Hello all,
Just thought I would pass on an interesting error to you all. Probably a no
brainer, but ...
A couple of friends and I have recently setup (and are modifying) a copy of
Circle30bpl17, and with one of our first changes found an interesting
situation to avoid. If (like us) you wish to add a bit of flavour to the
MUD by allowing mobs to attack mobs (such as evil mobs attacking good, or
barbarians attacking the city, et cetera) MAKE SURE YOU LIMIT WHAT THEY WILL
ATTACK.
With the simple change that mobs can attack mobs, our MUD crashed due to teh
number of simultaneous combats that broke out as soon as the world
initialized. (One combat happened to be an Orc Hunter beating himself to
death, at which point the world core dumped, probably due to trying to award
EXP to a mob that did not exist.)
So we changed it so a mob couldn't attack itself (duh), and that still left
too many combats. (Same Orc Hunter, only this time killing another Orc
Hunter.)
Third fix was to make it so only mobs with a AGGR_MOB bit set (which we
added) would attack other mobs, and then it would do so according to the
regular AGGR* bits (AGGR_EVIL + AGGR_MOB means the mob will attack any evil
mob it encounters). This appears to work quite well, and allows scenarios
were a PC (or group) can find themselves in the middle of a mob-vs-mob
fight, or a defend the city type battle with the city guardsmen actually
helping by attacking the "evil" barbarians, without having to worry about
overloading the MUD.
This change goes with our addition of a leader and follower flag in the zone
files allowing you to specify leaders and their followers so you can easily
setup such scenarios as the Captain leading Lieutenants, leading Sergeants,
leading Corporals, leading Privates. Give the Captain a special like the
Mayor of Midgaard, and you have an army that will follow a specific plan of
battle. If members of hte army start dying it breaks the "chain of command"
causing the cut off sections to revert to normal mob behaviour. (kill the
Captain, and the whole thing breaks down :)
Anyway, just thought I would share these ideas and results with the list.
Larry Robinson@visi.net
Aspiring Galactic Overlord and
SphereMUD developer/alt. coder
http://users.visi.net/~robinson/
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