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KaVir · 11-16-2005, 03:41 AM

Well I guess the terminology I used is a bit ambigious, but I by 'grid-based' I was referring to a style of room-based mud in which each specific X/Y/Z position is represented by a room. From what I understood of Traer's post, that is the style of world he's gone for; room-based like most muds, but with the rooms laid out at specific X/Y/Z positions like a traditional wilderness system.

If your rooms are laid out on X/Y/Z coordinate points, you can just assign certain rooms to be solid matter, or give them walls. This can be quite an advantage for certain styles of mud, as it removes much of the limitation of traditional exits. For example in a stock Diku, if you want to walk 'north' in a forest where no north exit exists, it's not possible because there's no way to know what should be there. But with this approach you always know what's there, and could easily give players the commands to hack their way through thick foliage, fly over the edge of a cliff, or even smash their way through the wall of a building.

My old room-based approach used a 512x512 2D array of pointers to 10x10 grids, each stored in two bumped double-linked lists (one for the Z plane, the other representing the total list of grids), and consisted of slightly over a billion rooms. Grids were initialised based on a second 2D array of default templates (which fit together like a jigsaw to create a map), with altered grids saved to disk (so if you chopped down a chunk of forest, or build a house, it would be persistant). There was no real 'centre', I just picked a good point and assigned it as the starting location.

However, as I pointed out previously, it didn't work out that well in practice. Movement became a pain, as you'd have to type 'north' 4 or 5 times just to get past one building, and with players adding their own houses daily it become increasingly frustrating to navigate through the starting city. Combine that with the combat/movement limitations of room boundries, and it ended up with an almost claustrophobic feel. This was a big part of my motivation for scrapping rooms entirely, and moving to a true coordinate-based system.

11-16-2005, 03:41 AM	#5
KaVir Legend Join Date: Apr 2002 Name: Richard Home MUD: God Wars II Posts: 2,052	Well I guess the terminology I used is a bit ambigious, but I by 'grid-based' I was referring to a style of room-based mud in which each specific X/Y/Z position is represented by a room. From what I understood of Traer's post, that is the style of world he's gone for; room-based like most muds, but with the rooms laid out at specific X/Y/Z positions like a traditional wilderness system. If your rooms are laid out on X/Y/Z coordinate points, you can just assign certain rooms to be solid matter, or give them walls. This can be quite an advantage for certain styles of mud, as it removes much of the limitation of traditional exits. For example in a stock Diku, if you want to walk 'north' in a forest where no north exit exists, it's not possible because there's no way to know what should be there. But with this approach you always know what's there, and could easily give players the commands to hack their way through thick foliage, fly over the edge of a cliff, or even smash their way through the wall of a building. My old room-based approach used a 512x512 2D array of pointers to 10x10 grids, each stored in two bumped double-linked lists (one for the Z plane, the other representing the total list of grids), and consisted of slightly over a billion rooms. Grids were initialised based on a second 2D array of default templates (which fit together like a jigsaw to create a map), with altered grids saved to disk (so if you chopped down a chunk of forest, or build a house, it would be persistant). There was no real 'centre', I just picked a good point and assigned it as the starting location. However, as I pointed out previously, it didn't work out that well in practice. Movement became a pain, as you'd have to type 'north' 4 or 5 times just to get past one building, and with players adding their own houses daily it become increasingly frustrating to navigate through the starting city. Combine that with the combat/movement limitations of room boundries, and it ended up with an almost claustrophobic feel. This was a big part of my motivation for scrapping rooms entirely, and moving to a true coordinate-based system.