Best Bug Ever

every now and then, i indulge my fantasy of building a bleeding edge test-based VR engine, or more colloquially, a MUD engine. development of open source text-based VR engines pretty much came to a grinding halt about 5-6 years ago. i'd love to be the person who revives the genre. sometimes, i allow myself to putter around the internet, poking my nose into old MUD development mailing list archives and skimming through source code for applications that haven't been touched in years because it allows me to entertain the silly notion that i might actually have enough time on my hands to develop something like that.

today, i trawled through a collection of articles about MUD design written by a pioneer of MUD development. the ever-present challenge of building a text-based world is to make the virtual world interesting and somewhat realistic. it was in an article about dealing with this challenge that i found this:

Closing Thoughts... On Food

I'm sure I've run way over my intended length this week, but there's one more topic that I can't let lie: food. I said at the start that a lot of gamedev and programming work this week has gone into objects. The gamedev work has been about creating all the objects needed for plots in the game. Someday we're going to have a large library of objects, and it's going to be easier for developers to make their games, but today we're still forming the basis of that library – so there's a lot of work to be done.

The programming work has gone into – food. If you ate food in the castle in the first few weeks, you probably noticed that you typed "eat croissant" (substitute your favorite Marrach delicacy), a pleasing message appeared ("You eat the croissant.") and then the food was gone. Nice and simple, but a bit hard on the cooks trying to keep up with the players.

So wconnell, one of our engineers, started working on an advanced food system, so that when you took a bite, you just ate part of the food. The first draft of the system involved the mass of a piece of food decreasing by about 10% when a bite was taken.

Or at least that was the theory...

There was a minor mistake in the coding somewhere and as a result whenever someone took a bite of food, their food got bigger... by about 10x. We had one character trapped in the dining hall after she'd eaten a bit too much of her roll. We had a slice of white cheese that grew to be larger than the entire castle. It was chaos.

We giggled about it for hours.

Sometimes this job is kind of weird.

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