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

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.
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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

(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…
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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.)

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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.
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allaryin repost crafting, plans

(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
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allaryin idea, repost chat, jabber, plans

(Yet another repost from notes archived elsewhere. I originally put this on my personal blog in August of ‘05.)

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The following is a continual survey that I am conducting of all magical effects that I have seen implemented in pen and paper rpg’s. The point here is to condense them into their barest forms and thus be able to categorize specific spells into individual categories - and to use the list as a sort of checklist when designing other magic systems.
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allaryin repost buff, magic, plans, skills