http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/mudreading/~3/210142631/attributes

Sorry for the lack of content for the last month, serious real life hardship has caused MUDding to fall by the wayside. For now, here is a discussion on the topic of character attributes in RPGs that someone showed me:

Character Attributes in Role-Playing Games

Also, here is a description of the character attributes system in the PC game Arcanum, which I think is downright inspired:

Arcanum Character Generation

Hoping to get back into the pattern of producing regular articles as life gets back to normal. Also hoping to find people who are interested in writing. There have been some great guest authors and I’d love to have more.

http://www.zalanthas.org/blogs/brideofson/archives/001407.html

Seeing some discussion on the GDB about the Gone command, I decided to post some documentation on what we currently have implemented in the game engine for the gone command. Note that when we started designing the game engine, we have aimed to make it easily configurable and modifiable on the fly. That said, some of what is posted about in 'Code' posts about the Game Engine may never be used by Armageddon Reborn, but I include it here to show you the process we've gone through.

The gone command itself remains largely unchanged. It is an out of character command that lets you notify others in the room with you that you are no longer actively playing the game. The syntax, remains the same:

[Everybody oooh and ahh that there's a consistent 'syntax' command...you're welcome]

Here's an example of using the gone command:

The following is an excerpt from an internal doc (modified for the audience) on the features the game engine provides to support the gone command.

Gone Warning [engine default true]

If you're marked gone, a message is sent to anyone who refers to you in a command.  For instance, if Amos (the brown-haired man) is gone, and you want to give him some coins, you would see:

Notice the command still happened, you'll just get a warning letting you know that they're gone.

Gone shows in rooms [engine default true]

[GONE] is placed in front of gone character's long descriptions.  A user settable option to show this or not is something that likely will be added.

Example:

Idle Gone Timeout [engine default 5 minutes]

A timeout can be set to automatically mark you gone if you're idle for longer than a specified # of seconds.  The message is 'You are gone idling.'  This likely will also get a user option to disable it.

Idle Timeout [engine default 1 hour]

If you're idle for more than the specified time your link is automatically dropped, leaving you link-dead.

Link-dead Timeout [engine default 30 minutes]

If you're link-dead for more than the specified time, you are automatically extracted from the game.

Note that if we chose to use the link-dead timeout, it will allow a ranger-quit for non-rangers with the cost of having to leave yourself exposed for the delay specified.

In closing, please remember that this is just what the engine currently supports, more features could be added, and some, if not all of these might not be used at all.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/mudreading/~3/216631336/muds-and-oss

Over the years I’ve written a lot of MUD related code. So far, all of it has been unreleased code used by one MUD for one purpose. As work for the engine of a MUD I work on has gone open source, I’ve been thinking about what other projects can be given back to the community.

MUD software being free to use is nothing new. One of the most well-known MUD engines, DikuMUD, is free software. Technically it is not Open Source Software (OSS) because it is not free to use for any purpose. DikuMUD cannot be used for commercial purposes. The definition of OSS is described here.

I haven’t heard much about MUD-related code other than engine code being shared, though. A SMAUG world editor for Windows by Nick Gammon has a true OSS license, and I’d like to see more tools like this one. This is the kind of thing can help established MUDs as well as new ones.

I have a tool that is analogous to Nick’s called RMBT. It is a web-based tool for world editing that can be configured to use different MUD engines that are backed by MySQL. This I think will be my first foray into the world of releasing MUD tools as OSS.

My first consideration has been licensing. I’m no lawyer, but I do know enough about OSS licensing that I thought it’d be an easy decision. I was wrong.

The first issue is this: Do I want my code to be copyleft ? Copyleft code means that modified versions must have the same license as the original. This makes sure that all changes to the code are given back to the community, even if they aren’t made by the original author.

It sounds like a good deal to me. But there is a problem with code that is used as part of a larger program. Specifically, I want to make sure people who make MUDs with RMBT don’t suddenly have to release their MUD’s code to the community due to my license.

At first, I considered the LGPL which doesn’t have the restriction that when its used as part of a larger program, the whole program must be released. This seemed fine at first. However, this does allow other people to interface directly with RMBT code rather than just using the same database, integrating more closely with RMBT and possibly using RMBT code for display logic in their game. This isn’t really in the spirit of what I intend.

Eventually the question came of if sharing a database (the only interaction between RMBT and the MUD it builds for) even counts for this restriction. I have seen no clear answer to this question, though my research so far suggests that no, it does not. Thus, a ubiquitous OSS license such as the GPL is probably appropriate.

The concern that I’m currently working on is creating a releasable version of the code. Right now RMBT has no “default” configuration, so I need to make one that doesn’t contain details on the schemata of the MUD that it is currently being used with. The license, once finalized, needs to be attached to each RMBT source file. Lastly, the whole code needs a once-over to remove esoteric comments and embarrassing mistakes.

Its been a learning experience, but I’m pretty close to releasing my first open-source MUD software. It’ll be really interesting to see if anything comes of it. There is a good chance that other people might want to use it if they hear about it. I have a feeling that hearing about people that find it helpful will make the whole thing worthwhile.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/mudreadingcomments/~3/216782389/muds

MUDs and OSS

I’m pretty sure I once saw a video of RMBT somewhere and it looked neat. Looking forward to a release!

http://www.zalanthas.org/blogs/brideofson/archives/001408.html

I realized I totally forgot to post this video demo of RMBT. So, check it out.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/mudreading/~3/220807916/rmbt-is-now-

I feel cheesy having my first news post be news about something I myself did, but I guess I have nothing to gain from this, so I’ll forgive me.

RMBT, a graphical web-based MUD building tool developed for ArmageddonMUD, is now free software.

The RMBT project lives at lemon lime software.

Interested in seeing what the community response is.

http://www.zalanthas.org/blogs/brideofson/archives/001409.html

RMBT, the graphical web-based program for MUD world editing that we developed for the Armageddon Reborn project, is now open source. You can download it at http://lemonlimesoftware.com/

I'm hoping to see other MUDs out there using it someday! It was a lot of fun to develop but there is still lots of improvement, so it'd be great if it became a community effort.

http://www.zalanthas.org/blogs/brideofson/archives/001410.html

Just wanted to show you guys some examples of ideas we've kicked around but are ultimately not going to be in the game and why.

1) Approach: When we were working out how rooms would work in 2.0, we considered having to approach people and things in order to interact with them. We decided that adding even more roundtime/lag would have more 'ick factor' than 'wow factor'.

2) Pirate Class: Blasted landlubbers made this idea walk the plank.

3) Wood mage: Djarjak has the idea of "A new mage type that manipulates plants and wood in the way that others manipulate stone or water. (the lost element) " but at this point we're focusing primarily on the elements found in 1.0.

4) The Quicksand Sea: This was to be the basis for the pirate class (Arr!). Shalooonsh and I were going to place it smack dab in the middle of the world so you had to cross it to get anywhere *evil grin*. Perhaps we made a tactical error in calling it "The Sucking Sea"

5) Messenger System: aka the Pony Express, NPCs and PCs would take jobs delivering messages between cities. The presence of psionics and the departure of its proposer, Ashyom, left this idea in the dust.

6) The Gelid Chasm: Eniriah proposed an arctic area composed only of rock and ice. While it was very creative, the consensus was it wasn't quite right for Zalanthas.

7) Broken Mountain: Naiona proposed an underground cavern area with a race of mutants descended from interbreeding of humans and elves. This proposal suffered from endless "Brokeback Mountain" jokes. Another 'cavern' settlement, Kalamoor, was approved instead.

8) Marsh Dwarves: Tlaloc proposed a new race based on the bald DS dwarf, but without a focus.

9) No Middle Class: Naiona proposed a system where almost everyone would be dirt poor with no chance of advancement, and "wealth in tiny amounts - with the average PC [having] little chance of ever achieving it". This was eventually scrapped in favor of a player-driven economy.

10) Magick city: There were a couple of different proposals for cities that were not only accepting of magick, but entirely populated and ruled by magickers. At this time, nothing like this is planned for implementation.

http://www.zalanthas.org/blogs/brideofson/archives/001411.html

Based on the feedback from everyone we've made some changes to Tyleki, from how it was when we first announced it.

We've gotten rid of the mindbenders, they're simply outlawed from Tyleki and discovery of one will either result in its death (if the person dealing with it is confident their militia can take it down and that the person actually is a mindbender) or exile (if they're uncertain they can take it on or if they're uncertain it truly is a mindbender). They aren't trusted or accepted by normal people in Tyleki, although a good way to get rid of a competitor, if you can afford it, is to bribe a ruling family member and then accuse the person of being a mindbender.

However with mindbenders gone, we were left with trying to work out a way for the Tyleki ruling families to keep magickers under control. We had considered uniting the three militias into one force, as they'd be more effective that way, however the three separate militias seemed fairly popular. Instead we decided to have a special herb used in a tea that when drunk, limits the ability of a magicker to use their magick (doesn't negate it completely, but does make it more difficult). This herb will be foragable from where it grows, but specific details have yet to be worked out. The tea also has the side-effect of being extremely addictive and also causes changes in the person's physical appearance (which changes are yet to be determined) so that magickers have a harder time hiding.

Also there won't be widespread acceptance of magickers. Instead it will be up to players to decide their opinions on magickers, although most Tylekans would probably consider them to be dangerous to a degree with non-drugged magickers extremely dangerous.

This will help lower the tensions between the ruling families and ordinary citizens a bit as they won't appear to have super weapons pointed at each other.

Unrelated to the above, people were confused with this paragraph:

While only the Council can make laws, they cannot enforce the law and are instead reliant on the founding family guards to do this. In earlier times, the Council had more control over Tyleki. With the recent tension between the ruling families and the townspeople, the families have taken back much of the control from the actual Council.

In a ruling family there are two ways to gain power: become the family's leader or become the family's council representative. The power the Council representatives have within their family differs from family to family, but at their most powerful they have greater control then the family's leader.

The reason for this dual-power is because of a law was passed early in Tyleki history by the Council, that forbids the family leader from also being the Council's representative. This is fertile ground for tension between the leader and representative of a family. Sometimes the two have a power struggle for many years, other times one has dominated the other. In some family's this is more likely then in other family's, because of how the council represntative is chosen within a particular family.

A lot of other questions, comments and concerns were raised on Tyleki, however I'm not sure if this addresses them or not, so please ask again any questions you still have.

Oh and Ovirne from a previous post is a war hero ;)

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/mudreading/~3/226277456/more-than-mu

I ended up reading this fine blog due to a link from a commenter on this site, and from there started exploring various other types of “Interactive Fiction” (IF), that being a general term for the type of games that includes MUDs.

Its interesting just how isolated the MUD community is. Really, I have had almost no experience with the other types of IF.

For example, I didn’t even know what a roguelike is until I started playing Legerdemain, which was a fantasticly novel experience for me. To a MUDder, this is a graphical, single-player MUD. Graphical only in that there is a colorful ascii representation of your world, and MUD-like only in the similiar set of text-based commands. The biggest draw was the way exploration works, and I only stopped playing when the difficulty started wearing me down. I doubt this will be my last run-in with roguelikes.

Of course, the type of IF that everyone is familiar with is games like Zork (basically a single-player, turn-based MUD), which I did enjoy greatly at some time long past. What’s interesting is that there is still a community for this and new games that are released. And I, someone who has dedicated years of my free time to games that are effectively the same thing, have played none of them.

Assuming I’m not simply daft and that the separation of these communities extends beyond my own personal ignorance, my first response to it is that this is a problem. I want to see communities for lovers of all forms of interactive fiction. If there are any, I want to see what they’re like and why I haven’t heard of them. If there are not, I want to take a shot at creating one.

Getting my feet wet in the roguelike world seems like a good start. I’m thinking about writing my experience on this site, but I don’t have a good feel for if my readers would be interested in hearing about it, since its not MUD-related. But I do think you should be interested! Are you?