[MUD-Dev] Re: Affordances and social method

[quzah]

-----Original Message-----
From: Jon A. Lambert <jlsysinc at ix.netcom.com>
To: mud-dev at kanga.nu <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
Date: Saturday, August 01, 1998 11:41 AM
Subject: [MUD-Dev] Re: Affordances and social method

[Snip about players building everything]

>Sounds similar to the start of Age of Empires, WarCraft or 
>Civilization.  Those games seem to have worked well.  :)

True, but I was thinking in a more basic term. Something like
here's a rock, here's a branch, here's a vine, build a hammer.
Here's a hammer, here's Bubba, smack bubba and take his rock.

(grin) Then some time, things would naturally get a bit more
advanced. [Though I'm not sure how they'd eventually get around
to inventing metal -- perhaps discover that one of the rocks
encircling their camp fire has misshapen due to the heat or
something, and when they smack it with a rock they can shape
it ??] Then we'd get to like:

%design wall
What makes up a 'wall'?
%wall structure == 2 end posts, 4 cross posts, and thatching

Or something far to comples for the mortal mind to program (or
at least mine at the moment ;)

Actually, that's not how I'd do it, but you get the general
idea. At first, you'd have to design the very basic building
blocks of the world: rock, stick, et cetera. The things that
would be naturally found in the purest form of the world.
Then it would progress as more and more peoples inhabited it,
and with that, more things would be 'common'. For example,
soon you'd see "fire circles" (circles of rocks on the ground
where you start your fire ;) and you'd know that that is
where the fires are started. Naturally, fire would have to be
discovered first. -- Soon, a hut would be common place, and
so on and so on.

Then you'd have to add in obsoleting. -- To a point. A rock
would not obsolete, for it would be be the building block for
concrete -- er cement. (No, damnit, I can't spell) But some
things may perhapse obsolete themselves. Unless you went to
a section of the world far removed from the more advanced
sections. (You wander far off into the mountains, and by
god, a hut would be a really nice thing to have right about
now since its raining.)

But yeah, the general idea of a warcraftish thing is very
similar -- again, I was thinking of the extreme though.
(Also the fact that you would be 1 person, and not an army.)

-Q-

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