[crossfire] A funny thing happened on the way to the new maps

[Robert Brockway]

I hope no one minds me inline replying.  I'm oldskool :p

On Sat, 2 Apr 2016, Matthew Giassa wrote:

> It would be pretty cool. Reminds me of the AliceBot experiment 
> (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2011/05/05/nice-robots-finish-first-simulation-shows-how-altruism-can-evolve/). 
>
> Altruistic mice help anyone, regardless. Aggressive mice attack anyone. 
> Tribalism-oriented mice attack only mice of other "tribes". Then you could 
> have variations (sneaky mice pretend to be non-aggressive, then become 
> aggressive after a random number of turns, then eventually regress to 
> non-aggressive again), variations in the "viewing distance" (ie: range before 
> monster sees another and becomes aggressive), purely defensive altruistic, 
> etc.

What your suggesting there would require additional coding in the game 
wouldn't it?  Actually I've always liked the idea of having the 
potential for monsters to fight each other.   Just because they are 
against the player doesn't mean skeletons and orcs should always get on.

> You would need a reward mechanism for attacking other mice (victorious mouse 
> gains an attribute). Then you could just reset certain maps to play around 
> with initial conditions, like a Monte Carlo simulation. You could release a 
> bunch of magical cats to clean up the mice population, then they disappear. 
> Or, you could release pigeons to eat the mice, followed by lizards, snakes, 
> gorillas, to make it really interesting.

That's starting to sound like a ecology simulator - they are fun too :)

> 100GB? All you need is a few people like me running the equivalent of a 
> private OC3 to effectively saturate the pipe and rack up a hefty bill by 
> setting the "pre-cache all maps on launch" option in the client.
> DreamHost does some good private server services, but it's about $150.00 USD 
> per month.

I know you can pre-cache all images.  Is it really possible to pre-cache 
all maps?

> Please keep us up-to-date on this. Sounds comical AND academic.

It's been fun so far.

I've learnt a few things:

* The mice on tile maps spread out to other maps and the population grew 
at high rate initially.

* Population growth rate slowed after 12-15 hours. I believe only mice 
with a free adjacent space were able to reproduce. Eventually this was 
effectively only mice at the periphery (wave front) of the mouse expansion 
as all other mice were adjacent to mice, very high mountains or ocean.

* The mice will eventually fill up any terrain they can walk to but they 
will not cross bridges.

* This does cause the server to slow. Noticable slowness observed with 
100,000-200,000 mice in the game.

* Monsters created on a tile map that have moved to a different tile map 
do not disappear if the original tile map is reset.

I restarted crossfire with temp maps removed as my daughter wanted to play 
and it was really slow with all the mice.

One of her characters may have a corrupt character file after she logged 
in with the vast number of mice in play.  The character seems to be fine 
however the logs get many examples of the error below when the character 
logs in:

16/04/02 17:24:28 [EE] Multiple skills with the same subtype? praying, 
karate
16/04/02 17:24:28 [EE] Multiple skills with the same subtype? praying, 
thaumaturgy
16/04/02 17:24:28 [EE] Multiple skills with the same subtype? literacy, 
sorcery
16/04/02 17:24:28 [EE] Multiple skills with the same subtype? climbing, 
bargaining
16/04/02 17:24:28 [EE] Multiple skills with the same subtype? use magic 
item, evocation

The source says this is a warning, but a warning of what I wonder :)

The character hasn't been played much lately and I have a backup from a 
couple of days ago that I may restore if it is having issues and I can't 
fix it any other way.

Cheers,

Rob

-- 
Email: robert at timetraveller.org		Linux counter ID #16440
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I tried to change the world but they had a no-return policy