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Old 05-06-2013, 12:16 AM   #134
plamzi
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Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"

To me, this raises more questions than it answers. It seems like you're assuming that each tile will represent a room. If that's so, then how do you visualize (any number of) PC's, NPC's, and objects, all in the same room? Stacking them on one tile will make it impossible for PC's to target individual NPC's, which pretty much any typical MUD allows you to do. Of course, you can choose to impose a set of constraints that make stacking possible (by implementing collision checks that keep NPC's, PC's, and objects on separate tiles, always have NPC groups with leaders, etc.) but it will not be very long before the domino effect kicks in and you find yourself needing a very different world and a different set of rules.

Civilization does have collision checks, in the sense that another player's units and your own cannot occupy the same tile. Like roguelike games, it assumes that when you try to occupy the same tile, you are attacking. In any game, this leads to limitations on how attacks and targetting works. This in turn has implications for the kinds of attacks (be they weapons, spells, or skills) the game can implement.

I don't know how Pokemon does things exactly, but if you mean that it doesn't show your own avatar, then this really simplifies very little in an online game where you have to show other players' avatars to enable co-op or PvP play.

I thought about these challenges a lot 3 years back when I was designing my app UI. My goal was to visualize a typical Diku world design rather than throw away years of extremely creative content. It was part of my project to try and dust off this content for a new generation of players, so I wanted to visualize it in a way that forced no major redesigns. I could see no way to achieve that goal by using a roguelike tileset.
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