[MUD-Dev] People were talking about resets..

[John Buehler]

Tand'a-ur writes:

> I've been watching this thread for a while because I recently made
> my own mock ecology from resets. It seems most people want really
> heavy simulation by keeping track of different things like food,
> current population etc.

> As most of you know, you can make a very complex and cool system
> and the players might not know the differenace between that and a
> very heavily faked system.  So I took the route of faking it.

[snip]

> Basically the whole point of this rambling email is you can create
> something that is not very complex using existing variables which
> will appear pretty much the same to the players as something which
> is very complex and took up 10x more of your time.

If the purpose of your game is to let players kill things, then
obviously a simulated ecology with complex behaviors is going to be
pointless.  Such players don't want complex behaviors, they just
want targets.  They want *interesting* targets, but that generally
means that their behavior makes them more entertaining to kill,
which is not necessarily aligned with a simulated ecology.

If you want to provide greater variety of experience with your
ecology, then that 'very complex' implementation is probably going
to be worth it.  Because after a certain point, manually 'faking'
all those many behaviors is going to take more time and effort than
just modeling the underlying forces of an ecology.

Also, once ecology modeling code becomes available as a toolkit
(ideally as components), people will be cranking out ecologies in
games like nobody's business.

JB

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