20 Oct, 2010, jurdendurden wrote in the 1st comment:
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I've come to the conclusion that it is going to be nigh impossible for me to hire enough active builders to create an entire game world in a reasonable amount of time. Through this I have been thinking of generating the world's content (a one time basis, not each time it reboots), laying it out, then going over it all and then having the builders that I do have just polish it up (add progs, fine details, unique npc's, etc.).

Does anyone have any thoughts on this? I have a world map already and I was trying to think of some way to have the game "read" the layout of it and go from there.
20 Oct, 2010, Tavish wrote in the 2nd comment:
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What sort of format is your world map in? Are you using a standard room based world or a coordinate style design?
20 Oct, 2010, jurdendurden wrote in the 3rd comment:
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Well being as I don't want to trash the existing original zones that the builders have thus far created, I am somewhat forced into keeping the room system, which is kind of a bummer. I could still lay out the rooms themselves into a like… 4000X4000 array or something…

ROOM_INDEX_DATA * world[4000][4000];


The whole thing is, I don't want it dynamically created each time I boot…. in fact the more I think about it I want to just make a create_random_area command, that I can pass arguments like… area_type (forest,city), exotic (may have anti_magic rooms or something), a boolean for underground, and other neat stuff. Could just make like…. 40 of these then manually link them all together. *shrug*
20 Oct, 2010, Bobo the bee wrote in the 4th comment:
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I've been eyeballing this approach myself, since I think I'll be in the same boat. I'll probably end up using a random_dungeon command to create new dungeons for people to explore, but I've really thought long and hard about creating many of my areas with a script, especially generic towns out in the wilderness. I am going to be using a co-ordinate based system, so at least I have that going for me – I do think it'll be easier to create a world that way.

I love the idea of it, though I'm a far way off from working on it.
20 Oct, 2010, Rudha wrote in the 5th comment:
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You could perhaps tie random generation to certain zones with a zone that has the 'random_dungeon' flag or something, which is something I've been considering myself for certain areas.

Maya/Rudha
20 Oct, 2010, jurdendurden wrote in the 6th comment:
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Oh that's a really good idea, that way the "arguments" would just be the settings in AEDIT. Then you could just have it create the area based on these when you type asave world or asave changed (Or whatever respective commands they are outside of Rom). Once it's created, you could set some boolean value to let it know not to re-create it again… unless told otherwise via some other command/flag. Sounds pretty slick.
20 Oct, 2010, Rudha wrote in the 7th comment:
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Well, the way I thought about doing it myself is to have a section in the ZEDIT for "Random generation" inside of which you would have a few different way to tweak with it. A variable for seed, one to define what kind of area it was (dungeon, city, etc etc). I would probably make it so that it was regenerated on resets, myself, and then if you wanted that randomly generated area to be a little longer lasting, you could then just lengthen the reset. Dont want it to regenerate? Make it a no reset zone. Seems sensical to me.

Maya/Rudha
20 Oct, 2010, jurdendurden wrote in the 8th comment:
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Well I decided to stick with what I had said in the previous post with a slight variation… instead of randomly generating the area when it saves… instead I'll just have it generate it when the flag is set. Cuts out a step or two.
21 Oct, 2010, quixadhal wrote in the 9th comment:
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What I always wanted to do, was to have an algorithm generate a random seamless world, but allow builders to just overwrite generated data with traditional rooms as they wander around. Minecraft is a recent example of the idea. Initially, you generate one "chunk" of world data at coordinates 0,0,0. You tweak a couple of paramaters to ensure that first chunk is useable land (although you could also just re-roll until you get that). From there, you generate new chunks as anyone wanders close enough to an edge.

At any point, you can just choose to edit the room, which works just like a traditional MUD. So, if you want to lay out a city in a 40x60 rectangle, just walk around until you find a nice looking chunk of land and edit as you like. The only constraints you'd really have is that at least part of your custom work has be euclidean to mesh with the coordinate system. You could make a entry point that moves to a different coordinate set (or none at all).

It's on my list of things to do if I ever get back to really working on my MUD. :)

It should be noted that I'm using an LpMUD style of system, where "zones" are just for administrative purposes. Rooms are loaded one-at-a-time as something touches them, so you set up a virtual room system where if the room that's being loaded doesn't exist, you randomly generate one that would fit. If you use Diku-style zones, you might have to do the entire zone when that happens.
21 Oct, 2010, Quarlash wrote in the 10th comment:
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I've always liked the idea of evolving or growing zones. Zones which would adjust to their surroundings, the age, seasons, etc. It could be as simple as vines growing over an old path (making xyz inaccessible? Or inaccessible until Person1 comes through with a machete?) and animals creating a new path elsewhere, or decorations for seasonal times (Snow on the ground for winter for example).

There's always a lot of emphasis placed on the initial development of zones, and lots of them, but rarely any on slowly changing zones to keep them feeling comfortable, but with new and interesting exploratory twists. Realistically, I'm sure I just casually touched on a massive project for most muds, but it would seem a logical step for even muds which have weather.

I'm not sure of the value in it, other than the atmosphere it would provide to the mud. It may not be a core system like combat, or socializing, but it would definitely be a supporting feature to the mud and give it more character.
22 Oct, 2010, Bobo the bee wrote in the 11th comment:
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Quarlash said:
I've always liked the idea of evolving or growing zones. Zones which would adjust to their surroundings, the age, seasons, etc. It could be as simple as vines growing over an old path (making xyz inaccessible? Or inaccessible until Person1 comes through with a machete?) and animals creating a new path elsewhere, or decorations for seasonal times (Snow on the ground for winter for example).

There's always a lot of emphasis placed on the initial development of zones, and lots of them, but rarely any on slowly changing zones to keep them feeling comfortable, but with new and interesting exploratory twists. Realistically, I'm sure I just casually touched on a massive project for most muds, but it would seem a logical step for even muds which have weather.

I'm not sure of the value in it, other than the atmosphere it would provide to the mud. It may not be a core system like combat, or socializing, but it would definitely be a supporting feature to the mud and give it more character.


It's small features like that which can really be the difference to a player staying or leaving, and unique features are almost always admired, even if they aren't liked. I hope to do something like this with my Mud, but the problem comes up when I ask myself: "Is the reward worth the time put into it?" I believe that it is, but I'm not entirely sure, and the 'time put into it' will likely be quite a lot to create even simple aging.
22 Oct, 2010, Rudha wrote in the 12th comment:
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It's the primary reason that I developed dynamic descriptions on the mud, really, to add those kinds of things to it. As NakedMud uses python scripting, it was exceedingly easy to implement that kind of thing for time of day, doors being open or closed, or basically anything that you could test for in a conditional statement.

The real 'cost' becomes how much work an individual room becomes. Designing a room with that kind of intricate detail is almost like making a work of art. It's something that you have to enjoy to really end up doing again and again over an entire zone and world. Personally, I like and take pride in the feeling that when Im making a room like that with that kind of artistic detail and intricacy, but I can also see the argument for the people who want quantity of rooms etc. Of course, in time Elvenblade's going to have both. Or I'll go crazy and start eating my fellow immortals one by one. Either way, its bound to be a spectacle.

Maya/Rudha
22 Oct, 2010, jurdendurden wrote in the 13th comment:
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Definately like the vines growing over things of age, and other factors that would make the world seem alive and "growing". It is a massive project though, and I think I'm going to split it up into increments. My working test right now creates a random zone, which sets sectors based on the type of area it is. Then it goes through and assigns generic room names, and a one liner description… "This is a forest", "This is a road", etc. It will assign around 85 rooms to a 100 vnum area. What I'm pondering now is continuity. If I'm making entire continent from thin air, they have to have some sort of flow, like the rivers flowing from mountain into the forests, and things of that nature. Which brings up a more immediate problem… handling exits. It's easy in a forest where you can go any direction, and I suppose roads are easy…but creating cities and such is a much different task.
22 Oct, 2010, Dean wrote in the 14th comment:
Votes: 0
jurdendurden said:
Definately like the vines growing over things of age, and other factors that would make the world seem alive and "growing". It is a massive project though, and I think I'm going to split it up into increments. My working test right now creates a random zone, which sets sectors based on the type of area it is. Then it goes through and assigns generic room names, and a one liner description… "This is a forest", "This is a road", etc. It will assign around 85 rooms to a 100 vnum area. What I'm pondering now is continuity. If I'm making entire continent from thin air, they have to have some sort of flow, like the rivers flowing from mountain into the forests, and things of that nature. Which brings up a more immediate problem… handling exits. It's easy in a forest where you can go any direction, and I suppose roads are easy…but creating cities and such is a much different task.


Maybe having a pre-defined set of layouts for cities and selecting one of those as appropriate?
22 Oct, 2010, Bobo the bee wrote in the 15th comment:
Votes: 0
jurdendurden said:
Which brings up a more immediate problem… handling exits. It's easy in a forest where you can go any direction, and I suppose roads are easy…but creating cities and such is a much different task.


Certainly random generators is not something I have any experience in, to date, but you could consider first creating a bare skeleton of rooms to serve as streets, maybe first have wall_roads that outline the place, then look every so many rooms in the roads to start creating intersections, have roads within cities be straight_road, curved_road, etc. to dictate direction, set further flags on roads to have things like market_road, residential_road, noble_road, to help the generator pick themes for certain streets, and maybe see how you go from there. Larger cities are one of the things that I'm not so sure it'd be a good idea to generate by code, because of their complexity.

Dean said:
Maybe having a pre-defined set of layouts for cities and selecting one of those as appropriate?


Depending on how important the city is, that could be a good idea. Smaller towns and villages I plan on doing this for and then adding some code to mix up the layout a bit. If you repeat a layout too much then people will, I think, catch on very, very quickly and it'll likely detract somewhat from the overall game. The pc/console game Mass Effect really suffered from this, when many of the side-quest dungeons were the same exact layout with different boxes and cover inhabiting them.
22 Oct, 2010, quixadhal wrote in the 16th comment:
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Look to the past for good examples of world generation. :)

There are plenty of old games that did this, just not any in the MUD realm. Conquer v4 and Dominion come to mind as multiplayer war games with text interfaces and fractal world generation. Dwarf Fortress does an excellent job, but source isn't available for it. Some of the roguelike games are good for dungeon-style map generation (Moria comes to mind).

There are also tools available for the RPG community that generate graphical maps for wilderness/cities/etc. They're aimed at AD&D players, but there's no reason you couldn't use them for other things.

In both the Dwarf Fortress and RPG tools case, even though source isn't available, you could use them as map generators and then parse the output, if you like.
22 Oct, 2010, KaVir wrote in the 17th comment:
Votes: 0
Bobo the bee said:
It's small features like that which can really be the difference to a player staying or leaving, and unique features are almost always admired, even if they aren't liked. I hope to do something like this with my Mud, but the problem comes up when I ask myself: "Is the reward worth the time put into it?" I believe that it is, but I'm not entirely sure, and the 'time put into it' will likely be quite a lot to create even simple aging.

Hard question to answer. Some people argue that it's not worth adding a feature that doesn't enhance the gameplay, but I've found that purely cosmetic features can indeed make a huge difference, and that you really need a balance of the two.

I use dynamic generated descriptions, so for me it's not such a big task to change the descriptions based on combinations of weather, season, time of day, etc. Likewise, although much of my world is laid out by hand, it's made up of predefined tiles - sections of landscape. So I can quite easily have lakes that freeze over during winter, tides that go in and out, and so on.

However these are cyclic things, with the world always going through the same fixed series of states - the four seasons, the same sequence of tide levels, etc. Even the weather, which can be less predictable, doesn't have any lasting impact.

If you want persistent changes, such as expanding forests, then it becomes more difficult.
22 Oct, 2010, Tavish wrote in the 18th comment:
Votes: 0
quixadhal said:
Look to the past for good examples of world generation. :)

There are plenty of old games that did this, just not any in the MUD realm. Conquer v4 and Dominion come to mind as multiplayer war games with text interfaces and fractal world generation. Dwarf Fortress does an excellent job, but source isn't available for it. Some of the roguelike games are good for dungeon-style map generation (Moria comes to mind).

There are few roguelikes out there that have some solid city / forest / cave generators as well as the normal dungeon types.
22 Oct, 2010, Bobo the bee wrote in the 19th comment:
Votes: 0
KaVir said:
I use dynamic generated descriptions, so for me it's not such a big task to change the descriptions based on combinations of weather, season, time of day, etc. Likewise, although much of my world is laid out by hand, it's made up of predefined tiles - sections of landscape. So I can quite easily have lakes that freeze over during winter, tides that go in and out, and so on.

However these are cyclic things, with the world always going through the same fixed series of states - the four seasons, the same sequence of tide levels, etc. Even the weather, which can be less predictable, doesn't have any lasting impact.


One thing I'd like to be able to do is really set climate zones – ie, the northern wastes might be more harsh than the middle zones. How easy would it be for you to handle that? Now that I think about it just a moment more, I don't think it'd be that hard to just add another zone atop several others that help govern behavior. Northern_Zone->Lake could easily enough have a whole different sequence of affects than Middle_Zone->Lake. So I guess I answered my own question with that. One could even make it so that winter affects different regions first and have storms that develop in one section move to bordering ones and unleash whatever affects that brings with it.
27 Oct, 2010, drifton wrote in the 20th comment:
Votes: 0
where the randomly generated worlds really come into being is for resource acquisition and the ability to generate new resources from locations, the biggest issues is the repetitiveness of content at this point and generation of description based on the provided information of a given tile type or set of tiles if you have a road the is 20 rooms long in the middle of a field that is the same for those 20 rooms it gets boring quickly, just like if all your forest rooms are all the same, its the generating of enough detail so that each room is potentially different, dwarffortress goes a long way into providing this level of detail and according to toady its still a long way off from what he wants,

the other great possibility with this style of world generation is the ability for players to influence the development of the world and areas through their actions, either them clearing a field in the middle of the woods to build a farm. where the farm is exposed to goblin attacks because there aren't any guards to protect the farm, the population of the farm incresses and becomes self sustaining so the player decides to open a saw mill to break down trees into lumber and sell to other players to build houses or the goverment to build ships ect… that small mill and farm now needs a black smith and housing to support workers forming that original farm into a small village with trade systems to towns to the north and south so they open an inn to handle traffic and it continues
0.0/20