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[MUD-Dev] Re: Reputations, More Mazes



J. C. Lawrence:
>???  You questioned the signal to noise ratio of the list, or of your
>ability to contribute to the list?  Ouch.


Sorry, I was unclear.  In the past, I have not posted trivial ideas that
have been sparked by the list because I did not think that they would
significantly add to the conversation.  I am slowly getting a better
idea of where the line between brainstorming and spam is drawn here.  :)

The S:N of Mud-Dev is great.  Lurking here gives me a lot to ponder,
some of the views I agree with, some I do not, but they all make me 
think.

Actually, I think I may have come across wrong a few times in my post,
(I will try and refrain from posting late at night in the future :) so
bear with me while I clarify (and apologize if I offended).

Me:
>> ...for a sophomore in college with a scant four years (mostly self
>> taught) of programming experience.  

No judgement was intended on the value of self teaching here, I was 
just giving a bit of my background.  :)

Me:
>> Quzah's thread on the "maze of the mind" system got me thinking on a
>> better way to model vast, twisting, untamed wilderness without
>> having to store thousands of rarely visited rooms (much less code
>> them).

"Better" refered to manually coding large mazes, not Quzah's method
of maze generation.

---

>In principle this is good stuff (and well workable).  The problem is
>translating it to a workable, interesting and believable environment
>within the game world.  Nobody here has yet done that, tho we have all
>nodded out heads wisely and said, "Yes, that's a good system that
>would work well in principle."  Implementation is a whole other bitch:
>
>  Okay, you have a random value.  Exactly how do you translate that
>into a generated room which is fairly consistent with the rooms
>surrounding it (encluding those NE/NW/SE/SW), or is at least
>believable without being a very simple variation of combinations of a
>few components in a room:
>
>    Tree?  Yes/No
>    Rock?  Yes/No
>    Pond?  Yes/No
>    etc.
>
>  Simple random combinations of the above makes for a mighty boring
>area.


Even with a decent paragraph splicer and fancy ways of saying the same
thing, I am afraid you are right.

Perhaps if the group carries three or four (or 17, whatever) bytes of 
data along with the seed, and used them as restrictions to the possible 
outcomes it might work better?

/*---*/

char *ground_desc[] = {
   "craggy and mountainous",
   "rough and broken",
   "gently hilled",
   "mostly flat"};

char *tree_desc[] = {
   "blue spruce"
   "pine and oak"
   "oak and silver maple"
   "maple and birch"};

char *underbrush_desc[] = {
   "carpets of needles"
   "leaves and thick ivy"
   "shrubs and berry bushes"
   "thick brambles"

byte ground_val = 2;
byte tree_val = 2;
byte underbrush_val = 0;

print( "Around you tower " + tree_desc[tree_val + rand(2)] + 
       " trees, dappling the sun on the " +
       underbrush_desc[underbrush_val + rand(2)] +
       " that cover the " + ground_desc[ground_val + rand(2)] +
       " ground." );

/*---*/

A run of this might result in:

Around you tower oak and silver maple trees, dappling the sun on the
leaves and thick ivy that cover the gently hilled ground.

As long as the _val s stay the same, the land described will stay very
similar.  The values only change when the players move in a direction
specified to increase a value.

Ex:  Use the above simple example, but replace the arrays with sparsly
populated arrays of size 256 (sparse to allow easy additions and to 
allow some items to happen more often), the rand(2) with rand(17) and
limit the byte _val to 256 - 17.  Now, when the players step n, ne, or
nw, add one to the tree_val.  Going s, sw or se subtracts one, and so
on for all the _val s (possibly with different directions).  Then add
more templates, make each paragraph a template, etc.  Of course, there
will always be some funky rooms, but...  over all I think it would
work, provided enough word choices were given.  

I suppose the best way to find out would be to code it.  Ick.  :)

Silence is random
Eli - c718157#showme,missouri.edu






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