MUD world design, Part 2

So, last time I droned on about how worlds work, and how they evolve from a plan (or a lack thereof). I promised to show you how to make a big huge world and still be able to grow bits of it that aren't right next to each other, but first... we need to get a few things straight.

Most MUDs use the concept of a room, as I mentioned before. But what IS a room? What functions does it serve in the game? Do we *have* to use rooms?

We don't need rooms, but they make life simpler in a lot of ways. Most of those ways are good, but a few are lazy. The firs thing rooms do is provide containment. Put simply, players only see what is in the room they are in, they only see people (and NPC's) enter and leave that same room. Combat is limited to the participants in the room. Speech is typically also limited to the room boundaries.

From a coder's point of view, this means a whole lot of checks that we'd have to perform for every action the player or NPC attempts can be simplified down to "am I in the same room as my target?" That's a LOT easier than handling range, line of sight, cover, and all the other things a coordinate based game has to deal with.

It also makes life easier on the builder. When designing an area, the builder doesn't have to measure and count, they just write the descriptions appropriately for the number of rooms they want the player to traverse from point to point. Want the journey from the city gate to the goblin cave to be 20 moves? Easy! Build your road out 18 rooms from the gate, describing the countryside in chunks large enough to fit the distance... put the enterance to your cave there. Now build out a few rooms from the road for people that wander. Done.

Of course, explorer types like me will laugh, since your world has edges you didn't account for. You'd need to put forests that are too thick to get through, or mountains too steep to climb, or swamps... you get the idea. The "edge" rooms have to make you believe you can't go that way, so you won't try... else it breaks the immersion.

Still, you'll notice I never said how far (in distance) the cave actually were from the city. That's because it doesn't matter. Rooms can be any size, and most games treat them as no size at all. Gamers talk about distances in terms of how many rooms away things are, and even games that drain endurance as you walk, treat all rooms as the same size.

If that sounds kindof cheesy to you, you're in my camp. I like maps! I like things to make sense unless there's a good reason for them NOT to. I like to be able to head out across country and find my own way, rather than following roads and directions. To do this, one either has to be in a coordinate system, or a room system that is fully fleshed out so it works like a coordinate system.

That is the show stopper. If you want to keep rooms, AND you want a fully fleshed out world, most people sigh, roll up their sleeves, and build on a grid. The grid will have thousands of "filler" rooms, whose description is mostly cut-and-pasted, and which have nothing of interest other than random wandering monsters.

You are standing on a grassy plain. Tall grass waves gently in the breeze, and stretches out as far as you can see in every direction. You think there is a smudge of a mountain range far to the north, and a forest lies below you, miles to the west.

Yeah. You can cut and paste that into about 200 rooms, then change the description of the forest and fill in another 50-100 on the west side. Yawn. Your players will "thank" you for your effort by flipping to brief mode and typing "/repeat 100 w".

But what's the alternative? You don't want the sheep-rail guided system. You don't want the complexity of a full coordinate system (and the major rewrites to the entire combat and communication system it involves). What else can we do?

More to come... after dinner. :)