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.
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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:
- forums
- 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.)
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.
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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.)
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
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allaryin repost faith, gods, magic, prayers, priests, skills
(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.)
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 some of my old notes on the move to using ‘recipes’ for the crafting system. It was originally imported into my personal blog in Dec of ‘06. I’ve not edited this from its original state, so odds are medium-high that these scribblings are entirely obsolete.)
Four categories of recipe difficulty: novice, apprentice, journeyman,
master. Each category corresponds to an equal 25% of the skill level range.
There should also be rare/unique type recipes that are only available to
high masters (like 90% or 95% skill). These recipes won’t be published in
the list here, but will wait for game implementation and will probably be
designed largely by the players.
Read more…
allaryin repost crafting, plans
(Wow. Of all of the old reposted posts… this is the only one to actually contain a disclaimer that it was already obsolete at the time it was originally posted. There are still a few shreds of ideas that I’d like to extract from here, but the whole notion that players would have to use “cook” and “chop” type verbs to prepare potions one step at a time has been completely replaced by the longstanding recipe system.)
Note: This document is old. The ideas herein have not yet been updated to bring them in sync with current plans for the game world.
The SIMud alchemy system will hopefully wind up being very interesting. It should allow players to experiment with a tremendous number of different ingredients and methods of preparing and combining the ingredients. There should probably be multiple combinations that result in similar potions.
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allaryin repost alchemy, crafting, magic, obsolete
(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.)
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.
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allaryin idea, repost interruption, magic, meditation, resistance