[MUD-Dev] You, the game of philosophy.

[coder at ibm.net]

On 10/12/97 at 01:26 PM, Vadim Tkachenko <vadimt at 4cs.com> said:
>coder at ibm.net wrote:
>> On 18/11/97 at 07:49 PM, Richard Woolcock <KaVir at dial.pipex.com> said:
>> >Derrick Jones wrote:

>>   2) Your soul needs a body or bodies to actually do anything in the (MUD)
>> physical universe (well, until you advance a lot).
>> 
>>   3) Run out of bodies and you die, permanently.

>Not nessessarily - what I intend to do, for example, is divide the soul
>and the body and give soul a chance to conquer a new body (including the
>forementioned rat, if nothing else helps).

The actual scenario is slightly more complex than the comment above.

--<cut>--

Characters are dependant on their bodies.  Diverting also from the
standard religious model, should a character lose all his bodies, the
character will die, permanently, and will be erased from the game. 
Loosing a body comes in a few forms:

  1) The body dies.

  2) Someone else takes over the body and compleatly ousts your possession
and any claims you have to it.  

This last is particularly interesting as most body possessions will be of
the form where the attacker takes control of the body, but does not
compleatly oust the prior owner(s) (the body may have been similarly
stolen before) from the body.  As such what happens is that the new chap
has control of the body, but the old owner(s) are along for the ride and
can see and hear everything the new owner does -- they just can't input
commands to their old body.  What this also means is that should the
latest owner "give up" the body, the previous owners who still have claims
get to fight for it (usually the most recent will win by default).

Note: Having such a partial claim to a body gives a character significant
advantage in trying to reclaim it.  The more recent the claim, the greater
the advantage.

Note: a player with such a partial claim to a body can drop his claim, at
which point he has no claim to the body at all.

Note: Compleatly ousting prior owners from a body is a laborious and
expensive proposition.  It is much easier in general to just wrest control
and leave the hangers on at that.  It does make it more likely that they
might grab the body back, but it sure saves a lot of effort and
debilitating work.

Note: A character will not die if it loses all its bodies but has
remaining an interest in a body it does not control.  A character only
dies and is deleted when it loses all contact with the game world --
ie all bodies are dead and no claims exist.

--<cut>--

>>   6) The more bodies you control the greater your pool of abilities, and
>> the greater the strain on you.

>Well, hive-mind monster comes to my mind here, as well as Civilization or
>other games where you control group behavior.

Quite.  I have swarm type bodies, as well as other less organised forms
and the common single-body humanoids.  Swarm type bodies have the
advantage of being effectively immortal, but the disadvantage of being
exasperaring and confusing to play and control (the individual motes are
grouped by minimum convex hulls into "blobs" each of which is treated as a
seperate "individual" until it joins with another blob or fractures into
multiple blobs.

>>   7) No global namespace.
>
>What is a definition of namespace, please? I believe I've missed it -
>still 233 unread messages in November archive :-((

The concept and definition of a namespace is rather older than that and
actually derives from programming.  C++ now has an explicit language token
"namespace" for instance.

A namespace is a logical domain or field in which names or tokens are
defined.  For instance, in a common MUD like an LP, or DIKU say, all the
players and objects names are defined in a global namespace.  This means
that everything is available as a name and can be referenced by name
everywhere, and that name will be resolved to the appropriate object or
semantic token -- it is a global namespace.  

I don't do this,  I have no global names.  I have no objects, names, or
anything else which is known by name evyerwhere.  For something to have a
name, some character must first give it a name, at which time that object
has that name for that character only.  For any other character to know
that object by a name, they too must first give it a name.  All names are
private to their defining characters.  Thus player names are not globally
defined, instead they are locally defined on the individual characters. 
The result is that every character defines his own names for every other
character, body, and object he finds, and those names could be all
different, but most importantly, none of those names are shared with
anybody else.

eg  Say we have a character we call "Bubba".  Jon Lambert could well know
him as "Boffo", Nathan as "Bernie", Alex as "Bluto", etc.  Those names
would be private to their individual namespaces.  Jon would have no idea
who "Bubba" was, or might well have the name "Bubba" assigned to some
other character.  Similarly for the rest of them.  A particular character
may have a name he would like to be known by, such as you might prefer to
be known as "Vadim", but there is no way of requiring that anybody else
actually use that name in refering to you.  It is merely a request.

>> The bodies of a logged out character remain in the game.  It is up to the
>> player to arrange for their safekeeping as needed.  This can be done via
>> user programming, using services provided by other players, or whatever
>> method that player see's fit.  If he does nothing, the body merely sits
>> there, a vegetative piece of meat, reacting to nothing.

>Once again, this is not quite realistic...

Of course its not realistic, but then neither is the current solution of
merely removing the character in its entirety.  I'm not after creating
realism here.  I'm after logical consistancy.

>...I'd propose a situation when
>any logged out character is in his/her private universe, and (like RL)
>you can find this universe and get into it, but you have to have certain
>abilities to do that.

A different model.  I really like it in some ways, but I specifically want
to keep unprotected logged-out characters easy prey if they can be
located.

>Side question (I've asked it here before, I believe) - did anybody here
>read Roger Zelazny's 'Castle Amber'? 

Yup.  Fair concept, excruciatingly poorly executed.

FWLIW I view the Amber series as Zelazny's worst work and almost trash in
comparison to the rest of his output.  His rewrites of other mythologies
OTOH (Cat, Lords of Light, My Name is Legion, etc) are pure brilliance. 
Even his shorts, such as "The Doors of His Face, The Eyes of His Mouth"
(or do I have that wrong again?) far far far outclass anything in the
Amber tripe (that particular short being worthy of multiple awards).

>If not, do it - a whole different
>concept - I haven't seen anything like that in MUDs yet, perhaps because
>his world concept is analog (gradient) rather than a digital one used
>historically in D&D and then in MUDs.

And thus incredibly difficult to represent, showing all the same modelling
problems as retroactive time travel.

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