[NTLUG:Discuss] re:Hilcrest idea

[Steve Baker]

Kathleen Weaver wrote:
> 
> >Is the game itself a 'shared' experience (like a MUD) or is each player
> >in
> >his/her own private world?
> 
> Oh, I haven't thought that far.  Either would be interesting...

Well, I don't have any experience with the off-the-shelf MUD kits - but
if you had to program it yourself, doing a multi-player adventure would
be *hard* - both from an implementation and conceptual standpoint.

In a multiuser setup, you have to think up ways for the "world" to
keep regenerating as players solve things.

In the single player "Collosal Cave" adventure, you find the cage,
get the little bird and put it into the cage - and then defeat the
snake by releasing the little bird.

In a multiuser setup, what happens if someone gets the cage and then
wanders off to do something else?  Nobody else can get the bird and
pass the snake.  If you have an infinite number of cages that can be
taken - and an infinite number of birds too - then do you also have
an infinite number of snakes - so everyone gets to solve the snake
room?   You have to think things through much more subtly in a
multi-user
setup.

I guess I'm working up to advising against a multiuser setup.

> >Are you thinking about interaction in the old adventure style (verb
> >noun, eg
> >get bird, go north, say xyzzy) - or some kind of point-n-click interface
> >(eg
> >the Kings' Quest series) ?
> 
> I think point and click would be more fun.
 
It has some gains and some losses.

* Win:  It's easier to point at the door leading west than to type:

    go west

* Loss: It restricts what you can do.  When you click on the lamp, do
  you mean "Light Lamp", "Get Lamp", "Smash Lamp"?

Some games have a hybrid scheme where clicking on the lamp *always*
means
"Get Lamp", and for anything else, you have to type.

The snag is really just that the pictures have to be a lot more exact,
and the game has to know where on the picture the west door is.

> >It would be pretty easy to add still pictures - but only if we have a
> >talented
> >artist somewhere who could paint 100+ images. (Maybe we could get some
> >of
> >the kids to do this?  Given a verbal description of a location.)
> 
> I've got kids for that...

Cool!
 
> >> What type of interface would you be interested in?  With a web browser you
> >> could have the cross platform aspects easily, but you'd be limited in what you
> >> could do.  Do they all have newer browsers, say Netscrape 4.x?  If so you
> >> could probably do some interesting this with the DOM and JavaScript.
> 
> We can specifiy when it comes to Netscape.  I'm going to start another
> message with some more ideas I've come up with.

Perhaps it's time to take this off the discuss at ntlug.org list - it's
getting
rather off-topic.  Didn't you mention that you could start up a mailing
list?
 
> >Using a web browser is certainly do-able - there is an online version of
> >"Colossal Cave" (the classic Crowther & Woods adventure).  If you did
> >that,
> >you could probably run ALL the games on the server - those kinds of
> >game use almost zero compute time and are easy to run as CGI programs.
> 
> That would be very neat.

Then perhaps we should ask the person who put up the "Collosal Cave"
site
if we can steal his/her code?

-- 
Steve Baker                  http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
sjbaker1 at airmail.net (home)  http://www.woodsoup.org/~sbaker
sjbaker at hti.com      (work)