Re: Eressea: How shit happened, and what to do about it

From: lindahl@pbm.com (Greg Lindahl)

Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2001 22:32:07 +0000

"Enno Rehling" <schick.mir.spam@gmx.de> writes:

> 5. Design your game so it handles catastrophes.
> If you write a computer-moderated game like Eressea, build your design so
> that you can rerun individual areas without having to rerun the whole turn.

This is hard, but you can make it better by thinking carefully about
sources of randomness in your game, and using multiple seeded random
number generators. For example, if Eresea has 1 random number
generator per location, then if the same units do the same things in
the same order, they'll get the same random numbers. If you're
careful, it should be the case that a re-run is going to produce the
same results in most places...

> The whole thing was a real PITA. It's amazing how much a single shithead can
> make the world seem to be a much more unfriendly place for 1400 players and
> a few GMs with a single email.

Yep. We're lucky that in Olympia, there have been many cases of people
accidentally printing their passwords, but it has always been done in
public, so that the player had time before the next turn to change his
password and prevent a QUIT.

-- g

References

Eressea: How shit happened, and what to do about it
"Enno Rehling" <schick.mir.spam@gmx.de>
Mon, 22 Jan 2001 21:38:04 +0000

Referenced By

Eressea: How shit happened, and what to do about it
"Enno Rehling" <schick.mir.spam@gmx.de>
Mon, 22 Jan 2001 21:38:04 +0000