[MUD-Dev] Effective use of the third dimension

[adam at treyarch.com]

On Sun, 21 May 2000, Richard Ross wrote:
> I've had an idea for a flight system - above each outdoor room is a "sky"
> room, (automatically added by the system).  This room allows the character
> to move in the same directions as the "ground" room, and also lets them
> adjust their "altitude".  Other things flying in the same room are only
> listed if they are at the same altitude, although if the player looks around
> they can see everyone in the same sky as them (with indications of height
> difference).
> The uses of this system would be to allow sky-ground combat (flying
> creatures dropping or firing downwards, or dragon's breath scorching the
> ground as it flies).  It also allows flying creatures to easily reach (for
> example) caves that are high up the side of a mountain, and that would take
> a non-flier a perilous climb.
> Has anyone had any luck implementing a working third dimension?  By this I
> mean a fairly freeform "flight" system (not just another form of movement
> through standard rooms)?

Once upon a time I implemented what we called "the grid".  This wasn't
so much an actual physical location, but a set of 3D coordinates attached
to each in-game entity.  When the player moved to a new location, it would
first check to see if there was a room object at that x, y, z location.
If so they would enter it like a normal mud room.  If not, it would generate
a temporary room.  The description would be generated based on two bitmaps
that I had painted in Dpaint - an elevation map, indicating whether they were
at ground level, below ground level (you could tunnel through the ground
with a spell called "earthkin", and swim underwater with waterbreathing), or in
the air (if they were flying); and a terrain map, which indicated whether
the ground there was mountain, forest, plains, desert, water, and so forth.

This obviously gave players a great deal of freedom to move around.  It
also, however, gave a very "big empty world" effect, where it was hard
to find the actual content.  I ended up abandoning the idea, but it was
definitely pretty cool, as it supposed an arbitrarily large world.

Adam





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