by rooms which are x*x regions, kind of thing). In my use case, which is debateably too complicated to be fun, the fact that you have a 10x10 kingdom or larger is a core component of gameplay--worshippers kind of thing, I never started it so I didn't work out the thematic details. Every player gets one, and the world expands with the players (again, sort of; I'd not let the map become some wierd shape).

The problem here is this. Unless building is a core part of gameplay, i.e. newbies will be doing it from day one, and hack and slash is supported by building, there's no point to so much space. You'll have the classic problems muds have these days: a huge world and 10 players, who never run into each other. If players can build the world, and if you want a space constraint i.e. all rooms are 1 unit, don't do it this way. You don't need all this, and I'd say over 99%, maybe even as much as 99.9% of all your rooms are going to be generic template rooms that no one will care about.

Minecraft works because there is a 3d graphical representation. If I go build a mile-high sign that says something, or some sort of ALU, I can get the big picture or see my ALU working (well, not me, but). This doesn't work so well in muds. Ascii diagrams can show at most one layer and at most 2 dimensions. It's like the hypercube, the closest way to conceptualize it is a 3d cube moving through time, but we can only see the limited 3d cube (I know that that's not what a hypercube is, not really. It's only a 4-dimensional cube, the 4th dimension doesn't have to be time, but for our example...), we can't see the part of it that conceptually extends into the 4th dimension. In a mud, the most graphical information you can ever give is 2 dimensions at once, and you run into the same problem. You can show a 2-dimensional cross-section of a 3-dimensional object, no more. You've now lost either height or width, can't have both at the same time.

From a technical standpoint, this sounds like an awesome mud. Great programming skill, great tech usage, etc...but step back a moment. How sure are you that it will be "fun"? How sure are you that players will care?

Perhaps, play godwars2. I totally see why this sounds cool, but I also totally see why KaVir eventually abandoned the room. Rooms are great for builders or for any building-like abstraction, but for a world this size, maybe it's time to consider being the second roomless mud. I'm only keeping rooms in my "dream" mud that I'd like to program one day because it makes rts-like stuff possible. My specific idea is the "region", which is like a room but also like a little miniature godwars2 environment, wherein you can move around in 2d space (I considered godwars2 clone. But if you have a "region" with "features", it's possible to do some...unique things).

As to the actual programming, sectors work to an extent, yes. I just don't think that there's a point in diong all this stuff. The comment about muds typically not going above 200mb is true in most cases, and we are talking large, quality muds here. I believe Discworld, one of the largest still-existing muds, is somewhere around 2 gb, but that's with hundreds of players running around generating loot and leaving it about, etc.

If you can find code, and if it was ever even released, maybe look at empiremud.
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