18 Dec, 2008, Gehrig wrote in the 1st comment:
Votes: 0
So, I am still in the planning phase of designing a new MUD. Since I don't have tons of MUD experience, general gaming questions tend to come up…

The major question I have right now is - How many MOB's in one room fighting is too many? Keep in mind that there would be 2 teams attacking each other.

Thoughts?
18 Dec, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 2nd comment:
Votes: 0
Too many according to what? Resource usage, text spam, too many to be realistic, …?
18 Dec, 2008, Lyanic wrote in the 3rd comment:
Votes: 0
I'm assuming that "too many" is referring to text spam in this case. In response to that, I think anything double-digit is too many if you're displaying messages mid-combat or displaying each NPC separately on viewing, and treating the large number of NPCs by the same display rules that you would treat a single NPC. Actually, by those standards, approaching double-digit numbers is probably pushing it. However, there are other ways to handle it.

For instance, when you 'look' and see a large number of NPCs, they could be grouped (ie: There are 47 green orcs here).

Then if you're having combat between the large group of NPCs and another character or group (PCs or NPCs), you'd have to group combat messages/results together, as well:

There are 47 green orcs here fighting 22 purple gremlins.
32 of the green orcs attack, dealing 946 damage to the group of purple gremlins.
6 of the purple gremlins collapse and die.
14 of the purple gremlins attack, dealing 692 damage to the group of green orcs.
12 of the green orcs collapse and die.

I'm not sure if this really helps, but assuming I was correct on the assumption about this regarding text spam, and you don't want to go with an option like the one described above - limit it to 5-9 NPCs fighting in one room.
18 Dec, 2008, elanthis wrote in the 4th comment:
Votes: 0
Listen to Lyanic; he will make you strong. His suggestion works just as well if you're worried about memory usage, too. Grouping the mobs isn't just done for the display, but for all of the mob-related data. The mob essentially just gets a quantity attached to it and the display and combat logic is updated to match.

This is part of the suggestions I made for the people trying to run the one million room masturbatory games. The larger the world you're trying to model, the more data consolidation you should use. An army of 500 units isn't represented with 500 soldier objects; it's represented as one army object.

Also a great idea to implement for items in a game, especially if you believe in bringing a world alive through touchables and gettables. It's great to be able to pick berries or flowers or whatever in the forest, but it's a real problem if the user sees 20 lines when he types "inventory" that each say "A berry." Much better to list "50 berries."
18 Dec, 2008, Gehrig wrote in the 5th comment:
Votes: 0
I should have explained myself better. I did, indeed mean text spam. Maybe I should come right out and explain my idea (not like it is a great idea anyways).


My MUD's theme will be World War II. There will be 2 sides, Axis and Allieds. The name of the game is to help your side win the war. A player will be able to recieve "Orders" (quests) to capture, attack and defend sectors. He/she will have a squad follow them that will recieve orders from that player. There will be a front line that will change as Armies capture or lose sectors. There will also be strategic sectors (rooms) that can and should be captured. These sectors will have an impact on an Armies production (at first certain weapons and spawn rates <insert ideas here>).
This game will run itself. So, PC's are not actually required, NPCs will battle themselves without any help. I am not sure how I am going to accomplish this yet.

That is the basic concept. I can think of tons of abilities, skills and features I could add.

What has me the most stumped is combat. My initial idea was to create each individual NPC. But, I realized without having a MOB limit per room, this could get crazy. Having a limit would take away the realism of war (as much realism as there will be anyways).

I think your idea about creating single mob groups is great. However, how would this work when a single PC attacks this group? It seems like a PC won't even have a chance. Even if they have friend forces with them.

One last thing - Any comments or suggestions on my idea would be greatly appreciated. I know this game would be a lot of fun to me. However, I have my doubts that the average MUD player will be interested. Thoughts on that?
18 Dec, 2008, Zeno wrote in the 6th comment:
Votes: 0
Create a good customization to filtering various types of messages. Take FFXI for example. There are wars in the past and can consist of a large number of players and NPCs. If you have nothing filtered, it'll spam you up the arse. Setting the correct filters will help a ton.
18 Dec, 2008, Scandum wrote in the 7th comment:
Votes: 0
Gehrig said:
I think your idea about creating single mob groups is great. However, how would this work when a single PC attacks this group? It seems like a PC won't even have a chance. Even if they have friend forces with them.

One last thing - Any comments or suggestions on my idea would be greatly appreciated. I know this game would be a lot of fun to me. However, I have my doubts that the average MUD player will be interested. Thoughts on that?

You could have items like hand grenades do massive damage, or allow a sniper to take on a group with stealth. You'd have to code it such a way that dead soldiers aren't revived as the group mob heals.

Recruitment wise, you could go to a white nationalist forum like stormfront, lots of people obsessed with the nazis there who might do some alright roleplaying, if you can tolerate them that is. Next you could go around and offer people the chance to kill some racist bastards, maybe on some anarchist or international socialist site. I'm sure there are WW II related forums out there as well.
18 Dec, 2008, Zenn wrote in the 8th comment:
Votes: 0
Quite honestly, the typical MUD setup might not be the best idea for this kind of thing. I would personally recommend you use an overland map for your actual battlefields. Take a look at EmpireMUD's overland map for ideas.
18 Dec, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 9th comment:
Votes: 0
I would vote for the suggestion of only displaying text at the level of granularity that matters to the decision maker. If you're trying to decide how to manage several platoons, you don't really care what happens to each and every individual. But you do care about the higher-level pictures, e.g. your organizational units (platoons, squads, whatever) being reduced in strength, or perhaps even destroyed. (So you wouldn't get messages about "squad X has lost a soldier", but rather, "squad X has been destroyed".)

Of course, Zeno's suggestion about letting the players control the granularity themselves is a good one. If they want to see detail on a per-individual basis, fine; they'll have to deal with the spam. If they want to see detail on a per-platoon basis, fine; they'll lose some detail but will have less output to process.
18 Dec, 2008, KaVir wrote in the 10th comment:
Votes: 0
Grouping together mobs, filtering messages, etc, are all well and good, but IMO the easiest approach is simply to have a single mob which represents an entire squad/platoon/etc. You may need to add a few specific options if you don't already support them (such as the vulnerability to area-affect damage and the limited healing that Scandum mentioned), and will certainly need appropriate cosmetics (particularly for combat messages), but from a pure mechanics perspective a unit of soldiers is just another mobile.

I use this approach for mobs of villagers, units of soldiers, swarms of insects, etc. A single villager poses no threat to a powerful supernatural PC, but even a dragon is wary of a large mob of angry villagers armed with pitchforks and torches. Likewise, a single bee poses no real threat to most people, but a huge swarm of them can prove deadly - and even with message filtering, 50K "bee" mobs aren't going to do a good job of representing a swarm (because if a single bee does even 1 point of damage, the swarm will likely instant-kill anyone, while if a single bee doesn't do damage, neither will the swarm).
19 Dec, 2008, Gehrig wrote in the 11th comment:
Votes: 0
Hmm.. things to think about. I wanted the PC's to still be able to attack on their own. As a single player. It seems that grouping mobs won't work in this case. Just to clarify, the PC would only order their particular squad. Also, a PC would have the option to go out on his own (but shouldn't in most cases). They would still function as a single PC.

It seems like I either need to group everyone or keep them seperate. Unless I can figure out a way to do both, I might need to scrap my idea entirely.

Any other ideas of a WWII theme I could do, would be appreciated :)
19 Dec, 2008, Zenn wrote in the 12th comment:
Votes: 0
Bombs.
19 Dec, 2008, Gehrig wrote in the 13th comment:
Votes: 0
Zenn said:
Bombs.


Oh, I mean a whole other WWII MUD idea.
19 Dec, 2008, Lyanic wrote in the 14th comment:
Votes: 0
World War III would be a great idea for a sci-fi themed MUD…
19 Dec, 2008, Zenn wrote in the 15th comment:
Votes: 0
Lyanic said:
World War III would be a great idea for a sci-fi themed MUD…


The half-finished website:
http://www.wix.com/zenntheadmin/Earth243...
19 Dec, 2008, Lyanic wrote in the 16th comment:
Votes: 0
Quote
Quote
Lyanic said:
World War III would be a great idea for a sci-fi themed MUD…



The half-finished website:
http://www.wix.com/zenntheadmin/Earth243...


How far along is it? Any other details you feel like sharing?
19 Dec, 2008, Zenn wrote in the 17th comment:
Votes: 0
Focusing mainly on the code at the moment. It's based off SWR. This will be quite a while after WW3 actually occured. Some cities will have been rebuilt, but there will still be wide tracts of rural wasteland and areas of high radioactivity, where you can get radiation poisoning and there are all kinds of nasty mutants.

Also, there will be several offworld colonies.

It actually wasn't inspired by Fallout 3, though that definitely affected our ideas quite a bit. I'm hoping for at least one or two wasteland areas.

/Thread Hijacking
19 Dec, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 18th comment:
Votes: 0
How many PCs are you expecting at the same time? You can have all of your mobs grouped into units representing many individuals, and then have players be separate characters. It shouldn't matter that much if the players are individuals. You could represent a player being part of a squad by grouping him/her with the squad, and boosting the player's power for example to represent the larger firepower.
19 Dec, 2008, elanthis wrote in the 19th comment:
Votes: 0
Gehrig said:
It seems like I either need to group everyone or keep them seperate. Unless I can figure out a way to do both, I might need to scrap my idea entirely.


Why can't you do both? You group the mobs, not the PCs. Maybe the PCs party up, but that's fundamentally different. Each individual PC is interesting data. Individual mobs are not interesting (in the case of a large army).

You can even group mobs onto a PC. E.g.,

Elanthis and his 307 storm troopers attack the dire rat for 10,238 damage, killing it instantly in a spray of gore!
Vegeta yells, "It's over 9,000!"
Vegeta and his 362 saiyans attack Elanthis for 356,095,345 damage. Elanthis' atoms are vaporized! 307 storm troopers perish.
Goku and his 2 sons attack Vegeta's group for 45,048,495,349 damage. Vegeta is maimed! 356 saiyans die.
Vegeta and his 6 saiyans attack Goku's group for 123,834,348 damage. Goku goes to the Kais. 2 sons perish.
Vegeta says, "Widow's peaks beat spikes every time, Kakarot."
Tyche yells, "DBZ MUDs are for pre-teen dipsticks!"
Tyche and his 2 throbbing forehead veins attack Vegeta's group for 9 damage. Vegeta is knocked out! 6 saiyans die.
Tyche teabags Vegeta.
Elanthis the ghost says, "uh, guys? rezplz?"
Tyche points and laughs at Elanthis.
Tyche's group goes west.

… I think you get the point. (with apologies to Tyche :p )
19 Dec, 2008, Lyanic wrote in the 20th comment:
Votes: 0
elanthis said:
Each individual PC is interesting data. Individual mobs are not interesting (in the case of a large army).


I'd disagree with that. Why is a PC necessarily more interesting data than an NPC? Why have one set of rules for PCs and another for NPCs? I've always liked the idea of making the distinction between the two as seamless as possible.

elanthis said:
… I think you get the point. (with apologies to Tyche :p )


And apologies to everyone else! *mutters something about DBZ*
0.0/44