I've been toying with the idea of adding in, for lack of a better word, pawn shops. This would allow players to sell some of their items via a special shoppie. I'm sure there are already snippets for this kind of thing but I would rather not use someone else's code when adding in new stuff. The fewer people I have to credit for new features and stuff like that the better. Maybe it's just me, I don't know. That's always the way I've worked.

 Don't get me wrong, I have installed stuff that are works of others. Come to think of it, I have only installed one, well, one collection, of others work and that was the Lua scripting stuff done by Nick Gammon. All the previous snippets that were added were done by the previous implementor, Drazuk.

 Anyway, back to the pawn shop... the idea is to let players sell items they have for whatever price they want. This would be a (probably) better alternative to the live auction as there isn't always a lot of players on to bid on items. This way, a player can put up an item for sell and others will be able to look through these items and purchase any that they want. The money gained from the sell will go to the seller once they log back in to collect any money from sold items.

 The basics are easy enough to do. I'm now trying to figure out the best way to store the data to files and what format to use. Lua would make it pretty easy to write and read all the data back, but I think that would require some additional work done so that the spell affects on items can be stored as well 'cause I'm not certain if they are or not. I guess I could find out first...

Started out by getting up unusually early (for a day off, that is) around 10:30-ish. Got on the road about an hour later and headed towards Pigeon Forge. We stopped by an "As Seen on TV" store just to check it out and see what was really on the inside. Come to find out, it was stuff we had seen on tv and didn't need to see in the store. The big deal with that store was the convenience of being able to buy the items and not pay for shipping. Woo! Ok, so, we found out not to go there again.

Next stop was at Wonder Works. It's an upside-down museum. There was a ton of things inside to check out.  We spent about 4 or 5 hours inside there. There was this crazy bathroom in the upstairs section that had a glass door and a window into the hallway in front of it. You'd think this wasn't a good place to go, but once you go inside and lock the door, the glass gets all frosty-lookin so you can't see through it at all. Makes me wish houses had that kind of glass.

After we left there, it was time to go to Gatlinburg to spend our Hard Rock Cafe gift certificates. I think we spent a couple hours in there. Had an awesome dinner. She had a pork chop that tasted like an awesome steak. It was pretty tastey. I had what was called an S.O.B. burger. It had a lot of stuff that I wouldn't normally eat on a burger, like guacamole and some chipotle sauce. We each got a drink in a souveneir glass so we had something to take home with us. Total bill: $71.20 ... for 2 people. We ended up paying just over $30 after the gift certificates, including the $10 tip.

At this point it was a little before 9pm so we left from there and went back through Pigeon Forge to do some mini golf at Ripley's. We did the medium course, 18 holes. She did better than I did by 2 strokes. We would have tied, but I messed up pretty bad on one of the last holes. 

By 10:15 we were on our way back home. It was a really good day and I'd have to say we should do it again sometime, with the exception of the $70 dinner bill. 

I was thinkin the other day about what would be the easiest way to add holiday mobs, such as Cupids, Christmas elves, Santa, black cats, jack-o-lanterns, etc... to the mud world during certain months without having to edit the area files or set up a different area.lst file for each holiday. Then I realized that I had the Lua area reset scripting (thanks to Nick Gammon) installed and available. I would have to extend the mob invoking functions to accomodate certain things but that wouldn't be too much work.

Actually, now that I think about it, the hard part would be to design all the mobs for each of the holidays.

I've been using zMUD for 10 years or so now, admittedly not to its fullest potential. I've been keeping up with the news on cMUD's progress. It has a list of features yet to be coded that I'm waiting on, but with it being in a constant beta state now with a bunch of new bugs with each revision, I'm not planning to buy it any time soon. I'm really waiting for the full SSH support, some of which it has now in the cMUD Pro version, but it again still has bugs.

I'm not a bit bothered by the fact that there are no more planned versions of zMUD. I figure I paid about $20 for some software nearly 10 years ago and I've used it daily ever since then I've gotten my money's worth out of it. I don't think I've used any other piece of software as much or as long that cost so little. 

I have, however, gotten a bit curious about other MUD clients. One that I'm fiddling with now is MUSHClient written by Nick Gammon. This program makes me with I had known about Lua and MUSHClient years ago. I'm not saying that I would use it over zMUD, but that I would have had seperate uses for both programs. The native ability to use Lua in MUSHClient seems to have been there for several versions now. I don't know how long ago this began, but with the list of "plugins" and other scripts posted on Nick's site, it would appear that it has been quite a while.

There are so many built-in functions and different terms and syntax for MUSHClient that I feel a little overwhelmed by it. I think I felt the same way about zMUD when I first got it and was looking through the zScript functions in the help file. It'll just take some getting used to and experiment with the code. I'm not even sure I actually have a use for it yet, but it does look like something I want to learn how to use effectively. I've already found out that a few of our players use MUSHClient. A few also use zMUD too. For now, the zMUD users are really the only ones I'm able to help with scripts.

Other clients that some of our players use are WinTin95 and Portal. I've never used Portal, but WinTin95 is rather bland. It does the job, but I wasn't impressed with it. I've only used it when I really had no other option. Now I have lots of options and time to experiment with them all.