[MUD-Dev] Re: Scaling a world.

[Patrick Dughi]

On Mon, 24 Jul 2000, Nat Blundell wrote:

> For populating the map I use a bit mapped image (e.g. GIF) to map converter.
> This unfortunately is quite slow, but it seems to work fine. (It's slow
> because I use IPC to ask the running mud server to make the changes. I'm
> sure I could dramatically speed it up by just writing the GIF into the raw
> map file.) One major advantage of this is that you can digitise a real map
> of you favourite continent/island/town.

	Actually, I have it setup so that changes are written to a size
limited queue.  When required the queue is examined to see if the default
gif-map is used, or if the contents of the queue are used.  At periods of
inactivity, or when the queue is filled, the changes are commited
en-masse, by the server itself.  Seems to work okay, though I'm still in
beta.  Some of the changes are 'temporarily permenant' - such as dropped
items, or rooms containing monster corpses, or specific room (mainly
description) changes.  This is actually how I deal with zone entrances,
they're temporarily permenant entrances.  

	Yes, the zones are not on the map.  Different distance scales.

> 
> Once this information is in I use code based on that developed by Richard
> Woolcock and myself for the Dark/Last City mud (I believe the original idea
> was his) to create dynamic descriptions of each room. With some careful text
> processing and a lot of imagination Rich has been able to generate some very
> lurid descriptions.
> 

	For the dynamic room description, the biggest problem I have is
not generating a variety of room descriptions but making sure that I have
a constant type between rooms.  For example, if I have two forest rooms
which are 'maximum' forest types (surrounded on all sides by at least 3
rooms deep of forest), I always want one to be distinct from the other,
AND to be constant.  So if one has a broken stump and the other a bed of
pine needles, that will stay.

	Of course, it seems silly to end up saving this level of detail
for each room in the system.  I'm open to suggestions, but the best I
could get was a sort of hash of the coordinates having some influence.


> As far as moving around a large map is concerned- I'm waiting for Rich to
> solve the problem, then I'll pinch his ideas :)
> 
	You mean, the fact that a player will require a certain real-life
amount of time to traverse the world?  Why else would you have such a
great world if you did not, infact want your characters to have such
unlimited exploration potential? If you let them move too freely, your
world will shrink back to normal size.  Worse comes to worse, do what
Diablo II does for massive scenery changes; either a boat ride to the
east, or a stable magic portal?  You get the idea.  Some sort of focused
transportation, so they still can get around,but also still have a need to
explore.

						PjD

	





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