> Sure. What conceptical things do you want to talk about? Ok... try this on for size. Remove rooms from ROM. Replace them with an (x, y, z) coordinate system. Players have vectors (which include both direction and speed.) Everything has descriptions for certain distances. At a distance, you could see "There's someone over there." A bit closer "There's an elf over there." closer: "There's an elf slinking around here." (stance.) "Earl, the Elven Thief stands here." (Stance). As you approach something, you see there's a tree a bit off to your right, and an elf by the tree. To your left, you see a small wooden shack. (Since everything has a DESCRIPTION and a construct material.) Of course, then elves might need to see better than humans, so you have a vision limit... and that can be fun.
Instead of rooms, you have maybe a series of formulas telling someone where they CAN'T go. Or maybe you have a different file format... Who knows, I haven't yet figured out how that could work. (But it's alot easier to tell someone where they can't go than where they can.) Of course, players would get kindof irritated if they couldn't travel (relatively) quickly from city to city... one way would be to set up a series of portals in every city... another would be to set up a series of airships or boats... Who knows, the ideas are endless. :) Maybe we could discuss there merit of levelless equipment in a leveled world. I mean, if ROM is so "realistic" as to say that you have to EAT every so often.. (Even if there ISN'T any "real" side-affect of not eating..) Why should someone be prohibited from pickup up a nice sword? Maybe one way to get around this is to have most weapons relatively similar. 1d8, 1d12, 2d6... really good rare weapons maybe 2d12... (Or similarly low figures.) Maybe players gain 1d4-1d12 (modified by con and maybe skills...) I don't know, we could talk about a lot of stuff. :) On the subject of player shops, MarkD answered it very thoroughly. :) Hey, maybe we could talk about herbalism... mix compound x, and compound y, come up with compound z, because x, and y, have "alchemical properties." That is to say, that alcohol is a "strengthener" and that nightshades are poisonous... mixing alcohol and nightshade would make a stronger poison... Maybe we could talk about ways to make that work... > What better implementation of the unlimited bits code do you have > in mind? It's so simple you can't make it simpler. I don't have a "better" one... I merely have a "different" one. > What would you do with the nanny? I've removed all references to > character-data out of it and the only thing being worked there with > is the descriptor-data. Make it account based. > Object-, room- and area-programs? Relatively easy, as long as you > have time to carefully go through the mob-programs and have seperated > the program-code from the mobprogram-code so you could reuse that > first one. Those work relatively well, and I don't know enough about scripting languages and how to make them to make many comments. But I do know about pthreads and sd's... and a fair bit more... not too bad for a puny freshman at a run-down barely accredited university. > Same with alligning the use of the new_XXX and free_XXX functions, > which made sure all the allocated memory became freed (in three > years of hacking you will forget it once or twice). It's a good idea to align them... When I write a malloc statement, I immediately go to where I expect the end of the use of it to be and free it. > Splitting the source-code so that the files are smaller (which was > suddenly needed when I downgraded from a cable-modem to a phone-modem) > will be a nice excercise in redesigning. Specially if you see what > a mess you sometimes make it if :-) Hmmm... it's a nice exercise... But not really conceptual in nature. But it's a good idea. :) > So, euh... I hope I have given you some ideas of what you can do > and what I can talk about. Likewise. And by the way, since these are all "conceptual ideas" ... feel free to knock on them. ;) Mark _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
