Real world equivalencies in UO

[Yukiko]

I always run into trouble when trying to relate things in UO to real life equivalents like how many yards of material are in a UO bolt of cloth or how many boards will a log yield. Things like that have to be fudged or it would take a long time to gather enough material to make things. But I would like to know from my fellow POLsters if any of you have tried to do any realistic equivalencies such as I've described above.

I had done research into bolts of cloth about 6 years ago when I was working on the tailoring skill and found that there is no standard amount of cloth in a bolt. It depends on the thickness of the material and maybe on the cost per yard as well.

There is one skill I have personal experience with and that is smelting and refining. Many years ago I worked for a small precious metals refinery. We didn't use electro-plating as is used almost entirely in most modern refineries. We used the Biblical process known as fire polishing. I won't bore you with the process here except to say that the actual metal content by weight in ore is much less than the weight of the ore. Many factors can effect the actual amount of metal contained in ore so some ore might have a large amount of metal embedded in it (high grade ore) and some might have very little (low grade ore). Sine UO doesn't allow for various grades of ore we just have to decide on how many ingots a unit of ore will yield.

Anyway, if you've given any thought to real world equivalencies I'd love to hear them and what you decided as a result.

Thanks.

[Pachacuti]

That is really nice. I remember trying to do something similar, but not really concerning quantities. Something that really bothered me in UO was the weight of the objects. In UO players can carry dozens of katanas n their bags, what felt really unrealistic to me. In my old shard I always tried to aim for real life weight.

[Yukiko]

I guess the tendency is to want to make things as realistic as possible for some people. So let's choose on thing here to use as an example; logs. You need to decide how big a log is. So let's say a log is 4 feet long by two feet in diameter. This means that a character might be able to carry three at most just going by size alone. We're not even considering weight here. Plus this means that aside from a dagger and maybe an axe that's about all they can fit in a backpack and their arms. We'll allow pretend that they had to use their arms to carry logs even though the game construct is putting them in their pack. So now they have three logs, a dagger and an axe. That's all they can carry if we want to be "realistic". I can't think of anyone who would want to play on a server that set things up that way. Understand that I am interested in realism. However, remember this is also a game. I'm not too interested in making things that realistic but rather in equating the UO items to real world items and then using that to determine how much raw material might be in the item. For example, how many boards can we extract from a log? Naturally we would need to decide how big a log is and then use that information to determine how many boards (2 X 4's) you could get from a log. We'll just have to resign ourselves to the fact that players can carry way more logs in their pack than they could in real life. Yeah, I know it sucks for reality sake but like I said, it is a game after all.

[Pachacuti]

True, true, now I see it would be really annoying. Maybe if you could do more stuff with a single log, the player would need to carry less of them, making things more realistic. At the moment, a single chair take more than one log to be made, I don't think that much wood would be needed.

[Yukiko]

It all depends on the "size" of logs on your server and how "big" the chair is. If your logs are assumed to be 4 feet long and two feet in diameter you could get a decent yield of 2 X 4 boards from that. I'm not going to do the math here to figure out exactly how many boards you'd get but let's assume you get 10 2 X 4's out of that log. That might be enough to make one chair. Remember if we are going to emulate true real world models here there's always some waste when cutting logs, ie. saw dust. Plus, you're going to screw up some cuts or end up with a big knot in the middle of a board and that will affect yield. I mention waste and stuff like that only to show how truly detailed you could get in making the game "realistic".

I knew of one shard where they were going to require a blacksmith to maintain his forge at a constant temperature by double clicking on the bellows or if the forge was too hot by not double clicking the bellows. Some metals required certain temperatures to smelt. I believe the developers of that shard were working on a temperature gump that provided visual feedback to the smith. Also, you could alloy certain metals together but that required certain specific temperatures based on which metals you were combining. I won't even begin to tell you what was involved in making a composite bow on that shard. There are some players for whom that level of realism might appeal but for most people they just want to play the game as an escape from real life.

Now I'm not saying that things should be easy. If you make stuff super easy to do/craft/kill people get bored. There should be a certain amount of struggle involved in a game but it needs to be fun and not overly realistic. Unfortunately, I've gone a little off topic in my own post.
*grins*

I'm more interested in quantity rather than game mechanics. In other words, what is the yield from a raw material? I know if I've thought about this and wondered about things like this then there are others who have as well.

So here's a list of some raw materials:

Ore
Logs
Wheat
Flax (spun into thread. I don't think you can make yarn from flax but I don't know for sure)
Wool (spun into yarn)
Thread (woven into linen cloth (if you made the thread from flax))
Yarn (woven into wool cloth)
Corn
Sand (We decided on a "scoop" as the unit of measure for sand and clay)
Clay
Bolt of cloth (this isn't truly the raw material. That would be flax or wool)

Do we decide on a one to one conversion for these things, ie. one ball of yarn makes on bolt of wool cloth? I don't like that idea. I'd rather try to approximate real life equivalents if possible and where things would take too much raw material we'd fudge it up a bit. I was just curious if anyone had thought this through and came up with any numbers.