[MUD-Dev] Hard Sci-fi muds was Character evolution

[Matt Chatterley]

On Wed, 17 Sep 1997 clawrenc at cup.hp.com wrote:

> In <199709160940.CAA30935 at pc4.zennet.com>, on 09/16/97 
>    at 08:51 AM, "Brandon J. Rickman" <ashes at pc4.zennet.com> said:
> 
> >On Mon, 8 Sep 97 21:53:33 MST, cg at ami-cg.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA
> > (Chris Gray) wrote:
> 
> >Making things decay is tricky without introducing a weird kind of
> >physics.  
> 
> Not necessarily.  You can also introduce various forms of carrion
> consumers (for corpses), or variant forms for the other types of
> decay.

Plus of course the 'corpses as a resource' stuff that we discussed a while
ago. Dead bodies in a forest probably would not last long though as you
say, because of carrion (depending on how fresh they are?). Perhaps some
PCs would dispose of the corpses they leave behind neatly.
 
> >...Imagine how disgusting a mud would be if every
> >room in the newbie area looked like this:
> 
> >  Happy Forestland
> >  You stand in a clearing in the middle of Happy Forestland.  The sun
> >  is shining on the happy green trees.
> >  Your movement is slightly hampered by the rotting corpses of several
> >  thousand dead bunnies.
> >  A fluffy bunny is here.
> 
> With carrion consumers:
> 
>   Happy Forestland
>   You stand in a clearing in the middle of Happy Forestland.  The sun
>   is shining on the happy green trees.
>   The bloody corpse of a bunny is here.
>   A fluffy bunny is here.
>   A badger dashes from the woods, grabs the dead bunny, and disappears
> 
>     back into his set.  You hear the faint sound of chewing and the 
>     pleased stomache grumbles of a well-fed badger.

Heh.
   
> As always, taking a slightly different tack, I have my Trash
> Collectors (TC's)as discussed earlier, which have their own in-built
> ecology based on the avilability of objects for them to consume.  They
> more they can eat, the more they breed (spores).  They more they
> breed, they more they eat.  If they starve to death (not enough
> objects to consume) their spores will hatch along later, hopefully to
> find more plentiful food supplies.

Interesting, at least to observe.

> The intended result is an entire species based on the ecology (and
> economy, implicitly) of the supply of "uninteresting" objects.
> 
> Note: Currently my setup is over-aggressive in this regard.  TC's tend
> to rapidly population explode as they hit a new area, and then starve
> to death in large numbers.  The result is that the world ends up
> swimming in TC spores, which then hatch at a very low
> just-ticking-over rate, eating everthing that's available as soon as
> its is available, and keeping the supply of spores well stocked.  I
> need to fiddle with the cycles there to get a more unstable
> relationship.

No kidding. ;)
 
> >So should we dismiss corpses as being relatively uninteresting
> >details (aside from special corpse-related activities (hey!) like
> >looting and sac'ing)?  I guess it depends on the situation.
> 
> As discussed previously: on eapproach is to look at corpses as a
> resource.  The question then becomes: what can I do that is
> interesting with this resource.

Yup - I remember this discussion clearly. It turns out there are a lot
more things than you might expect to do with corpses!
 
> >_But_ imagine a scenario where for some obscure quest I need to fill
> >up a sack with rabbit bones.  If wholesale rabbit slaughter is a
> >primary focus of the newbie area, shouldn't I expect there to be at
> >least enough rabbit bones in the Happy Forestland to fill a sack? 
> >Even if all the  corpses had already decayed "to dust"?  
> 
> Given that the HFL is home to a large set of badgers, and badgers tend
> to treat bones much the way humans treat candy wrappers...possibly
> not.

Hah. One way around this (not the badgers) is to have corpses decay to
leave mangled skeletons or somesuch.

[Snip]

Regards,
	-Matt Chatterley
	http://user.itl.net/~neddy/index.html
"Smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics." -?