Walraven/SIMud

It has finally happened.

After a long period of wrangling with bugs, dealing with server drama, and some finalizing purges of walraven specific theme stuff, SIMud is finally open to the world.

Downloaders, go nuts.

Take heed:

This is still alpha mode code, and there’s going to be pieces missing since I had to gut some stuff that was taken out.

The license is Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution + Share-alike. If you would like different licensing terms, please go to to talk to the admins about it. They may elect to make concessions upon request.

http://shentino.necronomicorp.com/public/simud.tar.bz2

Requirements:
LDMud 3.4.2
a generously beefy config file

Note that there’s a lot of functionality that was walraven specific that had to be censored, and things are almost certainly going to be broken.

For the time being, to make yourself an admin, you’ll need to patch the /bin/wiz/addwizard.c command to skip the ADM_CHECK, add yoruself as a level 1000 wizard, and then add the admin check back.

With a little bit of TLC, installation will be less of a hassle soon enough, but with limited resources, a raw unsanded release was better than nothing.

Duke Nukem Forever has taught me not to get bogged down in perfection.

gpfault news

I now have root access to walraven.

It was granted after a recent mud restore failure I couldn’t fix at the time, plus what proved to be the last straw regarding very annoying file ownership problems caused by the security system littering uids of whoever last touched the file.

Bugs, beware.

For inspiration, I refer to one of my favorite scenes from Tombstone…

Wyatt Earp: All right, Clanton… you called down the thunder, well now you’ve got it! You see that?
[pulls open his coat, revealing a badge]
Wyatt Earp: It says United States Marshal!
Ike Clanton: [terrified, pleading] Wyatt, please, I…
Wyatt Earp: [referring to Stilwell, laying dead] Take a good look at him, Ike… ’cause that’s how you’re gonna end up!
[shoves Ike down roughly with his boot]
Wyatt Earp: The Cowboys are finished, you understand? I see a red sash, I kill the man wearin’ it!
[lets Ike up to run for his life]
Wyatt Earp: So run, you cur… RUN! Tell all the other curs the law’s comin’!
[shouts]
Wyatt Earp: You tell ‘em I’M coming… and hell’s coming with me, you hear?…
[louder]
Wyatt Earp: Hell’s coming with me!

gpfault news

Not much of the player base seems to have survived the server drama that we experienced, which has unfortunately left a major power vacuum in the game as key characters have had their players go away.

Currently mulling over how to handle this.

By default, our “playerwipe” daemon that mops up abandoned accounts based on how long a player goes without logging in can cull out the dead weight. But it takes horrendously long, and has most likely already been mercilessly tuned so I really don’t want to fiddle with anything.

Currently, AFAIK, Allaryin is the only member of the city council at the moment. My own character, Shentino, fulfills the role of Candle Hill’s treasurer, having previously held the role of the merchant guildmaster.

Probably will resolve this vaccuum in character. Some chitty chat with “The ‘A’ team” will probably be in order.

That said, the player base itself is rather limp, and really took a beating. Fresh blood will probably be needed, which brings me to the horrendous newbie “bootcamp” that allaryin previously complained about.

Witac is hopeless, and a new system needs to be written that

* Teaches players the basics of how to survive in the world
* Gives them some starting equipment
* Teaches them the actual rules of the game
* Gets their initial descriptions set properly (eyes, hair, skin, etc…plus clothing)

Additionally, the magic tree, most likely a newbie’s ONLY source of food in the place, has a strict quota. While reasonable to prevent exploiters from picking a million fruits and using the tree as an infinite orchard, it also enforces an implied time limit, and if a newbie is stuck and can’t get his quests figured out before his hunger eats up his magic tree quota, he will be stuck in an infinite starvation loop.

Newbie boot camp, whatever it turns out to be, needs to be newbie friendly, while at the same time protected from being abused by exploiters. It’s possible that enforcing an anti-non-newbie quarantine may work. I also need to be wary of collusion with old timers who may in theory pass newbieland contraband into the ‘real world”

Bugs bypassed:

* Until a way for the mud to connect to itself is found, hunger daemon has been changed from heartbeat to 3-second callout. Heartbeats are disabled when no players are online.

Tweaks:

* Finally fed up with my mortal getting blown offline, I increased the base idleness allowed from 15 minutes to 30 minutes. Players still get a one minute bonus per level.

gpfault news

Since becoming archwizard I’ve been fixing things like crazy:

• Shopkeepers can now buy as well as sell
• Hunger ticks moved into a separate daemon that uses a heartbeat to process a workload. Old system was unreliable and allowed certain mobs to cheat.
• Map areas now generate all internal exits explicitly, and a typo fix was made.
• Buildings owned by players that don’t exist anymore are now escheated as abandoned. All locks are removed and the building reverts to unowned status.
• Rudimentary support for multiple currencies. Shopkeepers can be told to accept different kinds of money.
• The infamous penny fumbling bug in the bank ledger was nixed after converting from floating candles to integer pence.
• Doors that are locked as well as closed print as ‘x’ instead of ‘+’, allowing players to receive a much faster visual feedback.
• A minor exploit in mining that allowed players to teleport into a level after it has already flooded has been fixed. Now, flooding is a seperate operation carried out by a different object, that also remains behind in the flooded levels to instantly kill anyone who returns.
• Death is now only checked during heartbeat, to prevent cases where multiple simultaneous damagings would result in multiple deaths for players. A few players who have been affected by this have had their stats refunded.
• The anthill that people were stumbling across in ihaya had its return exit misrouted to some old terrain that was superceded by newer geography, causing players to be stuck in limbo. The old terrain was removed and the anthill was properly reattached.
• Carnivores will now attempt to consume their meaty inventories, as well as scavenge dead bodies, in addition to killing and devouring live prey.

That’s the good news, now onto the bad news.

Following the tradition of a probationary apprentice of the great creator Rodenon, I managed to, as has been done by the other admins in their heyday, nuke all the trees in the world.

A reboot didn’t save them, so I spent about a day reseeding them. The good news is it gave me an excuse to redistribute the tree composition of the various lands to more closely match their intended climates and biomes. Writing smart trees that could later be converted into the appropriate tree randomly was a big help, as was the regrowing daemon I wrote that insta-growed the smart trees and made them spread.

gpfault news