August 1999

• Game design and gender: An interesting article Nathan F Yospe
• • Game design and gender: An interesting article Jon A. Lambert
  • • Game design and gender: An interesting article Marian Griffith
    • • Game design and gender: An interesting article Jeremy Music "Sterling"
      • • Game design and gender: An interesting article Cynbe ru Taren
        • Game design and gender: An interesting article Caliban Tiresias Darklock
        • • Game design and gender: An interesting article Matthew Mihaly
          • • Game design and gender: An interesting article Caliban Tiresias Darklock
            • • Game design and gender: An interesting article Ben Greear
              • • Game design and gender: An interesting article Albert
          • Game design and gender: An interesting article Koster, Raph
          • Game design and gender: An interesting article Laurel Fan
          • • Game design and gender: An interesting article Caliban Tiresias Darklock
            • • Game design and gender: An interesting article Willowreed@aol.com
              • Game design and gender: An interesting article Albert
        • Game design and gender: An interesting article Koster, Raph
        • • Game design and gender: An interesting article Adam Wiggins
          • Game design and gender: An interesting article Marian Griffith
        • Game design and gender: An interesting article Marian Griffith
      • Game design and gender: An interesting article Ola Fosheim Grøstad
      • • Game design and gender: An interesting article Matthew Mihaly
        • • Game design and gender: An interesting article Adam Wiggins
          • • Game design and gender: An interesting article Caliban Tiresias Darklock
            • Game design and gender: An interesting article Matthew Mihaly
        • Game design and gender: An interesting article Marian Griffith
        • • Game design and gender: An interesting article Mik Clarke
        • Game design and gender: An interesting article Marian Griffith
        • • Game design and gender: An interesting article Ola Fosheim Grøstad
  • Game design and gender: An interesting article Greg Miller
• question about tile-based games Chris Gray
• • question about tile-based games Scott Boding
  • question about tile-based games Jeremy Music "Sterling"
  • • question about tile-based games Katrina McClelan
    • • question about tile-based games Caliban Tiresias Darklock
      • • question about tile-based games Hans-Henrik Staerfeldt
        • • question about tile-based games Chris Gray
    • question about tile-based games AR Schleicher
  • question about tile-based games Wes Connell
  • question about tile-based games AR Schleicher
  • • question about tile-based games Wes Connell
• Mud Census? Timothy O'Neill Dang
• MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Par Winzell
• • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Dr. Cat
  • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Matthew Mihaly
• MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Par Winzell
• • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Matthew Mihaly
    On Tue, 17 Aug 1999, Par Winzell wrote:
    
    > Matthew Mihaly writes:
    >
    > As for the rest...
    >
    > I don't -want- to investigate the bleeding edge of cellular automata,
    > and the urge is -not- to mimic realistic ecologies. Would you consider
    > SimCity self-sustaining? Where do the people come from? They appear as
    > inevitable results of your town being a desirable place to live. That's
    > a way to create an ecology too -- toss out breeding rates and predators
    > and just assume nature will find a way [tm] to fill any empty niches.
    
    Right, I fully agree that investigating the bleeding edge is not the way
    to go with games. I guess my point was that doing something like SimCity
    or whatnot in one player, and doing it massively multiplayer are very
    different things. People make things difficult.
    
    >
    > I picked the example of Gandalf precisely because it's about as far as
    > you can get from bleeding edge, infact it has nothing to do with scalar
    > fields or automata at all and so in your words cannot be interesting --
    > yet it made the game so much more fun.
    
    Right, that's fair enough. Perhaps it illustrates a way to do things too.
    Maybe you start by making two simple, disparate background elements
    collide (not necessarily 'physically'). Add a few more rules and you start
    to get some pretty unpredictable interactions. Not a 'real' virtual
    ecology, but unpreditable enough to be useful.
    
    >
    > Simulation can mean a lot of different things. If you want to be able to
    > gaze at your ecology with eternal fascination, then perhaps you do need
    > to blend just the right amounts of diffusion, propagation, sources and
    > interactions and I'm sure that is a terrible complex field of science
    > and I would perhaps go so far as to label this one of the pipe-dreams
    > I want to avoid. However, to populate the wilderness with a sensible mix
    > of critters that vary in concentration depending on where you are, that
    > can be pretty simple and yet be called a simulation.
    
    Yeah, I agree, but it seems that what you are doing then is basically
    doing what Dr. Cat says he does. You're making the end, not the means, the
    important bit, unless I misunderstand your example of populating the
    wilderness. It sounds like you are putting the ends first, ie your goal is
    to populate the wilderness so that things vary in concentration. You don't
    need any sort of virtual ecology for that. Just have a limited number of
    deer or whatever, spit out random rooms with whatever criteria for where
    they go whenever it is you want them to appear, and then make there be a
    chance of another deer appearing in a room adjacent to the room where a
    deer appeared. Then do the same to the new deer room, and so on. You'll
    get varying concentrations of deer that never concentrate in the same
    place. But that has nothing to do with making a virtual ecology really.
    It's chaos, which is just as uninteresting (in the sense that I use the
    word) as order. I agree that it still might be fun, and frankly, I'm much
    more likely to do something in the above way, than trying to create
    cellular rules for the deer, hoping they work out correctly. I'd still
    prefer to see something along the lines of virtual ecology, but I don't
    think it can be done right now masively multiplayer (at least not without
    a lot of constraints on it).
    -
    
    
    >
    >
    > All this said, though, I don't expect any of this to be trivial and I'm
    > looking forward with great anticipation to digging into the details of
    > it. If I sounded terribly arrogant I apologize. I'm not underestimating
    > the problem, I think; I expect it to be tricky... but doable.
    
    Well, it'd be very interesting, but I think if you let the players mess
    around with it too much (and that's sort of the point of having things),
    then they are going to push it to chaos or order, because people just tend
    to seem to do that.
    --matt
• MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Wes Connell
• • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Koster, Raph
  • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Greg Miller
    • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Colin Coghill
      • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Marian Griffith
      • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Greg Miller
        • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Matthew Mihaly
          • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Miroslav Silovic
            • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Matthew Mihaly
              • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Caliban Tiresias Darklock
          • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Marian Griffith
          • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Greg Miller
            • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Marian Griffith
              • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Greg Miller
        • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Koster, Raph
        • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Mik Clarke
          • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Koster, Raph
            • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Mik Clarke
              • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Koster, Raph
                • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Greg Miller
          • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Wes Connell
          • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Albert
          • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Marian Griffith
          • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Ilya, SCC, Game Commando
            • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Matthew Mihaly
              • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Marian Griffith
                • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Greg Miller
                  • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Marian Griffith
              • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Caliban Tiresias Darklock
              • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Ilya, SCC, Game Commando
                • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Matthew Mihaly
                • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Caliban Tiresias Darklock
                  • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Matthew Mihaly
                    • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Koster, Raph
                • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Greg Miller
  • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Ola Fosheim Grøstad
  • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Koster, Raph
    • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Ola Fosheim Grøstad
      • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Koster, Raph
        • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Ola Fosheim Grøstad
    • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Greg Miller
  • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Marian Griffith
  • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Matthew Mihaly
• Designing fun sims. (was MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs) Ola Fosheim Grøstad
• The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Dundee
• • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Ola Fosheim Grøstad
  • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Ilya, SCC, Game Commando
    • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Colin Coghill
      • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Ilya, SCC, Game Commando
        • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Sellers, Michael
        • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Wes Connell
        • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Matthew Mihaly
          • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Koster, Raph
            • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Wes Connell
          • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Sellers, Michael
      • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Ola Fosheim Grøstad
      • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Ilya, SCC, Game Commando
        • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Dundee
          • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Ilya, Game Commandos
            • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Dundee
              • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Jon A. Lambert
                • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Travis S. Casey
                • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing J C Lawrence
                • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Koster, Raph
                  • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Adam Wiggins
                  • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Koster, Raph
                    • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Adam Wiggins
                      • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Koster, Raph
                        • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Ola Fosheim Grøstad
                        • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Wes Connell
                        • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Travis S. Casey
                          • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Wes Connell
                            • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Travis S. Casey
                              • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Caliban Tiresias Darklock
                                • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Dundee
                                  • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Travis Casey
                                  • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Caliban Tiresias Darklock
                          • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Dundee
                        • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing J C Lawrence
                        • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Robin Cloutman
                        • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Adam Wiggins
                          • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Ilya, Game Commandos
                            • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Wes Connell
                          • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Laurel Fan
                          • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Mik Clarke
                      • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing J C Lawrence
                      • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing J C Lawrence
                    • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing J C Lawrence
                  • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Timothy O'Neill Dang
                  • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing J C Lawrence
                  • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Dundee
                  • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing J C Lawrence
                    • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Caliban Tiresias Darklock
                    • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Dundee
                      • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Adam Wiggins
                        • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Greg Miller
                        • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Ilya, Game Commandos
                  • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Travis S. Casey
              • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Chris Turner
              • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Adam Wiggins
                • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Chris Turner
          • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Ola Fosheim Grøstad
          • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Ilya, Game Commandos
            • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Ola Fosheim Grøstad
            • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Greg Miller
            • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Ola Fosheim Grøstad
              • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Caliban Tiresias Darklock
                • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Greg Miller
  • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Eli Stevens {KiZurich}
  • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Adam Wiggins
    • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing J C Lawrence
    • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Wes Connell
      • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Greg Miller
  • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Dundee
• Balancing issues (renamed) Marian Griffith
• Singleton design pattern (OT?) Eli Stevens {KiZurich}
• • Singleton design pattern (OT?) Wayne Pearson
  • Singleton design pattern (OT?) Cynbe ru Taren
  • • Singleton design pattern (OT?) Adam Wiggins
• OT: My absence J C Lawrence
• ScryMUD: News update (Opening to the Public on the 4th of September!) Ben Greear