[Divunal-author] friendlies; worlds; wiki?

[Christopher Armstrong]

Here is the distillation of a conversation I had with dash in #divunal
last month.

We talked about how to model the emotional states of friendlies.

<dash> we at least need measurements of "how willing they are to attack
you" and "how willing they are to do cool stuff for you"

Eventually I came to the conclusion that it'd be a bad idea to mix
*seemingly* "opposing" property-continuums into a single continuum (that
has negative values). Examples are: "Willingness to build stuff" vs
"Willingness to attack", and "Chaotic" vs "Lawful". It's become apparent
after playing MUDs and other such RPGs for a while that the chaos/lawful
continuum isn't very robust, because they are not *true* opposites,
they're just mostly opposing. 

<radix> it's problematic to come up with opposites that are consistent
<radix> so best to separate them into separate continuums
<radix> (although that will require more thought on our part! :))
<radix> i.e., writing a robust emotion system ;-)

And now:

<radix> I think I just had a cool idea for a world
<dash> oooh! good
<dash> we need more worlds

It's based on "Coby", the mining world in Gordon Dickson's Childe Cycle.
It's the only place in accessible space where manual labor for mining is
cheaper than machinery, and it has an uninhabitable surface. So
basically, you have a planet full of two kinds of people: 1) fairly
ignorant workers, 2) wildly corrupt (and also fairly ignorant)
officials. Anyway, one day the miners run into a (typically)
ridiculously powerful (and destructive...) technology far beneath the
surface. Within the hour, conflict breaks out, and there is a struggle
for the officials to gain as much control of the technology as possible.
I haven't fleshed out the idea much beyond this -- what exactly the
technology is, I don't know, but I doubt the inhabitants would be able
to figure out any of it beyond the most rudimentary stuff. But the
rudimentary technology is enough to give the player quite a bit of a
challenge when trying to confront any hostile characters :-)

And now for dash's idea.

<dash> ever watch "Fraggle Rock"?
<dash> Doozers vs. Fraggles.
<dash> nuff said.

So, we fleshed it out a bit, and discovered that both groups were
friendlies, but obviously, if you joined one side, the other wouldn't
like you very much :-) Doozers can build you interesting stuff from your
artifacts, but we couldn't come up with anything for Fraggles to do. (we
got distracted in a discussion about griefers :))

Anyway, that's it. Now how about a wiki so we can start putting this
stuff up in a persistent and mutable environemnt? I volunteer to set one
up :)

-- 
                                Chris Armstrong
                         << radix@twistedmatrix.com >>
                http://twistedmatrix.com/users/carmstro.twistd/