Re: [spoon-discuss] warehouses and more

["Orc In A Spacesuit" <orcinaspacesuit@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> From: "Glotmorf" <glotmorf@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> On 10/24/02 at 5:03 AM Orc In A Spacesuit wrote:
>
> >I do not propose the following rule, as this is not public:
> >{{__Warehouses__
> >In this rule, Players, Societies, and Gremlins are Entities.
> >In this rule, all things that can exist on The Grid, including all Grid
> >Objects, are Physical Objects
> >In this rule, all Physical Objects that can be carried, picked up, 
> thrown,
> >dropped, and/or possessed are also Carryable Objects.
> >[[I didn't include dependence because it doesn't come up in this rule.]]
> >
> >There exists a class of objects named Warehouses.  Warehouses are 
> Physical
> >Objects.  All Warehouses have an Owner, who is an Entity.  All Warehouses
> >are Passable.  All Warehouses must have a unique name, which may not be
> >"Hiding". [[You'll see why below]]
> >
> >Warehouses may possess Carryable Objects.  Any Player who is in the same
> >Location as a Warehouse may give any Object in eir possession to the
> >Warehouse.  If the Owner of a Warehouse explictly permits it, any Player
> >may
> >take a Carryable Object from a Warehouse at eir Location.
> >
> >Any Carryable Object in the possession of a Warehouse is not considered 
> in
> >the same Location as the Warehouse, but is instead in the Location "In 
> X";
> >this Location does exist while the Warehouse exists.  If a Warehouse
> >ceases
> >to exist, all Carryable Objects it possesed are transferred to the last
> >Location of the Warehouse.
> >
> >Any Entity may purchase a Warehouse for (10*(2^X)) points, where X is the
> >number of Warehouses that Entity has purchased during the current nweek.
> >When purchasing a Warehouse, the Entity must choose a Square in which the
> >Warehouse is placed.
> >
> >If more than one Warehouse is in the same Location, the one that entered
> >that Location most recently is destroyed [[The process repeats until 
> there
> >is one left]].  If a Warehouse is in the same Location as an Impassible
> >Object, it is destroyed.
> >}}
>
> And to think, you spearheaded turning off my Mining rule.  What happens if 
> the Baron has a Warehouse at (5,5) and I drop another one there?  Eir 
> Warehouse goes away, mine survives, and I get all the stuff that was in 
> eirs.  Okay, it's more expensive than bulldozing, but still.

I opposed the Mining rule because it's buggy as flytape.  And you have it 
backwards; if you dropped a Warehouse on bd's yours would go poof instantly.

> How about something simpler?  Things can be thrown into Limbo.  Have 
> warehouses be in Limbo, along with, oh, say, a robot that catches things 
> thrown at it (most of the time, with only the occasional breakage to thing 
> or robot) and can throw things back to people on the grid (with reasonable 
> accuracy, and of course allowing for wind).  Maybe even throw in messengers 
> (expense charged per trip, but no breakage) or field runners (like the 
> water people at football games, or the ball fetchers at tennis matches).

Sure! Why not?  Go ahead and do that too!

> Or simpler still: we give societies something called warehouses that don't 
> have to be anywhere in particular, we assume all of the above is in place, 
> and just allow stuff to be freely exchanged between societies and society 
> members.  If you don't think "warehouse" is a good name for this, we could 
> instead call it...oh, I don't know...how about "resource pool"?

Because I don't want it that way, thats why.  Besides the fact that the 
current rules are buggy and I don't feel like making sure that just because 
you give something to a society doesn't mean you still keep it, cause its 
location hasn't changed.  One thing that I have trying to move towards, not 
in the uber, but in the future (I had planned to wait on this, remember?), 
is instead of Gnomes popping out of nowhere and getting instantly 
teleported, we make an actual economy and industry system, where you get 
resources, process them, and move them around.  I don't want it to get 
stodgy or anything, so I've designed lots of ways to streamline it (mostly 
just in my head, though), auto-delivery and such.  This isn't about fixing 
the rules, as the uber prop is about, and the society prop is partially 
about.  It's about me trying to change the function of the game to something 
I find more enjoyable, and trying to make sure others find it enjoyable too. 
 Hopefully I'll be able to get the system interesting enough that people 
will want to vote for it.
Unfortunatly, you pressed for a way to have your raw materials right now, 
and I gave up the boring, unpolished partial inner workings.
And as for simplicty? The prop would be a 1/3 as long at most if I were 
writing it with the uber in place, as I had planned.  It only looks stilted 
because I don't think of it in terms of the current ruleset.

> I devised resource pools because they provided possibilities, not 
> restrictions.  If you explicitly state that such-and-such are the things 
> that can be possessed by a society, you create a restriction, not a 
> possibility, because you implicitly exclude everything else.

Resource are buggy, but I don't feel like CFI'ing everything (and probably 
figuring out an exploit--I think I just figured out a dupe hack); I feel 
like fixing things.  And right now 'fixing' resource pools involves keeping 
a few numerical ones, and temporarily losing the even more buggy 'pools' of 
grid objects.

> Under the status quo, I could create a resource pool for WBE of airspeeder 
> ownership, buy a bunch of airspeeders, give them to WBE and have WBE make 
> them available for use by employees. (I assume this is close to what Wonko 
> had in mind with eir 40-airspeeder pile.)  With your proposal, I'd have to 
> get a rule passed explicitly stating WBE (or societies in general) could do 
> that.

No.  Hell no.  Once the uber passes (which will fill in the temporary but 
non-buggy bare spots), Entities will be able to do tons of stuff, including 
buying and owning Airspeeders.
That's part of one of its new concepts--no longer do just /Players/ do 
things, but /Entities/ do.  This will have qualifiers in some places, like 
voting and issuing CFI's, of course, but what this means is that Societies 
(including Corporations), Gremlins, (even The Bank if it chooses to through 
some quirk of the rules) will get to do tons of stuff.  Buy Airspeeders and 
direct them.  Mine the grid.  Buy (shipments of) alcoholic drinks, plop them 
in eir Warehouses, and set up a bar next door.  Heck, the Corporation could, 
if Music is incorporated, even hire players to 'perform as a band', playing 
Music that gives beneficial effects to the patrons of the bar.

I see Societies and more as missing out on their full potential.  I made the 
Societies from seperate from the uber because it was a big change, and I 
wanted it to be hashed out seperatly.  I know it looks threadbare, 
incomplete, but that's because it's only a piece of the big picture.

Sorry if it sound like I'm ranting, or just plugging the uber again.  But I 
want you to see that I'm trying to do good for societies, and I want you to 
help me do good, an I want you to accept a temporary lack (of no direct 
pools).
Feel free to propose your 'robot in limbo' idea.  Sounds interesting.  Just 
try to balance it, and it would be nice if you made a rough draft in 
-discuss first.

> >For WBE, change the rules such that entities can Recycle certain 
> Carryable
> >Objects in Warehouses, maybe requiring a machine or something; and when
> >something is Recycled, the Owner gets Materials.  And define Societies,
> >Players, and Gremlins (why gremlins? they don't get any now, but may in
> >the
> >future) to have the Property Materials.
>
> Why the insistence on Properties, as opposed to simply possessing objects?  
> Are you trying to establish a cashless economy?  If you're going for 
> realism, the stuff objects are made from has to be objects too, as opposed 
> to, say, my getting a pizza from an ATM.

If you have large numbers of exactly identical things, it is much easier to 
represent them as numerical properties than as individual objects.  That's 
the entire reason for number systems in the first place, and why we don't 
draw out 2 dollar bills, a quarter, a nickle, and 3 pennies for $2.33.
And if things are not identical, I don't advocate numerical represntations.  
And I'm not for just numbered amounts of grid objects.  It seemed to me like 
Resources was being represented as a number, like Wood, instead of 
individual objects, like Piles of Wood.
Hmm.  Am I getting off topic?
Oh. Properties.  Well, a property can be a list of objects possessed, too.  
We can either have something like "bd has a Pile of Resources in eir 
possession", or we can have "bd has 1 Resources".  If we are going to make 
these unidentified resources be grid objects, then yeah, lets make them 
piles or something, and not have the numbering.  But if we aren't going to 
put them in the grid, we may as well just have numbers.

Orc In A Spacesuit

_________________________________________________________________
Get faster connections -- switch to MSN Internet Access! 
http://resourcecenter.msn.com/access/plans/default.asp

_______________________________________________
spoon-discuss mailing list
spoon-discuss@xxxxxxxxx
http://lists.ellipsis.cx/mailman/listinfo/spoon-discuss