How far can DS go?

[realedazed]

I was at work daydreaming about creating my MUD (hey, my job is BORING!). I was thinking of the particular systems that I would like to create and how I could implement them.  I remember reading some really cool things in the code vault and about some nice features other existing MUDs already have.  Now, I was wondering just how far I could push DS. Like, how complicated of a feature could I create. Like here's one of my ideas. (What follows is somewhat of a brain dump):

Players will be able to forage the lands for plants that can be used in cooking, alchemy, poisons, etc. Each plant will have a preferred time of day to bloom, season to grow and maximum harvest amount. Skilled players can harvest seeds and grow in private gardens, with the most rare plants requiring the most care.  Players will have the ability to completely wipe out plants for the season if they are not careful with their foraging. The skill of the player and a little luck will determine the quality of the harvested plant. And the quality of all ingredients will effect the overall outcome of the product. Each plant will have a certian properties that the players can mix and match into custom products. For example, nightcap root, when ground, can boost the potency of poisons and quickens their effects. Black fungus will cause the victim's limbs to slowly grow numb.  Fennel leaf attacks the immune system.  So, given those ingredients, one could make an extremely potent poison that complete numbs a victim using nightcap root + black fungus or a poison that both slow numbs the limbs and makes you increasingly sick by mixing the fennel + fungus. Or, mix all three and someone's really in trouble.

This isn't the most complex example, but it seems like it would require a bunch of work. My question is could something like this (and more) be done?

[Ashon]

yes.

[Dworkin]

You'd be setting up an economy where the natural outcome is complete devastation. Players would compete for plants because they represent wealth. A few of them would corner the market; the more plant species they wiped out, the richer they'd be. Griefers would simply destroy without bothering to profit. Your mud would be dirt-poor (mud-poor?) and, after a few seasons, potionless.

[Nilrin]

I believe in general the question of can DS or LPC in general do -this- and is it capable of doing -that- comes up fairly often in discussion, and just about always, to some extent or other, the answer is yes.

http://dead-souls.net/ds-faq.html#11

That's obviously the short answer, since if you decide to pursue a less than menial ambition any further, you'll find that it is less trivial than you hoped, filled with snags, compromises, and unforeseen consequences.  At least, that usually seems to be the case when I attempt some new concept.

Code isn't usually the ultimate snafu, but design.

One problem with inventing a design concept is knowing how players will respond and play along with such a design. A great deal of factors may play a role in how successful your concept is, such as the player power in your MUD.

How many players do you hope to host?
How influential do you want your players to be?
How easily do you want players to wipe out a certain crop?
How important of a concept are crops?

And so on...

You may also be forced to weigh in factors such as system resources or even time you're willing to spend on such an idea.

At one point, I had the notion that I was going to have a MUD where every plant in the game was represented by an object, and these plants would have a less than basic life cycle. Each room would have nutrients variables, and plants would grow from seed to maturity and in turn go to seed as well. Various species would compete for survival, and as in real life, would find some sort of mutual balance with one another. As plants died and rotted away, these nutrients would be returned to the room and recycled for other plants to use. Interestingly, through migration, clusters of nutrients would move to various parts of the MUD, and certain species of plants would overcome others through a freak combination of MUD design, room layout, plant behavior, and plain luck.

Then, through the inspiration of another coder who designed and posted a crafting system, I went to work on designing my own, using as broad of a base as I could imagine and plenty of detail for flexibility. This system would essentially allow for a player to start from the basic tools of stone and wood, and with skills and time, eventually work their way up to brewing their own potions, building their own homes and cooking their own food, all essentially generated from the growth and natural resources around them.

It didn't take long to realize that designing the system the way I did was a complete hog of resources and having 50,000 objects all with heartbeats was generally not a good idea.

While there are probably workarounds for such a problem, I ultimately ended up with basically a fun science experiment and a nice crafting system.

So really, it isn't a question of if DS can do it, but whether it will actually work for -your- MUD.

[Ashon]

It didn't take long to realize that designing the system the way I did was a complete hog of resources and having 50,000 objects all with heartbeats was generally not a good idea.

While there are probably workarounds for such a problem, I ultimately ended up with basically a fun science experiment and a nice crafting system.

Try having a crop daemon that tracks your growing seasons, every 'wheat' object should register with the crop daemon and when the daemon determines that it's time to grow, harvest, rot, whatever, it sends a message to the wheat object, and forces whatever changes you need.  That way it's all controled by a central location and if you want to make changes you've got a centralized place to do it.