To be honest the spaces are already there: houses. Surely it would be possible to grant restricted OLC to those on a house-list that only functions Between Time & Space?
I guess I could live with restricted OLC access to add new rooms
inside a private house, i.e. rooms that couldn't be accessed without special invitation.
I could live with rooms and possibly mobs being added in a 'sandbox' too, as long as it was set as !teleport and had a warning sign at the entrance about desc quality.
But objects is a totally different matter, unless someone could code in a restriction against them being taken anywhere in the mud. I wouldn't like 4D turning into something that looks as a DragonballZ mud. And I'm even a bit reluctant about mobs, because I know that at least some players would abuse this liberty by making easy-to-kill mobs and then use these for fast levelling. It has happened in the past, and that's not what the game is supposed to be about.
The sandbox idea has merits, even though I think the players would tire of it very fast, because building is really rather tedious work. However, at the time when I was still hoping that Crafting skills would be implemented, the top skill for Woodworkers was Shipbuilder - i.e. to build vehicles. And for Stoneworker the top skill was Constructor, which would give them restricted access to OLC, so that they could build player Houses in a walled in zone with building plots that we would provide. These houses would not be crashproof, but there would be a skill called Cabinetmaker, where players could make the equivalent to our crashproof lockers.
And it would also be quite possible to let players build their own mini dungeons or arenas in the sandbox area, without needing to write any descs at all, unless they chose to. Because we actually have the equivalent of the Minecraft lego blocks in our Wilderness code. A room that is set with a Wilderness flag gets an auto-generated description, based on the sector of the room. And until you exchange that default desc for something new, that is what everyone entering the room will see. So, repetitive descs, and just two lines, (but at least two lines without typo, grammar and punctuation errors). And it allows for quick building.
Also, with the help of KaVir's new client app, (which is still under development), we now also have access to graphic sidebar maps, which look pretty nice, and make orienting in the game a lot easier, which is good both for exploring amd Pkilling.
The enclosed screenshot shows a part of the Ancient Greece map in the right side window, while using KaVir's GUI in my own MUSHclient. The circle indicates my own position on the map, and each square on the map represents one room, i.e. one map tile or lego block.
The in-game equivalent map is displayed on the Game screen, for comparison.
At least for me this is an enormous improvement, because you always have the map at the side to help with the orientation, and you can use the arrows on the number pad to move around easily.
(In case someone wonders, the small icons under the Avatar to the left indicate that I have a spell cast on me, and the digits on the icons show the remaining duration time, which slowly ticks down until effect ends and the icons disappear. There are of course lots of other features you can add to the client, but for this subject the maps are what counts. I'll post more info about the client app and how to download it in another post, just thought I'd mention it here).
http://img215.imageshack.us/img215/1695/maplaconia.jpg
