Walraven/SIMud

With the IRC gateway largely wrangled into submission and a way to read all of the old-style forum posts… I’m ready to move on to more interesting things.

I think my next two priorities for the project are:

1. getting the mudlib under source control
2. streamlining the newbie experience

source control

I’ve said this before, but just for completeness sake, we will be going with Mercurial - for reasons I don’t really care to discuss. A lot of research and experimentation has gone into this decision. Suffice it that there are way more pro’s than con’s and that while Git was considered, it fell flat when it came to offering what I actually needed.

We’ve attempted this at least twice in the past with miserable results. There are still remnants of CVS and SVN lying around, cluttering the place up. I will be scouring them.

As soon as everything is in hg, I will be attempting yet again to produce a vaguely distributable package of source. Since it has been so long, the administration will have to decide on licensing again, etc… Initially, the bundle will only be made available in response to individual requests from developers, but as we get this thing figured out, I hope to throw the doors open to the public after only 13+ years

My plans are that there will be something available by next Saturday (April 18th, 2009).

new newbie experience

Witac is awesome. However, it is also very brittle and frequently confusing. Acius has patched a few bugs out there recently, and I had to manually repair three broken NPC’s last week.

I plan on writing a much simpler (and more linear) newbie experience in the nearish future (once we’re under hg). Witac island will still stick around in some fashion or another - the specifics of which are yet to even be discussed. We may repair the quests and port them to the new (as-of-yet launched) quest journal system or we may scrap them entirely. We may leave the zone as a museum or turn it into a newbie city or something else entirely. I have no idea yet

But the new newbie world will be geographically smaller than Witac and will hopefully touch on the following topics:

1. The rules.
2. Moving around inside of rooms.
3. Basic gathering and crafting.
4. Basic combat.
5. Basic magic.

When newbies step out of the new experience (onto the docks of Candle Hill), they should have a few basic tools at their disposal, a few coins in their pockets, and a bit of advice as to what they might want to do next.

With the removal of Witac, some NPC’s will need to move to the mainland in order to handle hairdressing and such.

I have no ETA on this one, but I will be publishing details for discussion as the planning progresses. My goal is to have this done before the end of May, but I hope to have it ready much much sooner.

allaryin idea, news operations, plans, quests

Just a minor update here. The IRC daemon is as done as I am planning on making it for a long while. Some of the messaging has been cleaned up and it now keeps track of listening users.

You can see who’s on IRC with the normal ‘who’ command:

% who
                         -----== PLAYERS ==-----
   [Admin]     Allaryin needs to write quest journals (right adjusted)
   [Admin]     Malap has several legs (chaotic banana)
  [Ancient]    Polar bears enjoy eating Sora (lawful good) [idle]
                        -----== CHAT USERS ==-----
    [irc]      @Acius
    [irc]      @allaryin
    [irc]      @Harkins

                 --== Players: 1, Wizards: 2, IRC: 3 ==--

When I add jabber support, it will be integrated together with this. Linking of IRC/MUD accounts is future tech that I don’t want to think about quite yet… but when the futuretime comes, I’ll try to set it up so all three services play happy together somehow.

allaryin news chat, irc

In response to a suggestion from Sora, I’ve finally implemented a universal ‘rest’ command.

It may not be used during combat and requires you to be seated.

When you rest, you will regenerate some endurance at the cost of a large amount of readiness plus 1 heartbeat of ‘busy’ status per point of endurance healed in this way. At present, the cost is 250 readiness + 75 per end. This means you will be able to recharge 13-15 points of endurance per activation but will be disabled for 40-50 seconds.

In the future, I will be changing the cost to include a (minor) stat debuff for a short period after resting in exchange for a slight reduction in the ‘busy’ cost. This change should reduce the complete disabling duration down to 20-30 seconds but will weaken you for 30-60 additional seconds.

In addition to this command and the longstanding invigorate spell, there should eventually be some guild-specific ways of recharging endurance as well as some crafted consumables.

allaryin news abilities

There has been a healthy level of activity recently. GPF/Shentino has made a few fixes to Witac and I know Acius has done… something.

Apart from my posts here and lots of discussions with community members, I’ve just launched a pair of new (big) features.
Read more…

allaryin news chat, forums, irc

A lot of discussion has happened over the last week or so on how to deal with overlapping buffs.

At present, there aren’t very many objects that give stat buffs - and there aren’t any that give skill buffs. Aside from my strong desire to avoid unbalanced +con buffs floating all over the place, the biggest reason for this sort of thing is probably just how horribly difficult it is to implement reliably.

The current method for giving someone a temporary stat buff is by giving an object a query_str_bonus() method (or con, dex, spd, int, etc…) and dropping it in the player’s inventory. You then wait until recalc() is called on the living - it is called very frequently. The result of all query_str_bonus() calls on the player’s entire inventory is added together in a stat_bonus[] hash that’s stored on all living objects and the contents of stat_bonus[] are then added to all stat queries…

there is a better way

In stead of requiring individual objects to track every buff and in stead of requiring frequent iteration over a player’s inventory and calling 10 methods on every object they’re holding… I think a single buff manager is in order.
Read more…

allaryin idea buff, hunger, magic, stats

At present, hunger is really quite complicated. It does its damage in weird scaling ticks that vary in rate from race to race. Eating different items of food provides an assortment of unreliable and difficult to track buffs (that may be abused horribly). Eating habits will affect your character’s weight - with most players trending toward skin and bones as a result. Gurgling stomachs can interrupt spellcasting, and sufficient hunger results in a penalty to strength, constitution, and dexterity.

Not only is this too complex and involved, it’s too harsh and arbitrary. Yes, player characters should need to eat (it’s part of the mudlib’s original vision). No, they shouldn’t die because they idled out. Yes, wolves should eat deer. No, peasants shouldn’t starve to death because their employer’s player went on vacation for a week.

What we need is a simpler system that motivates people to eat - requires them to eat if they want to play the game at all, but does not penalize them for periods of inactivity and does not require the balancing of quite so many variables.
Read more…

allaryin idea buff, crafting, hunger, stats

Since one of our biggest concerns at present is organizing the mudlib development and resuscitating the community, my first priority is improving communication between everyone.

Initially, this means two things:

1. forums
2. mudmail

We have existing systems for both of these, but both systems stink for one reason or another. Malap’s forum system served us very well for a number of years, but eventually began to fade around the edges, showing age and lack of maintenance. Mudmail… is pretty much a joke. The in-game client is mediocre at best and unusable in many cases.
Read more…

allaryin news forums, mail, plans

A lot of server drama has plagued us over the last year. Walraven is back up and running for the first time in a few months - on a brand spankin’ new machine.

I still have every intention of reviving the project, but am the only admin with any active interest at present (others have poked their heads in, but I haven’t heard any overwhelming desire to dive back in from any of them).

I’ve spent a few hours today pondering the ponderables. Garvin has been a valuable sounding board and will be receiving wizard credentials (on an additional character specifically for performing wiz duties). A few of the other select old guard players will also be given this opportunity if they come back.

We’ve got big plans and I hope to see some of them actually happen.

The first thing I’ll be doing is installing an authentic bug tracking system (something better than the old forums we had).

I’ll be updating here - and on our twitter feed as things progress.

(And no, I don’t plan on making the entire site live inside of Wordpress, this is just the easiest way to get the dynamic blog and front page for now.)

allaryin news operations, plans

(This is another old article that was posted to my personal blog. I wrote this one back in June of ‘07.)

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Ok, it’s time for some more Walraven ideas/plans/dreams/wishes.

Since it was introduced, mining has been one of the biggest and most popular activities in the game. It’s easy to get into, it’s relatively safe, it practices skills that are later useful in combat, it produces valuable resources for crafting, etc… Oh, and it’s fun too

Mining is so popular that it is traditionally one of THE first activities a newbie engages in - usually at the advice of older players.
Read more…

allaryin idea, repost guilds, mining, quests

(This is another repost. This article was dredged up from my original notes on the idea of a ‘favor’ system for handling a player’s standing with the gods. It was originally imported into my personal blog in December of ‘06, but was probably written well before that. It is being preserved here for historical reasons.)

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Favor starts at zero, is capped at 100, and is allowed to go arbitrarily negative.

Messages
  96..    presence
  76..95  very close
  10..75
  -1..9   brief rumble
 -14..-2  loud rumble, displeased
 -29..-15 bolt
    ..-30 death

Read more…

allaryin repost faith, gods, magic, prayers, priests, skills