Kalimat al-Mutafalsif

Background
Random Dungeon Generation (DunGen) stems from the thought that every dungeon should be different. If you're making an admin generate every dungeon, you're severely limited by the time of the admins. If you have 3 admins, all of whome work full time on the world that's about 120 hours per week. If a dungeon takes 3 hours to setup, test, and release, you can get 40 done per week. Pretty good! Oh, wait, admins can't spend all day making dungeons, they have to, you know, write new features, add new races, they can't be bothered with little things such as quests.

Solution?
So, how to fix that? We (Walraven) came up with the idea that our dungeons will be randomly generated. Meaning no one will have to spend any time making new dungeons. If we want to add 40 in one week, ok, type 'dungen 40' (this is a place marker meaning: some command generate 40 dungeons) and there you go.

It gets better. We're not going to need to login to type 'dungen 40', it'll just happen automagically. As it should in any game. This gives the game world a chance to evolve, without any admin interaction. This is exactly what I want from a game, complete and total freedom on the part of the world and players with the only interaction from admins coming in the form of new skills, etc.

Does it end there?
Nope! Once dungeons are generating correctly, and being propogated by monsters, we'll then have Random Quest Generation. Meaning, a peasant could run up to you and say "I just lost my family's ring in that mine over there! Won't you please save it?!" And you, being the noble hero you are, will run in, slay a thousand kobolds, and obtain that ring. Once you return the ring though, does it make sense for the peasant to just ask another hero to grab that ring? No! He's got his ring back, he should stay away from mines! Because of that, once a quest is done, its done. Forgotten and the peasant goes back to being a nice little farmer. Same with the dungeon, once it's beaten it is destroyed in some form (collapses in on itself is my favorite) and is never seen again.

Some may point out this would bring up an issue if we ever (some day) get a large player base. One might run out of quests, or dungeons. Due to a recent census that involved a ton of laughing, I don't think we'll be running out of mines anytime soon. And the quests can be generated on a scale equal to the amount used. It'll be automagic like the dungeons and we won't have to touch it.

All of the above leads to admins that can spend their days programming features, not dungeons, and whatever quests are imperitive for everyone to complete (noobie quests, training quests) can make sense for people to do multiple times, and have a lot more time put into them. And, I might add, this is something World of Warcraft can't have, as they always keep the same floor layouts for dungeons, buildings, etc. (Count them, I know of less than 10 unique layouts). Randomization is needed in the gaming community to keep things fresh.

So I spent this previous weekend visiting Malaprop in Chicago. I also had the wonderful please of getting to meet another admin (Acius) from the project I met Malap on, Walraven. Where to begin...?

First off, how I know them.
It's very interesting meeting people in an online environment, getting to "know" them pretty well, then transferring that knowledge to real life. I met them when I applied to be a wizard (programmer) on the online game, Walraven.

Malap was the one who interviewed me and (hence) got the pleasure (not) of teaching me LPC and how our world works. I am very, very sorry. All kidding aside it was a good day as within 3 hours of the "interview" he said "Ok, there's your home directory, pick something and play with it." Best way to learn that I know of, hands on.

Acius (I believe) was working hard core when I started, so didn't really get to know him, except for the few rare occurances when Malap had no clue. Apparently Acius knows LPC better than english, or some such non-sense as he is disgustingly good at it. (That is a compliment, not an insult). But it was good to get to meet him finally, he was as smart in real-life as he has been when I ping him over AIM.

Next, the weekend itself
I went up Friday night to meet malap at his place, and Acius had gotten in that day. Went out for some good Chicago pizza then the important part of the night, and my first shameless plug - Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind. This is by far the best theatre I've seen. That's not a cop-out as I'm male yet really love theater. Specifically things written in Iambic Pentameter or good existentialist plays. But this theater is just beyond fun. Very interactive with the crowd, very geeky (d6s are involved). It does have a very liberal slant to it, however, so if you're easily offended don't go. At the same time, all the plays have elements of truths and, by the artists admission, are written from their point of view. What's true for me is not going to be true for you, so if you look at it as a way to see where they're coming from you shouldn't be offended. I personally disagree with some of the plays I saw, but it was still hilarious, saddening, and everything in between.

Saturday Acius and I went for a tour of Chicago (I took him around as he'd never been before). Had many, many good talks about cool things I've never dealt with before, and was overall a good geeky time. Then, the best part, we had a little codefest on Walraven. I say best part because normally I'm just bugging these guys via ones and zeros and don't really get as much of a bouncing ideas off each other feel. Here the three of us were in the same room, and working off what eachother had. It was cool. The idea we were working on in something World of Warcraft will never have, Random Dungeon Generation.

Sunday was not much more than a lot more coding to get our first dungeon generated. Great fun, though I'll admit I felt a little out of place as rusty I was with LPC. I probably held the whole deal up a few hours, but they were nice about it and I learned stuff. End of the day, learning is what matters.