The mud is dead.

I’m moving on.

I’ll watch from afar though. If things recover I’ll be back, but at the moment only admin voodoo is going to fix things, and in the meantime all I can do is twiddle my thumbs and devote my time to more productive uses.

1. Interface simplicity. I think this can largely be solved by simply making the living object and the buff manager the same thing, and avoiding the “get_buff_manager” thunking annoyance. You’re adding a function to living *anyway*.

2. Updatability. Your system here relies very heavily on there never being a buggy object, ever. This is terrible design. The old system guaranteed that the buffs were always correct after a refresh, no matter how buggy the previous buffs were. This system has no way of saying “recalculate all my buffs to make sure they’re right.” You’re one badly-behaved object away from weird, sticky, evil permanent buffs.

I think the solution to this is easy — make sure the buff manager knows WHICH OBJECTS are providing the buffs, and allow it to ask what the current amount of the buff is. This avoids the ugliness of looping through the inventory, although IMO the correct answer to that is to start making players carry backpacks if they want to carry lots of stuff, thus avoiding the multi-hundred-object inventory problem. I do agree that having more than one query function for different buff types was a terrible idea — I would do it like this:

query_buff() { return ([ "str" : -2, "dex" : 5 ]); }

I think simplifying the buff system is a good idea, but I believe you’ve discarded some important and valuable properties with your proposal here.

As far as ticking hunger on readiness… I’d like to, but I’m convinced it wouldn’t work. I’ve been pondering this one for a while now, and it would be awfully difficult to balance. I think the better solution is to add endurance and mana costs to actions that previously had none.

Assign a general category of buff to each of the food groups and you’re good to go.

You could also have hunger tick when *readiness* recharges, which means that just about every form of action would make you hungry. HP/MP recharges mostly only apply to combat, and there’s a bunch of active ways to kill time that are light on combat.