[MUD-Dev] Resets, repops and quests

[Matt Chatterley]

[Chris G:]
> [Alex O:]
> 
> :Hello guys.
> 
> Welcome back! :-)

<g> Indeedy.

> :Have been a bit busy a bit lately and didn't follow the discussions.
> :I'm now under a curse compelling me to catch up with the list (~800 messages
> :worth of backlog... <gulp!>).
> 
> I had a co-worker over last night and we spent the evening talking, etc.
> Now I find that I have 75 email messages just this morning!

I had about 40 emails this morning from this list, having been offline for
about 10 hours. Not terribly bad, especially not given the fact that they
all had good appropriate subject lines, and of course, we have almost 100%
signal.
 
> :Anyways, There was an interesting thread about a month ago which discussed
> :resets and repops in a mud.  The consensus seems to be that resets are a thing
> :to be avoided(tm).
> 
> Explicit, game or area-wide resets are something I don't like. Some kind
> of resetting of state is pretty well needed locally, however, else you
> can't have the same puzzle solved more than once.

Yeah. The typical LP way of handling this (I think.. or at least the way I
do it), is that after every X minutes of existance, a room is checked and
reset if necessary (special conditions for reset controllable by a reset()
function which is called). This basically means the room gets cleaned up,
and so forth. Monsters repopulated if specified.. special functions reset
to their initial state. It's rare for rooms near to each other to reset at
the same time, since the timer runs separately for each room.
 
> :The question that was left unanswered is: How can a mud have a working quest
> :system without some kind of resets?
> 
> When I was doing my little quests, the issue that come up is that of how
> a given quest can be solved by different people at the same time. I was not
> able to come up with an answer, and ended up being unsatisfied. One of my
> entire areas shuts out other characters while one character is in it. I
> don't like that, but couldn't see an alternative, given the nature of the
> puzzle in it.
> 
> How *do* others out there solve this?

I approach this in the same way you do - by basically not solving it at
all. I've given this matter a quite extensive amount of consideration and
come up with nothing more satisfactory.

Regards,
	-Matt Chatterley
	http://user.itl.net/~neddy/index.html
"Fishing is complete and utter madness."  -Spike Milligan