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

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

(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

(Wow. A repost with immediately useful application. This is my original writeup for an in-game forum interface… and it will likely be the springboard I use when actually implementing the communication upgrade ideas.)

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The in-game forum system is long overdue. It should be very similar to the mudmail client, they should both use similar commands, etc…
Read more…

allaryin idea, repost forums, mail, plans

(This is a repost of an article I originally wrote on my personal blog back in December of ‘06. It is being appropriately back-dated.)

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I’ve recently given a lot of thought to the magic system in Walraven. It is a mess of kludges and bandaids upon bandaids upon gaping wounds. Lots of systems in the game were written as temporary type measures just to get a feature into testing. Unfortunately, with the kind of time people tend to have for working on the mud these days, those temporary measures have just sort of stuck around and become permanent.

I therefore propose a list of new features and rewrites that will become version 2 of the game’s magic system.
Read more…

allaryin idea, repost interruption, magic, meditation, resistance

(This is a repost of my original writeup on the subject of integrating mud chat with jabber. It was posted on my personal blog back in November ‘06.)

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Mud <-> outside world communication. It’s an idea that I’ve been throwing around for months (years now). I’ve given up on it several times. And today, it reared its ugly little head again when McKay (Sora) poked me about something vaguely related.

The incarnation of the idea this time around is simple enough that I’m willing to commit to producing it in the nearish future. It’s simpler than previous ideas but still adds a lot of value to the game - and by virtue of being simpler it has the added bonus of being more likely to see its way into implementation
Read more…

allaryin idea, repost chat, jabber, plans