Instanced areas.

[Saffire]

Summary
An instanced area is a personal copy of an area for a pre-defined player, or group of players. No one but the specified player(s) can enter an instanced area. Instances allow players to have a more personal experience exploring, adventuring, or completing quests in their own private area.

Why Needed

• An instanced area could be used to create a personal tutorial for every newbie before they enter the rest of the game world.
• Instanced areas allow less social players to play a game without having to deal with other players if they don't want to.
• Players can go through instanced areas solo or with others without having to worry about other players showing up and killing the same things they are, looting their corpses, grabbing quest items, etc.

Arguments Against

• Instanced areas separate players from the rest of the game.
• Players could abuse instanced areas to avoid having to deal with the consequences for their actions. For example: Hiding from another player that wants to kill you.
• It detracts from the realism factor of the MUD.

Conclusion
Personally, I would only use this in my newbie tutorial, but that is only because of the nature of the MUD I am creating (It is to be a very social MUD), but I can think of a lot of different MUDs that could benefit from instanced areas. A great example of instancing is Guild Wars. Every city is open to the public, and it is where all the game's trading and socializing goes on. When a player (Or a party of players) leaves the city, however, they are no longer able to interact with other players at all, save for communications, such as whispers or channels.

[Justin]

I have nothing against instanced areas, but I am not entirely sure how I would do them currently. Dynamically creating areas isn't a problem, of course, it's the making them 'private' that I am not sure about. Perhaps just a flag would do? I'm not sure.

[Saffire]

I was wondering how to do it too. One idea would be to create a new copy of the area and stick players in there when they enter an instanced area. I was racking my brain trying to think up some more earlier, but everything I came up with was either going to be way to inefficient to be possible, or far too complex to code.

[Justin]

Hm. Copying is a bit of a pain to do right, because there are some things you want to copy and some things you really don't (like unique IDs).
However...you could just write code (or even a reaction) which creates the area, with lots of calls to Manager#create_object.

Of course, if you have a 1,000 players in huge instanced areas, that will be ridiculously slow (to create each) and eat up memory like crazy. But it's a place to start.

In the case of a tutorial, you could just have the code be in login.rb to create an area when the character is created and then stick them in it. I think that would actually work just fine.

I'll look into this, because I suspect there are some things I could add to make it easier.

Edit: I just realized you would also have to keep track of the instanced areas and delete them when they are no longer needed. I don't think that would be too difficult, though.