[koteko]

It's going to be RPI and extremely focused on magic. Killing will be free but between mage users it'd be less common because of the huge effects. You might use your servants though: it is also going to have control of lesser creatures (also created by you from materials, like golems) which are going to be your hands most of the time with a user-managed limited scripting. A powerful player might in fact start its own kingdom, but the extremely hard setting would (in my plans, of course) strongly encourage to stay inside the main city until you are strong enough. Death will be permanent-ish (there will be tricks to reduce the risk) so who does not do teamwork is likely going to die soon.

You could dig tunnel, but going down will be more difficult, as going up will be more risky because of lack of air. That's actually a way to reduce a lot the world size (assuming I load only visited rooms), since it's going to be even less likely to use that 5+5 layers above and below the "ground level" of each plane.

I'm maintaining a development blog to check how people feel about my ideas, and so far it's good (a few guys have already proposed a collaboration, even though I know how it works in this case, ie 1 out of 100 maybe actually do the job he said he'd do).

That said, I understand your remarks. The graphical map would help to visualize (it's an actual tile map) even though just in 2D (and maybe some fake isometric effects) but of course it might all be an overkill, I won't know until I tinker with it.

I need to think it over, in the meanwhile I might play godwars2 as you suggest, because I don't really understand how a roomless world..feels.

I imagine there is a coordinate system where each point represents, instead of a room, a spot where an entity, and only one, can stay (unless you also allows entities over entities..). Do entities occupy areas, or just points (ie a bed occupies the same space as a player)?

I can also imagine you can only "see" entities around you within a certain radius, and if I whisper only the closest pgs will hear me.

But..how does that improves compared to a room system? I don't see advantages, since I don't have ranged combat (bows or similar, you can do VERY ranged things with magic but you don't need to know the coordinates of an entity for that) and I'll probably implement a room-specific coordinate system to allow for distances inside the room (it takes time to start an attack, proportional to the distance between the fighters).

It'd also increase the difficulty for me to draw a 2D graphical map of the surrounding cells, unless I treat each point of the graph as I now treat the rooms, reducing the size of the tiles: now I have a 9x9 grid of tiles, I'll have, I don't know, 900x900 tiles? the points in what now is a room should be at least 10x10 I guess..

I'm probably missing a lot here though...never played or studied a roomless mud. I'll check empiremud out..

[KaVir]

That's what I did in my previous mud as well. Each room was placed at a specific x/y/z position, but each room also had its own internal x/y coordinates. The problem was that while you could move around tactically within a room, it was inconsistent with actions that took place between rooms.

But imagine taking that same design concept (rooms have internal coordinates) and creating one huge room to represent the entire world. Technically you might argue that the mud is still room-based (it just has one room), but the movement system isn't room-based in the traditional sense, as you don't move from one room to the next.

This makes it easier to add certain tactical features, such as variable movement rate (including fleeing, leaping, knockbacks, etc), weapon reach, ranged attacks, area of effect attacks, facing, visibility, and so on. It also allows you to have distance-based communication, descriptions, etc.

You don't draw points, you draw terrain. This doesn't need to change between room-based and roomless.

EmpireMUD isn't roomless, it's actually very similar to my old mud - rooms placed on a grid.

[koteko]

uhm, thank you very much for the clarification than.

Seeing the forum post you linked me before, I understood you consider a tile a square of 100 rooms, while on my mud one tile is one room. Your approach is interesting, as you can define a set of terrains and build your world with them without incurring in the overhead (and also difficulty) of deciding the little tile cell by cell. Is like you are "drawing" with a 10x pen (with smart choice of "traits") and I with a 1x pen. The effect might be roughly the same but you are going to sweat 10 times less..

So with a roomless world, you design the world grid-style putting the terrains you want, while the players will move on graph of points which will overlap with the tile grid (like 100 points for each tile). That's pretty smart.

So a real room would be an area of space where you have 4 walls, a floor, a roof and a door (normally). Do you use bounding boxes for entities, so you can calcolate collisions and space occupied?

I'll think it over, in the meanwhile I'll try out your godwars2 when I find the time

[KaVir]

The 10x10 tiles were used to create the initial world layout, a bit like laying down pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. This made it easy to ensure consistency, because (for example) an ocean tile couldn't be placed directly beside a plains tile, you needed to have a shore tile between them. Similarly, you couldn't have rivers that went nowhere, they had to start at a spring and end in the ocean (or in a swamp), and they always had to flow in the same direction. It's also really convenient for drawing graphical maps .

I actually retained this concept in God Wars II. You can test it out by typing 'home' as soon as you log on, then type 'zone' to view the 16x16 tile IDs in your home plane, and 'tile' to view the current tile you're on. Try typing 'zone land 1', 'zone land 2', 'zone land 3', etc, and then use 'zone' and 'tile' again to see how they've changed. Try typing 'zone land' on its own, then 'terraform mountain', then 'terraform next', etc - using 'tile' each time to view the specific tile you're starting on.

A concept I didn't reimplement was the ability to customise tiles. In my former mud, once the jigsaw pieces had been placed you could fully customise individual instances. That's how tunnels were dug, forests chopped down, buildings constructed, etc. The mud would track (and cache) individual tiles that differed from the template they were based on. It allowed the initial world to be constructed relatively quickly, while still allowing important parts to be fully customised (you could also anchor traditional rooms to specific x/y/z positions, which was a step up from my earlier wilderness system).

Exactly. Originally the mud was just one vast plain, then I experimented with adding terrain features that covered parts of the world, but in the end I decided it was easier to reuse the tile concept I'd designed in my previous mud. Each tile represents 660x660 feet (1 square furlong), meaning each piece of terrain is 66x66 feet (1 square chain) and 8 tiles are exactly 1 mile. Weapon reach is calculated in feet, and movement speed is feet per second.

In my former mud it was possible to add floors, walls and ceilings around rooms. The implementation in my current mud is very different (it only reused the tile/terrain concept), and I don't bother with that degree of accuracy, instead I just have some terrain types that represent walls, and there's no Z axis. If I want a dungeon, it can be described as steps leading down, but you just 'enter' it.

[camlorn]

Let me take this time to mention that Godwars2 is fully blind accessible in every way, and is a pretty good example of that, as well.