(Message inbox:111) Return-Path: pulkka@cs.washington.edu Received: from mail.fwi.uva.nl by gene.fwi.uva.nl with SMTP (5.65c(FWI)/3.0) id AA17989; Sun Feb 21 15:58:37 1993 Received: by mail.fwi.uva.nl from june.cs.washington.edu with SMTP (5.65c(FWI)/3.0) id AA02533; Mon, 22 Feb 1993 09:47:29 +0100 Received: by june.cs.washington.edu (5.65b/7.1ju) id AA00857; Mon, 22 Feb 93 00:46:19 -0800 Return-Path: Date: Sun, 21 Feb 1993 23:58:37 -0800 (PST) From: Aaron Pulkka Subject: Regenesis Meeting To: Bram , cschaffe@flounder.rutgers.edu, dove@well.sf.ca.us, edan@netcom.com, fontenot@comet.rice.edu, graham@cs.montana.edu, groenewo@fwi.uva.nl, hjtoi@jyu.fi, jw@ddsdx2.jhuapl.edu, lyn@matt.ksu.ksu.edu, peugh@wam.umd.edu, vexar@watserv.ucr.edu, wing@lysator.liu.se, pulkka@cs.washington.edu In-Reply-To: Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII BSXers! Just got done reading the log from the meeting ... sorry I couldn't make it. Thanks for making the log available by ftp :) A few comments on the proceedings: + 3d vs 2d w/3d 'effects' This topic came up before the official meeting started. This would be an OK thing to do to make the game more playable and more 'realistic,' but keep in mind that they may be hacks which are thrown away later. If the changeover to a true 3d system is made, all the 3d tricks will be useless and head for the bit bucket. (more 3d comments at the end). + Login help Great idea ... I agree with the suggestion that it not be built from within the mud. Building it in the game driver or as a separate process sounds like a good way to go. + Challenge / Risk / Experience / Combat Time-limit: bad idea, players will get frustrated and end up either quiting or just having 100 characters before they wiz, with no continuity :( Bad for role-playing. Eating: great idea ... you need to eat or you loose hps. Gotta work to get money to eat. Risk/Reward => Addiction (without combat!) Consider the idea of job sub-quests. These chores can be alot like combat in their repetetiveness and risk. The players can be freelancers, wandering the galaxy looking for work and solving quests along the way. As well as the standard quests, sub-quests in the form of odd jobs will be available for money. These jobs will have an element of risk and reward. By completing the job you get paid and gain experience. This later leads well into adding skills and guilds. For example, you may get hired to retrieve objects from a nuclear reactor which is heading for meltdown. You can even stop the meltdown if you get to the control room alive (and have good enough stats :) Along the way you find objects and avoid hazards (or don't avoid them). The entire time you are in you take radiation damage and may get burnt by randomly exploding pipes as well. Do you risk heading for the control room, or do you just grab what you can and escape before you get fried!? High risk, high reward. Money can buy better radiation suits and detectors. Oh, you want to get detoxed? That'll cost ya! Other subquests can be more sublime; how about folding papers and stuffing envelopes for a living? Don't accidentally staple the pages out of order or put two stamps on one envelope; that's coming out of your paycheck! This would be a great replacement for combat. + BSX / protocol ++ Colors Bram's idea of using a single 24-bit color map where the LSBs can be wacked off for 8 or 16-bit color maps while only loosing brightness info sounds great. ++ True 3d Argh! What happened, the meeting ended before it got to the important stuff? I would like to see this discussed more; without going true 3d on the server side, we can't make the clients any hotter. We need to be able to make better clients for better machines, not just faster. If we are going to support 8088 machines than we are going to go nowhere. Clients should only be considered for machines of at least 'multimedia' power. That means at least a 386 with 4 MEG RAM (in PC land). Otherwise, forget it...why bother? Ask yourself if you are in this for the long run, or the short run. ++ Eyephones / Data Gloves I personally was not kidding when I brought these up. But it doesn't matter for the server at all. If true 3d is used, then client builders can worry about implementing support for 3d i/o devices. A standard mouse driven interface should be just fine for everyone without an SGI at their disposal. For those of us with access to nice equipment, we should be able to take advantage of it. Short run, or long run? Shall we be known as the pioneers that moved mudding to the next level, or as the forgotten regensis hackers that made superficial upgrades to an underplayed mud? You decide -- and let me know. -- Graduate student (graphical human interfaces & robotics) Comp Sci & Engr Dept +--------------\ Univ of Washington, FR-35 | Aaron Pulkka > pulkka@cs.washington.edu Seattle, WA 98195 +--------------/