Lysator's LS Development Blog

Walk throughs

2012-02-07T15:28:00.000-05:00

Got all of the major coding done on Arnedio Shrine, so I staged it for a walkthrough in development. Once that is done, and I am satisfied that everything is spelled correctly and works functionally, I can port it to live code. It will sit there for at least another week while I finalize everything. With that done, I pulled up Whitewind's Lair for examination. It is remarkably complete from what I remember f it. Some of the NPC's have some old code, but those will be an easy fix. The geography is done, so I just need to populate the dungeon, polish some things up, and that project will be ready for walk through.

Along side those two, I have the new home for OIA brewing. There are a lot of changes I want to make to that area, which may take quite a bit of time. I have a second dungeon well under way, but neither of these project have had a thorough review to determine just how far along they actually are. Brooding on the horizon of development is Twilight Tower. I may scour though those files tonight to determine what I need to do to finish that up.

As far as Devonshire goes, I am either going to have to scale it down some, or come up with a few more stores to go in. Several chunks of stores were removed for other projects, and some of the remaining stores no longer fit in with the theme of the area.

AAaaaand, I have decided to expand Sloan to include an underground dungeon area. That will be a handful of map definitions, some new gladiators, populating the tunnels, and laying out where the tunnels will start and end.

More shrine work

2012-01-30T12:58:00.000-05:00

Between bouts of checking on the treasure hunt and lamenting over my player's quest challenges, I spent time pushing Arnedio Shrine closer towards completion. I expanded the selection of creatures,and at this point only have the raw templates in place. I still need to go back and add their equipment, skills, and descriptions. I also placed the old rooms (the crappy ones from Devonshire) into actual locations within the map, and began updating them. The bronze statue was so old that the only bronze in it was in the name. Due to no material properties being set, it had defaulted to iron. I also had to update its shape, mass, description, and whether or not you could pick it up and wield it as a weapon. The rooms are a bit more complex to update, but it is slowly happening. The final shrine room is completely different. The original room made mention of the importance of the room, what happened in the room, and the generic altar. The updated room doesn't tell you what has happened in the room, it shows you the effects of what happened and lets you piece together what transpired. It also has a fuller description, so you have some idea of the nature of Ilsidahur other than he is a god venerated by the clerics f Devonshire. The entire project is geared towards this, bringing Ilsidahur from the name of a generic god to an actual deity with specific followers, rituals, materials used by his followers, a background, etc.

Once Arnedio Shrine goes into production, that will leave just Twilight Tower to separate out from Devonshire. Along with that, I need to add in two more cities to house OIA and Sentinels, and that will open up Devonshire for a full scale reconstruction. By eliminating these other elements, I can focus Devonshire on its open religious tolerance, setting up some minor conflict with the much more strict church of Yehovah in nearby Camelot. This ties in to the tone I want to set for Avalon as a center of conflict; good/evil, civilization/barbarians, new religion/old religions, Avalon/Esartur, Camelot/Camille, internal strife between the lesser lords of the land, religious factions,

Once OIA and Sentinels leave Devonshire, all that will be left is the quests, the catacombs, and the clerics. I may set up the catacombs as a separate project with distinct exploration points, yet still 3d and interlaced with the map of Devonshire. The shops are taking on a whole new feel, and I can easily convert them into a more religiously aligned version of the current form.

It seems my path for right now if to push Arnedio Shrine to completion, push the two new towns to completion (which will also involve someone who can resize flamra equipment), upgrade Twilight Tower, and then focus on Devonshire. So much to do, and I don't know how much time I will have to allocate.

Treasure hunt, part 1

2012-01-30T12:33:00.000-05:00

Ran a 24 hour treasure hunt. I posted the list just before midnight on Saturday and close the contest just after midnight on Sunday. The list consisted of mostly comestibles, but there were 31 items total. Of the five submissions, one person turned in 7, one had 12, two had 20 and one had 24. The way I had the prizes set up was fr every ten items, that was one grade of prizes, so in order to get a Great prize, you had to go above and beyond with the items. Most of the items had multiple versions that would qualify. The charm of protection came in either paper form from Xi Feng Ming, or in stone form from Sloan (Same name for the item, different code and functionality). You can get an acorn in Sloan from the nut merchant, or off of one of the squirrels in Avalon (or you can forage for them in the oak forests in Avalon). The Sea slug is a delicacy in both Etz'laerhi and in Sounion. The original intent was for flexibility in the turn-ins, so that you didn't have to rely upon one shopkeeper in the entire mud to be alive and in their shop in order to purchase the items. At the end, the multiple sources of the items was the qualifier for the Great prize levels. General basis for Great prizes is to go above and beyond during the event, which will change depending upon the specifics of the event. Typically, I don't announce what above and beyond means. Players tend to come up with new and ingenious means of rising above their peers. Overall, I awarded one lesser, one minor, two majors, and I upgraded the highest turn-in to a greater. Prizes were not gamebreakers by any means. One recolour of a familiar (completely cosmetic effect), one Jan Li tessen (just a rare item that shows up every now and then, so all I did was shorten the wait process), one chronomemetic hourglass, and two rewards are still in deliberation. Of all of those, the hourglass has the most potential to change things, since it buffs skills, and was awarded to an OIA.

I think for the next event, I'll post the item list on Friday and close out on Sunday, just to give more time. This one was kinda short notice, but that may have worked out for the better. There was a lot less prep time, and less time to go explore new stores for the first time. If you knew where the items loaded, it was easy to go get them. If you didn't already know where to get them, you could waste a lot of time going in the wrong direction.

Crafting ideas

2012-01-21T23:08:00.000-05:00

So I was working on some ideas I had for candle magicks, which is basically a process by which you combine various enchanted ingredients to form a candle that, while it is lit, grants a certain effect for all present. The mechanics of the candle are easy enough. The issue arose when I started trying to get the ability to enchant on a test character. Typically, this would be via an association or guild, or possibly an item or office. Trying to formulate that around lead me to how Empathic Bonds are distributed, which is basically the Empathic Bonds portion is all set up with the various bonds already handled in the centralized code, and guilds simply attaching that centralized code with their own parameters. The same could easily be done with my Candle Magicks, but enchanting candles, as it is, is not extensive enough to warrant anything more than a single affiliation. I seems a bit of too much work to set up Candle Magicks, and then set up the affiliation that uses it, unless I can some how expand candle crafting enough so that different guilds can take part in it.

So what if I didn't stop at just candles? If I branched things out to include metal crafting as well, I can add on other stipulations to the processes. My earlier work on the furnaces could come into play, with some minor changes. Each furnace and forge set can have parameters within which they can run, namely fuel source and temperature. Some forges and furnaces can run at different temperatures, some can hold a specific temperature for a longer period of time, some can accept exotic fuels to burn extremely hot, or some can even burn cold or have stuff like chaosfire or angelfire.

From there, I'd have to add in a few more layers to the centralized code, for materals, for end results, and for crafting styles. While one association can be set up to 'work metal', it can have different schools where you can focus on weapons, or armour, or tools, or whatever. So the 'Iron Smiths' (for lack of a better name right now) can be specified as 'metal working', and can choose a master to teach them the 'craft weapons' discipline. I already have the basics of this set up in my Candle Magicks to make a basic candle from wax, a wick, and with the additional requirement of there being a candle mold in the local vicinity (same room). Switch this over to iron work, with the requirement of having an ingot of iron available, a furnace set at temperature of Temperature_Moderate (whatever that macro ends up being), a forge present, an anvil present, and tools present. Basic process creates a simple sword made of iron. While not that impressive, it is a start. From there, there can be the option of 'reforge iron' to bring it back to a workable state, or you can use various finishing techniques (via additionally defined processes), such as adding strips of leather for the hilt, adding gems to the crosspiece, etching your craftsmark into the blade, etc.

Different affiliations can then be set up based upon the specific Master Smiths, while also making the individual furnaces and forges more important. In order to work the higher grade materials, you need a specific furnace. The thond that owns the one furnace that can get hot enough to manipulate adamantium may have certain requirements in order for you to use it (aside from outright slaughtering him and feeding his corpse to the furnace, which is probably going to be the first response from most of the players if this ever gets coded and loaded into the main mud).

Additional options could include wood working, leather working, metal working, candle crafting, bow crafting, stone working, gem crafting, food, cloth, etc. Such possibilities...

Race work

2012-01-20T13:02:00.000-05:00

There is something strangely satisfying about creating race code. In order to fulfill some of the animals I am wanting for my upcoming areas, I can either use current races and just get very creative with some settings, or I can just create the race file correctly and and not have to do as much wok on the actual object. An example of getting creative is the pelicans in Avalon. They use the "duck" racial definition, and I altered the identity around so that if you had it identified, it would appear as a pelican. Not exactly a proper thing to do, but it got the job done at the time. Now I am going back through and making actual racial definitions for certain things. A lot of the ones I am making just are not in currently, and it will not take much time to set them up. Some examples: giraffe, kangaroo, koala, and monitor lizard. Other races should have been defined earlier, but weren't, such as fey cats (cat sidhe, possibly), fey horses, ice vipers, water sprites, and most of my elementally enhanced creatures (in preparation for making some of the elemental planes to explore). Some are just new races that we don't currently have and I thought would be a nice addition, like the kitsune, vulpines, and jack-o-lanterns(this last one is in preparation for the next Halloween event, and can be similar to the death turkeys).

There is a lot that goes into setting up a race properly, though, so this is a time consuming process. I need to account for their physical dimensions, attributes, skills, description (a couple of races I need to redo the descriptions, like great wolf and ice troll), lineage, elements, colourations and frequency, anatomy, racial attacks, etc. Very tedious to do the initial work, but highly rewarding in the end. It took me about 4 hours to make an ostrich, but afterwards it took about 2 minutes to have the file set up to load a whole flock of them, each with slight variations in attributes and skills, and some had brown feathers while others had black. They run a lot faster than a giant chicken, but they are flightless.

There is a lot that can be done with races as well. In my original Fey Cats, I had a description of them having long spindly legs. In the racial definition, I can actually make the legs longer and thinner than a normal cat. I can also set up the fur colours to be better suited to forest camouflage, whether it is a white-dappled brown coat, a brown and green striped coat, or a mottled green coat. The custom created race definition works a lot better than using the cat definition and hacking on some special effects.

There are some repercussions, though. I don't know if anyone has bonded a fey cat as a cat bond (other than myself), so if I do a race substitution, it may have an adverse effect there. I also do not have the privs to alter race definitions, so I have to rely upon the good fortune of being online when someone who does have the privs is on, and be able to catch them at a time when they are not busy and in a good enough mood to assist me in getting these into place. It took a while to get the Kalashk change in place, but it finally went in, but it did go in. With that, it brought the playable races up to 62. Maelstrom begged me for like three days for that change. I guess I should maybe changelog that at some point this weekend.

Shrine work

2012-01-03T13:17:00.000-05:00

Did a lot of work retooling the old Shrine of Ilsidahur from Devonshire. Aside from getting a name change (to Arnedio Shrine), it is getting a new location, inhabitants, and all of the gear those inhabitants would use/make. I built a bit of backstory into it, and have been working on fleshing out the setting some more. I also got rid of the 'listen to the birds' crap that was required to find the temple. Had I not received my e-mail cheatsheet, I never would have figured out that obscure method of navigation. Figuring things out is one thing. If you get the answer and your response is "Oh, I should have been able to figure that out; the clues are all there." or others online are able to point you back to the clues that you overlooked, then I am fine with that. I was just not making a connection that was readily there. If you get the answer and the response is "How was I supposed to figure THAT out?" and no one can offer any validation, then there is an issue with that portion of the quest.

Gardagh winterized

2011-12-19T12:29:00.000-05:00

Updated the definitions that control the maps so that the seasons change. The season now affects the room description, terrain (Terrain_Snow in winter), and some of the material properties (rivers ice in winter, and ice floes for in the ocean in winter). It also affects the colour patterns of the map view. In the process, I also removed several map definitions, which were only put in there to simulate a snowy region. The snowy evergreen forest became an evergreen forest that gets snow in winter, the arctic ocean became a rocky beach that has a separate winter description, the snowy mountains became rocky mountains that get snow in winter, etc. This had an unfortunate incident once I removed the Snowy Mountains, since it was explicitly called for in the Traveler's temple code when it checks for a teleport destination. Removing the snowy mountains from their selection didn't diminish their selection at all, since that same amount of real estate is now just the rocky mountains. I also had to update Gardagh's control daemon. I removed all of the references to other projects, mainly the Northlands, and focused everything on just the aspects that were unique to Gardagh. I still need to do a thorough walk through and look over everything thoroughly.

I also took a look through my top two most complete projects to see what I need to focus on next. It initially looked like one project was almost completely done, but then I started looking closer at it, and almost none of the definitions were set up, and the map is only marginally complete. I also immediately saw the need for more creature files, armour files, weapon files, and comestible files. I got placeholders set up, but that's all. The next closest project to completion has a LOT of stuff already completed, and several stores that are currently fully functional, with exits already set into the rest of the map. It needs a lot more refining, and I need to add in the 'dungeon level'.

Of my most recent area releases, Sloan feels the least successful, despite having marginally better code. Vargan feels much more successful, since it has the slaughter zone underneath the main village, so it has appeal to both the killing machines and the players who want to delve into the minutiae and background stories/culture. Sloan has a small killing zone, and seems more geared towards the latter portion of players, which is far smaller. It seems that adding in a dungeon area or extensive killing zone is the way to go, since it allows for a civilized area which can go relatively unscathed by those seeking xp.

Sloan released

2011-12-15T12:59:00.000-05:00

Did the official release of Sloan. It went over rather well, though I did have to address a handful of typos, and expand out a few of the NPC's. I added in a lot of response chat to at least 3 of the npc's, and I added in a Norska trainer.

I'll be applying some of what I did in Sloan to Gardagh, particularly the use of materials, and seasonal descriptions. Once this is done, I can go back to newer content for a project, then it will be Avalon's turn to get the map updated. Of the newer content, now that Sloan is no longer on the list, I only have 4 projects that are further along than some of the overland maps of Akalahai. This should change once i start adding in more customized descriptions for each area, and adding in each area's specific creatures. I will at least set up the cities as overlays so that they can either be commented out, or just added as a tagline at the bottom, without disrupting the actual map image. It also makes it easier to have them show up on a map viewer.

Of all of the rotten luck

2011-12-12T22:30:00.000-05:00

I tentatively opened up Sloan to the public. My thinking was that I'd have the next four hours to deal with any issues that initially arose. At the end of that time period, I could either shut down the project and seal it off again until I could work out the issues, or I could changelog the release and leave it open. Things started off alright. I added a section to the wiki talk page for reporting any issues, since I tend to either block OOC, ignore people, gag people, or otherwise prevent their incessant idiocy from irritating me when I am trying to code (Incidentally, this works really well). The right around hour 3, I cannot connect through my client to the mud any more. FTP works fine, internet works fine. The mud's home page, wiki, leaderboards, etc all update with no problem. Connecting via the client goes to Connected Status, but then nothing. I just hope it wasn't something I was working on that is causing the issue. I've had Sloan up and running for several days prior to this to test the server load, and haven't come across an issue like this yet.

So much more work to do.

2011-12-12T00:56:00.000-05:00

I got Sloan up to >99.975% ready for release. I had a lot of minor issues that I needed to clean up, so despite me thinking it was ready to release, it is still not released 9 hours later. I did my walk through, and found some things that I wanted done slightly better. I added in the outbound exits, and had everything set up to release it, but then I took a test populace through it. During the killing spree, the numbers weren't looking right. I had to redo a majority of the map_area_definitions. Basically, you can exit Sloan, but you cannot enter it under normal circumstances. To push it live, all I need to do is update the overland map that will link its entrance, and push one reload.

That's where I got pushed even farther behind. Sloan is getting put into an area with an old map, so in order to even see the icon for Sloan, I have to reroute some of the roads. While I was digging into that, I realized that how I had the old map set up was completely unnecessarily complicated. I should be able to cut out at least a third of the current overland definitions, add in some new features, and make the map view a bit nicer. I can also set up the text file that I can use in a different project to make a map object of the region.

But, if this region's map is set up this poorly, I should look at the other maps. Just doing the necessary repairs to these maps may take me well into next year, but it should have a decent payout in functionality and appearance. Fortunately, I have a lot of the content already made and live, so it will just be a matter of nitpicking through what I have, and changes can go straight through as I get them done.

Destructive diamond golem

2011-12-02T12:20:00.000-05:00

Played around a little bit with some possible golemim constructs for Terravis. One of the most expensive to make is the diamond golem, and rightly so. I did some benchmark combat testing with one of them, just to see how effective of a tank it would make. A single diamond golem 2 rounded Helborg (who still got off that crazy shadow bat attack thing he does), ripped through Bloodbane, Bartziluth, Flametooth, and Redmoon 2x (respawned in the middle of beating on Flametooth) without taking any damage (if it had been damaged, it healed up, but I don't think diamond golemim heal naturally). It completely wrecked Corna. The downside is that it just took a while to do any of this (other than Helborg, who went down really fast). Very durable, but not tremendously gifted with speed. The damage output was considerable in most cases, consistently above 100 points of damage every round unless it was getting resisted. It lasted about 10 minutes with the Avatar of Kali before it shattered, which is much longer than most players will last. With Kali, you either kill her fast, or you die fast-- there is almost never a drawn out conflict with her. Tiamat was a shorter combat, at around 4 minutes. One of her breath attacks just completely rocked the diamond golem, but she would change frequently, and that was probably the only reason the fight lasted that long. Overall results: it may be a bit overpowered in the lower echelons of opponents, but it falls short on the upper targets. Combats were also long and drawn out.

While those combats were rolling in the background, I took the opportunity to flesh out a little bit more of Sloan (93% ready for release). It also gave me a decent visual for one of the remaining rooms, and a starting point for two more NPC interactions and 1 more room description.

Swimming changes

2011-11-30T13:07:00.001-05:00

Recent swimming changes have brought Undines closer to where I was wanting them. Before, they had a huge advantage in combat while in the water, and could rock underwater xp areas. Now that the swimming skill factors into movement speed through the water, Undines have the capacity to tear across water terrain. The three bonus specs in swimming are nice on their own, but combine that will the Swimming skill buff from several of their invocations, and swimming gets close to the same speed as flight. A few more modifications to the guild, and they should be set for a while.

From a player side, it was such a pleasant relief to go from an island in the Northwest Atalantic Ocean to Discordia in a matter of seconds The first leg of the journey was only slightly faster, but once I applied the swimming buffs, the rest of the trip was really fast and easy. I slowed down a lot once I got on land, but that all fits in with the guild. I like that change quite a bit.

Background work

2011-11-30T10:20:00.000-05:00

Did a lot of background work on Terravis, establishing a general feel for the guild. The downside is that half of what I wanted the guild to have as a strength was also over in OIA. So, changes are gonna have to be made in OIA to minimize overlap between guilds. I started by extending out the DoT burn effect from the attack spells, changing them more into burners than nukers. Then I adjusted the spec access, which was not set up to consider smoke, heat, or light magick. There were excessive specs in skills that were hardly touched by the guild, and low spec access in skills used extensively at this point. So I rearranged a lot of the spec access and to what level things opened up. Then I worked on the guild link itself, which had all sorts of old code crammed in there and commented out. I made a few modifications, and set up the object to behave more like an actual flame, playing into an actual theme for the guild. It will burn off diseases and poisons that are afflicting the caster. I was toying with the idea of increasing metabolism as well, but I did't have a good number to work with, so I left that out for now. I also set it up to burn away supernal impediments to spell casting, namely supernal durability. It's not an immediate effect, but over time it will slowly melt away the SD points. This aspect opens up the possibility for Phoenix bonds without tanking your spell ratings, while handling my interpretation of supernal durability, which is that some outside power has done something to alter your flesh to make it more resistant to damage and the transfer of energy. Normally, stopping energy from affecting your body would mean that it wouldn't hurt as much, but at the same time impedes the flow of your own magick. The new OIA mechanism wears away at this to make your body once again more conducive to the flow of magick. So the change doesn't mean OIA have open access to SD and can be walking tanks with flame throwers. SD is still going to be hard to come by, and harder to maintain. But if you are particularly inventive, or donate enough, you can probably find a way of getting SD to work on an OIA.

All in all, the guild is starting to have a feel for how I originally wanted them. Current OIA are gonna get spammed when they first login, though, since the changes in specialty access are quite numerous.

Closing out the long weekend

2011-11-27T23:41:00.000-05:00

Just updated my projects worksheet. Sloan is obviously in the number 1 position for completion percentage, reigning at 92% to completion. The rest of the top 5 haven't changed at all in their rankings, but from #6 downward, everything has been shuffled around. The Akalahai projects rose quickly, particularly since I spent a lot of time on them to work out a majority of the early project issues that always show up. The maps all mesh now, and the basic terrains are defined. I even got so far as to begin a minor population in about 1/5 of the regions. I only added in a max of two type of creatures, and kept their numbers low, since I don't know yet what loading in another 22 regions will do for lag. Gotta take it slowly. But at this point, I have overcome a huge amount of grinding to get the projects up and running, so I can move on to the much more exciting portion of expanding the map details and basically breathing life into the regions with each new step taken. Prior steps could be done a dozen at a time and no visible change would have been made.

I did some similar work in some of my guilds. Unfortunately, I also deleted everything I had done for Ordo Malefici. The blood components were too irritating, the code setup was too set in stone the way it was and breaking it out and keeping it intact would be way more work than the project is worth. An update to that would probably have to take the same route as Travelers, where the entire concept of the guild gets redone, with a few minor touchpoints in remembrance of the previous version. Keeping OM intact is not gonna be done by me. Closest I would be able to get right now would be similar to how Red Magi were converted to OIA, and OIA are irritating me too much right now to even begin to take that route. The whole guild needs to be gutted and redone, with most of the players silenced so I don't have to listen to their constant useless irritating chatter about how OP one thing is, how awesome something else is, or how pitiful the guild has become now that the awesomeness has been nerfed to weaksauce.

The groundwork for both Drakkarim and Necromancers has been put into place. I also got the first ability for Exiles done and tested. It's not performing like I want it to, so it will require more tweaking. As with the Akalahai projects, these have all of the tedious initial work completed, so building the rest should be quick at this point. Despite Necromancers having 20 spells, and Drakkarim only having 18 abilities, both should be fully functional, especially considering two of the Necromancer spells are Create Undead and Bolster Undead. One makes followers from corpses, and the other 'heals' them from their decaying state so that they stick around longer. Those two alone will be hours upon hours of fun. Just the decay rate and maintenance should keep the huge armies of undead followers at bay, but it would be possible to just animate 2000 corpses and send them back to their doom by assailing a local populace.

Total project completion moved up to 8%.

Busy weekend

2011-11-26T03:09:00.000-05:00

Finally got a major burst of productivity. Sloan is simmering at over 90% completion. I have 3 rooms and the feedback from the NPC's before I start the walk through and opening the gates. Full release will probably be in December. Once that was set up, I started jumping around to some of the projects that I had started and never really did anything with. Most of Akalahai loads at this point, which means when they are all up and running, it doubles the landmass of the mud. The foundation for that continent is starting to come together, and I have everything mapped out to where I want it. Soon, I'll go through and set up the borders and global offsets so that I have one continuous continent rather than a bunch of isolated blocks of desert realm.

Then I started setting up the foundations for some of the guilds that I have been ignoring for a while. I got the spec access and spell selection for Drakarrim (not that they will have very many spells, just a few little buffs to help them in combat), and I set up the spec access for Necromancers. These should be two very fun guilds once they come out. One is a total combat monger, and the other makes undead followers.

Speaking of guilds, I nerfed some more of OIA. Somehow a Shoggoth got in despite me explicitely blocking them from entering. I distinctly remember blocking them, recall Twilight changing the message for when they get blocked, but oddly enough, there was no block when I looked at the guild. I changed that, and booted the shoggoth from the guild. Then I started looking around, and there were a lot of things changed that I distinctly remember setting for a very specific reason (and commenting them). Some stuff that I had commented out was no longer commented out. Either someone was tinkering with them while I wasn't looking, or I was working on them way too late and don't recall making those changes. There may have also been some alcohol involved at one point. Regardless, some guild members ended up with some nasty notifications when they logged in. My OIA lost about 7 bonus specs that would have come from the standing rewards (one of the things I had commented out). The whole guild is just crap at this point, but I am no going to even bother trying to fix it.

OIA are a prime candidate for the new universalized spell casting system Twilight was working on. It would just be completely uncouth to update my guild to those method when the creator of those processes hasn't even released his own updated guild. I also don't know how ready the universalized spell casting system is. Once I know for sure that it is ready for use, it will be at least a three month conversion, especially since I have several new ways of handling some of the stuff I did in OIA. One of the main things is going to be the buffs, and just changing them over to a standardized format is going to be painful.

Final stretch for Sloan

2011-11-16T12:16:00.000-05:00

Just exceeded 80% completion of Sloan. That means that the majority of the work is already done, and it's a matter of piecing everything together, linking files where they need to be linked (i.e. putting equipment in the stores and giving the NPC's belongings), and the finishing touches before the walk-throughs begin.

One of the things I like about the smaller villages is that while they may not have really powerful items in them, they have unique flavour. I made drinking horns last night, for water, wine, beer, and mead. It's not much, but it's something that should be more prevalent in the game but just isn't.

I also opened up a gateway for further development within the village. I know I want at least 6 more NPC's for raw flavour, but they are completely unnecessary for project completion. Three are currently represented by random gen creatures, one would make a completely separate quest much easier to initiate while providing a lead-in, one would be a lead-in to a future association, and one would lead-in to a future quest. Whether or not this future quest will be ready when the project launches is a completely different question.

I moved the final uncoded armour piece to a different project, where it will fit in slightly better. Got the last of the food items coded, the weapons are accounted for, and I started moving through the shops to get them finalized. Overall, a lot got done last night.

Protection Charms

2011-11-15T14:48:00.000-05:00

Used the delirium that held over from my dentist visit to weasel an extra day off from work. Granted my face was partially numb until about 3pm, so I wouldn't be functional for work until 4pm, so even attempting to go in to work would be pointless. I did get me an extra couple of hours to code, since I don't need to talk to anyone while I code.

Worked in Sloan some more, finishing up the map definitions and fleshing out the characters some more. I also expanded the selection of weapons and armour. Armour jumped from 7 items to 88, and I got all except two done. Both of the remaining armour items may end up exploding out into multiple pieces, especially if I treat them the same way I did the first 7.

One of the pieces of armour that got the most attention was the protection charm. It started as trying to rip off Lin Lin's protection charms from Xi Feng Ming. Those just sucked though, and I did not like that they were consumable. They also had some hacked language interpretation in there, and used an NPC to make an item that was modified by a module. I spliced out the language conversion crap, change the consumable piece f paper into a charm (we have an armour type already set up for it), and eliminated the NPC interaction. Then I converted the module over to a Protection_Charm base item, and fudged the code around so that it was a little bit cleaner. It's not cutting edge, but I can at least read it. I also started putting in comments, if for no other reason than to remind myself what I was doing and what the variables mean.

End result -- Instead of a paper charm that is burned for a short duration of resistance, I now have a wearable charm that when you rub it, it grants you resistance to whatever the rune written on it represents. I extended the duration, but still kept it with a huge variable based upon the user's geoturgy. (Geoturgic runes on a sandstone charm. The better the user is at using the runes, the better the result) The total resistances stack all the way up to 100. This can be lowered or raised easily for all charms by changing one line of code. Someone unskilled in geoturgy will get about 10% resist per rub for a very short duration (around 1 minute), at 20 spirit per rub. A skilled user can max out the protection in one rub, and it can last for about half an hour.

There is a possible abuse factor to these, since it can make someone (either with gads of spirit or a really high geoturgy) completely invulnerable so long as they maintain the protection charms (easily accomplished by triggers). I can either decrease the overall effectiveness of these by lowering the max resistance,

OM behind the scenes

2011-11-02T14:46:00.000-04:00

I have no plans of releasing an OM update, but I have been tinkering on the concept of them a bit in my own directory, just to see how some of the ideas I am coming up with would play out, and to see if I can manage updating some seriously outdated material.

Despite all of the negative press that OM tends to receive, there are some good things going on with them. Their buffs are all objects, and can be targetted for removal. Most OIA buffs, and a majority of the buffs from Undines, are handled in the spell definition, so once they are applied, you just have to wait for the effect to lapse. The elemental forms are one of the few exceptions, and can be cancelled by either Disperse Personal Flame or Dehydrate, respectively.

On top of all of the negative things players have to say about OM, there are some issues with how the code is set up. Parsing and whispering are among the top in that respect. To alleviate the whispering portion of the spells, I pulled in the do_hear from OIA, OZM, and Travelers. I also opted for a lot of the options found in the Traveler invocations, since the way OM cast is more of an invocation than an evocation. I also started splitting the guild abilities between personally empowered spells and Asmodai empowered invocations. This cleared up a lot of issues, and opened several newer options.

If this ever goes live, new spells or invocations can be added with either a single definition, or that definition plus whatever support files are needed. The whisper command would no longer be needed, and casting can be halted by silencing the caster. The caster could still use 'whisper' to cast their spells, just so long as they were able to hear their words. There would also be a lot more that could be put into the invocation of each spell, giving way to lots of flavour text. Also, the need to hand parse commands would be eliminated since the spells/invocations can be set to activity cost, allowing the game itself to do the parsing, if needed.

That still leaves the blood issue, which is drawn from a value in the racial definitions that is greatly arbitrary and in no way reflects actual properties of the blood. I have a few options for that. One would be to set up definitions for the blood types, and hand add in specific races. This would allow me to make specific selections of blood not based upon rarity, and then use said blood to fuel specific spells. I could have things like Reptilian blood, Elder blood, Draconic blood, Angelic blood, common blood, chicken blood, elven blood, dwarven blood, goblin blood, chaotic/ordered blood, use ichor/alcohol/tar, and then tie those blood types to specific effects. Another option is to list out in the blood daemon specifically what blood should be used for what purposes. Yet another option would be to poll through all available races, compare that to thenumber of that race represented, and set up thresholds to determine actual blood rarity. Any of these methods would eliminate that concept that faun blood is just as exotic as angel blood, despite numerous faun readily accessible, and only 1 angel.

Also, I can tie in to the invocations either a blood requirement or a sacrifice requirement. This is particularly useful if I would want to have some other item be required other than blood, such as using a black skull for a huge boost to certain skills, or needing a black feather to cast the flight spell. While this may not be incredibly pertinent to OM in their current form, it is useful for other guild ideas I have in mind.

End result of what I coded up last night. Invocations load and have a lot of adaptability to them, and I managed to dredge one spell into a full conversion. That one spell took about 2 hours of tinkering to get everything set up the way I potentially want it to be. I decided to ditch the part about having a minimum casting requirement, so if you know the spell, you can cast it.

Other things I am looking at tinkering with: rituals, favour, and group spells. The current favour system is based entirely on skills and the presence of 'evil' items. I'd rather set it up like the Traveler's Karma, and instead of adding onto it via challenges, it gets added onto via rituals, sacrifices, and certain deeds.

Spell advancements

2011-10-31T13:07:00.000-04:00

I did a lot of tinkering with some spells this weekend, but nothing that made it to live code. I was trying to devise a way to handle two different arguments in spell command, the first to be a damage type and the second to be the target. I can get it to work, but not the way I wanted it to. I wanted "visualize a bolt of striking '. What I ended up with was 'visualize a bolt of 0 striking guard'. I swapped out the damage type to be a random selection of damage types available, and that worked Every time you cast the spell, it changes the damage type to one that you have available, and I can either set up a big, clunky chunk of code to determine which ones are available, or I can hack together some code based upon skill selection and damage types. The second option would be neater, codewise, but the first option allows me to use things other than spells to determine when a specific damage type is available. I did this some over in OIA, where doing certain quests unlocks certain damage types, or being in certain associations opens up certain spells regardless of skill levels.

Another option I came across was to change the damage type based upon an external factor. It can change based upon terrain via something like switch(query_terrain) { case (Terrain_Water) to make it do water damage. This is reminiscent of the old earth magi from one of the FF games.

Another dual argument I was trying to get to work was to have the first argument be a direction, and the second argument being the target, so that a mage can finally launch a bolt into the next screen without resorting to manifesting an object to do so. This did not work out well at all, mostly due to how I was trying to set it up. I spent a lot of time splitting up failure messages so that I could track down exactly where things were falling apart at. The main issue was the predetermined arguments for mentation were already assigned to something else, so it was doing what it was programmed to do, not what I thought I was telling it to do. In this case, I was not smarter than the machine. I may have a workaround for it, by using more of a spell effect than a mentation. This means going back to the vocal spell casting from OIA rather than the mental spell casting from Undines.

Fixing exploits

2011-10-31T12:49:00.000-04:00

Had a huge hole in the way Vestitus handled the reward for his portion of the Pzyruxal Sphere quest. You could askhim for the gem, he would give it to you, and then you could ask for it again, at which point he would give you a second one. Infinite loop of free charisma boosts, some of which could be permanent.

To fix this, I had him flag the player when the gem was rewarded, so you cannot go back and get the gem a second time. This is probably going to monkey wrench a lot of old tactics. You can't just kill him for the gem any more. You also can't use a character that has already received the gem from him, via this fashion, to get a second set of gems to hand off to a lower level incarnos on your atman. Not that you'd really need to, since this portion is set up so that even a pacifist is able to get the gem. The most complaints will be from the older players, as it always is when something gets changed. But that's the way of our world. Some old twink methods die out, and new methods are found.

In line with this, I may be changing Bartziluth to not be as aggressive, and reward a gem in a similar fashion. No idea what I will do for the pacifist route with her, but I have plenty of time to mull it over while I tend to other projects.

Finding exploits

2011-10-14T10:56:00.001-04:00

Part of the responsibility in being both developer and player is that when you find an exploit or possible exploit, you are obliged to either fix it or notify someone who can. "fixing" it can vary as to what it means.

While I was playing on my knight last night, I came across a couple of things that caught my attention. Three of the exploits ended up getting capped as to how may times you could repeat them, and the only reason I was gaining so much from them was due to level. I checked with a lower level character of the same race, and only got a fraction of the gain. I will have to look these situations over again later on to see if adding diminishing returns would be a better fix, but for now I am content with a soft cap as to how many times certain things can be repeated. One of the possible exploits is still in place, and I am formulating an idea of how to best address this particular case. I've narrowed down specifically which file needs to be adjusted (okay, so it could be done two different ways, but still just one of two files needs to be touched) , but the amount of time it would take to make the fix was more than I had at the moment. It's nothing huge, but given our history of changes based around abuse, I am opting to try to fix it before it becomes an outright exploit.

This seriously detracted from my xp run, but I dd manage to get that last 100K to make level, and had just enough attribute points to squeeze out one more spec point. Three more levels before I see another one of those.

Populating Sloan

2011-10-11T23:50:00.000-04:00

Started populating Sloan. I have the NPC's named, and only a very basic file for each one of them... just enough to get them named and loaded. I have also assigned them to their respective stores, so that the control daemon can automatically populate them. Then I transferred myself to the map, and walked around to where I had placed each store, assigning a store to a building based upon its proximity to local terrain features. At the same time, I listed the store in the control daemon according to their coordinates, and added the applicable exit in the store file. With a reload of the project, that automatically places each stored into its assigned location. I also designated which rooms would open into the stores, and added a note at the top of the file indicating the exit direction and exit destination. A basic file to add that exit to the room opens up a door to the store, and back out onto the map, and the destination allows me to customize the description so that you don't have to go inside to get an idea of what the store is.

More minor OIA changes

2011-10-11T19:12:00.000-04:00

Very minor change to OIA last night. I reduced the size of most of the bolt spells. The damage is still the same, but it is no longer being spread out over as wide of an area. For large targets, this means next to nothing. For human-sized targets, it means the attack will only hit one limb and apply all of that damage to that limb. For miniscule targets like faeries and dracannach it means that more of the attack is actually hitting their body, and what does hit them, less is being spread out over their multiple limbs.

On watching the damage meter for many combat rounds, both before and after the change, more damage is getting dealt out, especially to smaller targets. It's not that small targets are any more resistant to damage than large target, just that less of large attacks actually make contact with smaller targets. Far too often, combat gets broken down to Hit and Damage, on some simplified scale where every Hit does X Damage. Players often try to figure out the numbers behind the attacks by hitting each other and seeing how much damage was done to their chest. A Large special attack (like the previous version of Fire Bolt) would do 42 points of damage, spread out over 10-13 limbs, reducing apparent damage down to ~4 pts, ergo, Fire Bolt must only do a max of 4 points of damage.

Compared to a Staff of the Elements, there was little difference between the damage numbers from Fire Bolt and the staff. Where Fire Bolt pulled ahead was the fact that it did DoT, but the staff could be used to do damage every round (as opposed to waiting a round for the spell to go off). I also noticed a wider variation in damage from the fire bolt than from the staff. The staff consistently did 32 - 52 points of damage, where Fire Bolt would drop down to 12 points of damage when the accuracy was very low and only did a grazing shot. It still applied DoT. Fire Bolt can also be used in Defensive combat mode, allowing the mage to focus what Dex specialty points he has into Dodge and Prestidigitation rather than spreading them out over several combat skills to achieve the same amount of damage.

The Area Attack spells are much the inverse of the bolt spell's precision. It has a huge surface that it attacks with, and targets everything in the room. Small creatures minimize this damage, while large creatures soak in a larger chunk of the damage. The difference in hit points usually makes up for this, since the same 25 points done to a zuth's tail will rip a faerie's wings off. The mathematics behind the attack spell make AoE spells highly ineffective against single targets, but that doesn't stop people from trying to Fireball every available combat round.

I may do some more minor touch-ups, but most of the changes I'd like to do won't be available until after the conversion to Twilight's new spell system. I'm looking to expand the spell selection, customize a few minor things, expand the alternate training paths, add in some upper level spells, and add in a few minor things that will fully flesh out the guild.

Burnt offerings tinkering

2011-10-10T16:17:00.000-04:00

I tinkered with how Burnt Offerings dispenses its rewards. It now accumulates the items, and continuously burns . As it burns, it will disintegrate one item at a time and dispense a reward to all OIA online. If you add more fuel to the fire, it will burn longer. I also reduced the xp yield per burn, increased the rate of cycle between burns, and added a few other minor benefits. The burning will continue on even if you disincarnate and there are no other OIA online. Basically, you can sac a whole bunch of stuff all at once, and it is the same as if you sacrificed a handful of items from a bunch of different room, or even if you sacrificed a single item from a lot of different rooms. The overall effect is that the items are still cleared from the mud. It may take a little bit longer, but they are still cleared.

I tested with a few different assim levels. Amberites killed the freebie xp at level 2 with their low assim. No idea why they got xp at level 1, but they didn't get xp again until level 18. An orc, with 0 assim, got xp up until level 7, and then resumed getting xp after level 13. Must be some weird math with the standardized xp gains and assim. A level 50 kobold is getting around 350 xp per burn cycle. Not a lot, but still useful whentrying to grind through xp.

Sloan's recent advancements

2011-10-10T12:46:00.000-04:00

Sloan got a lot of advancement this weekend. The stores all load, but most of them have really slim stock. The NPC's are named, but not developed. The map loads and could be complete, but it is really boring right now; it will need several additions to break up the monotony of the large forest region. I know what creatures I want to load, but very few have actually been coded, aside from the generic ones that are already in use in other projects.

As an area, it is so blah right now. The weapons that load are just bronze, there are no special monsters or creatures, no items unique to the area, nothing that really stands out. The previous releases had plenty of new shinies. Vargan had the background lores, new alcohols, the arena setup, the alternate arrows (despite not doing esoteric damage), cold/ice damage cryomer gear, a fleshing out of a culture, and a fairly well stocked set of stores. Sounion had a handful of truly unique stores, unique service providers, unusual foods, electrical weapons, water weapons, water followers, new mounts, alternate xp methods, new trainers, and a gauntlet maze. The culture was not hard coded, but players were able to pick up on it by what they saw and experienced there. Fort Boastt was not quite as successful, but it did establish a fuller backstory for the area, introduced a new NPC, has a new compass, and cut away some of the crustiness that keeps Devonshire from moving forward.

A few more weeks, and Sloan should be getting closer to being more unique. Of the 14 shops, 9 are fairly unique. I have several items in the design phase which will be unique to the area, and have started on the comestibles. Still struggling with the armour concepts, but those should start falling into place as I flesh out the NPC's.

Playing the numbers for projects

2011-10-10T12:25:00.000-04:00

Since I have established my spreadsheet tracking my progress on my projects, I have been able to focus on targeting certain numbers. I also changes some of the formatting that the numbers represent, so I no longer have empty values skewing the final release percentage. Some projects do not have extensions, while others do not have separate rooms (notable regions, since everything is either a map_area() or a map_overlay()).

In the top 5 positions so far are:
Arnedio Shrine
Paran
Devonshire
Whitewind
Burakumin (Kaishima)

The last of these is sitting at 49% now, while the first rests at 63%.

Reviewing the chart before starting in on a weekend helps tremendously. It helps me focus on a certain project, and points me in a direction to go with it. Within my top five, I can get the most numerical increases towards project release by working in either Paran or Burakumin, specifically in the mon/ files (both are at 5%). Completing the mon/ files will push each of those projects 12% closer to completion. In an area like Sloan, where I aloready have some of the mon/ files done, it would be more productive to work on the actual rooms, specifically the ones that serves as entrances to the shops. More on that in another post.

The biggest benefit, though, is pointing out where I have done the least amount of development, and in keeping track of how far along each project is. It may be more than a month before I look back in on Twilight Tower, and it is time consuming to open up each file to see whether or not it is done.

Avalonian garou and dana

2011-10-04T13:10:00.000-04:00

Made some decisions about the presence of garou and dana in Avalon. I had started adding a lot of content into the main region directories, and then someone went through and cleaned a lot of them out. Doesn't really matter, since the Base files are still intact, and I can move those to a more appropriate project, redo the item files, and everything is back to where it was before the cleaning.

One of the main things I want to do with the garou and dana is move them over to Calais, Cimbra, and Andala. There are already established garou and dana in these areas, so it would be easier to work in what I want to do with the two races to those regions, rather than force their presence into Avalon, then build up a separate background. I had some minor ideas revolving around one of the elven rings of power that I made so very long ago, but I can just as well use that idea in a different region. Also, the idea I had for a new elven community was essentially a Valathyr rewrite in a different region. I can get everything I wanted from my own project by revamping Valathyr, which updates that code and gets stuff put in that I want put in. A handful of smaller elven establishments around these regions, nothing larger than a village or hamlet, would serve us much better than another full-scale elven city. So, Valathyr and Liathyr become major elven cities around which smaller communities have developed over the centuries, while eliminating a long loose thread of why the dana and tuatha were in Avalon for so long and had almost no influence on the culture. Smaller communities can be much faster to code, since I won't need to add in as much work, and it is far easier to add in one minor addition in a small project than it is to add in several minor additions into one larger project. Devonshire and Sounion have taught me at least that much.

To fill that void in Avalon, I am thinking about expanding the amount of roving knights and knight errants, play off of the presence of the Fianna and the older religions a little bit more, draw in some of the druidic elements from Gardagh, and build more of the map mobs from the Avalonian culture.

Project management charts

2011-09-20T13:32:00.000-04:00

I treated my coding projects like work projects, and did a progression analysis, mapping out the key criteria for completion, and charting each criterion as a percentage complete. So far, the forerunners are Paran ad Whitewind, both sitting around 55% complete. After that is Devonshire (by virtue that as projects get pulled from Devonshire, there are less files to complete, so that the current done work slowly starts accounting for more towards the finalized project), Arnedio Shrine,and the revamp of Schola Fervitus (mainly due to so much pre-existing material in it). Everything else ranks in below 25% done. The main value of the chart is visibility of progress, which can help me focus on what I need to do to get certain numbers more prominent.

Paran

2011-09-18T23:57:00.000-04:00

Finally got around to working on Paran, and got pathetically little done considering how much time I spent on the project. The creatures load and their identities are configured, but I am still having issues getting alter_element to actually change the colours of anything. I may just need to scrap the current selection and start building some from scratch. The map loads, and most of it is fine, but one layer of it just completely does not work with the rest of the area. I spent a good chunk of Sunday walking through making sure that the stairs lined up, and on several occasions, they did not, or led into solid structure on the next level. Almost all of the definitions are severely lacking, but for now I only have nine map_area() definitions to deal with. It's also an area with no shops, so I don't have to worry about all of the new equipment from the area aside from what is going to be worn/wielded by the populace.

Project status update

2011-09-13T00:40:00.000-04:00

Argopolis - Seaside trade city Not even mapped out.
Arnedio Shrine - Replaces the Shrine of Ilsidahur in Devonshire Mapped and defined. Need to populate and add in quest portion. Some of the definitions could use some work.
Burakumin - Oriental region Mapped and defined. Need to populate and add internal projects, and connect to next region. Some of the definitions need a lot of work.
Camelot - 3d update Barely started on the definitions
Devonshire - 3d update Mapped and defined, with a majority of the rooms fully developed. Map needs to be reintegrated once other projects are fully removed from this one.
the new home for Sentinels (name pending) No map yet
new home for Schola Fervitus - Basic map and definitions. Some creatures already formed.
Drakkarim - evil knights with demonic powers Control and Link done. no powers, GM, or items yet.
Exiles - Outcasts and wanderers for the cause of Order. Direction still not finalized. Powers roughly hashed out, but not coded.
Expugno Magi Potens - uber glass cannons. Basic spell capabilities are done. Need to expand spell selection and make the guild unique.
Fliu Gulch - Gardagh village Map needs expansion and definitions are old, but otherwise ready to populate
Kaishima - Oriental region Not even touched
Keigo - Oriental Region Not even touched
Mordekar - Gardagh Village Not even started
North Sea - connects Gardagh with the Northlands, offering more adventure under water and across the ice Not even started
Paran - dungeon crawl Map is bad, definitions need work and monsters need work
Sloan - Gardagh village Map is terrible, definitions need updating, population is laid out but not coded
Terravis - Earth magi Basic spell functionality, but very few spells.
Lair of Whitewind - dungeon crawl set in a glacier. Remarkably done. NPC's need some work, and most of the monsters have already been made live via the Northlands.
Loremasters - guild Barely functional, no powers, no equipment.
Tol Norno - elven stronghold. May get considerably reworked since the idea behind it has changed. Not even started
Twilight Tower - replacing the current tower from Devonshire Basic configuration is done. Map and definitions done, monsters mostly just listed.
Wintercrest - extension of the Northlands Map needs completely redone, but definitions and monsters are intact.

I have a good feeling for Sloan and Arnedio Shrine. Lacking in inspiration for the others. May tinker a little bit with some of the associations. Avalon and Gardagh need some attention, and I may carry some of what I did in Sounion into the sea floors of the Atalantic, around Avalon and Gardagh, and up the eastern coast. At the same time, I may end up refining the maps a lot for the main map.

Moving shops

2011-09-12T18:56:00.000-04:00

Some of the shops I had in Sounion were originally slated for Devonshire. Chaos Wares, the Electromancer's store, the seer, and the Aquamancer's store were all originally designed for Devonshire, but they happened ot fit into Sounion, with some minor tweaks.

Vargan had a similar situation. The cryoturge was originally slated for Devonshire, but it just fit better into Vargan.

This all works out for the better, since it is reducing the number of items Devonshire will need to load. It also means that instead of being a test bed for any and all new things I want to try all at once, I can break out smaller sections, work on those and get them live, and allow the new items to more slowly filter into the item stream. And once I have enough taken out of Devonshire, I can readjust everything to be a more holy version of its previous self, rather than the bustling harbour city that has an almost unimaginably wide selection of new trade goods and services.

Projects still in development

2011-09-12T13:17:00.000-04:00

I have at least 23 more projects that I have started and still need to finish.

Argopolis - Seaside trade city
Arnedio Shrine - Replaces the Shrine of Ilsidahur in Devonshire
Burakumin - Oriental region
Camelot - 3d update
Devonshire - 3d update
the new home for Sentinels (name pending)
new home for Schola Fervitus
Drakkarim - evil knights with demonic powers
Exiles - Outcasts and wanderers for the cause of Order
Expugno Magi Potens - uber glass cannons
Fliu Gulch - Gardagh village
Kaishima - Oriental region
Keigo - Oriental Region
Mordekar - Gardagh Village
North Sea - connects Gardagh with the Northlands, offering more adventure under water and across the ice
Paran - dungeon crawl
Sloan - Gardagh village
Terravis - Earth magi
Lair of Whitewind - dungeon crawl set in a glacier
Loremasters - guild
Tol Norno - elven stronghold. May get considerably reworked since the idea behind it has changed.
Twilight Tower - replacing the current tower from Devonshire
Wintercrest - extension of the Northlands

These are in at least some stage of development, though I only know how far along I am in just a few of them. Paran I know needs a lot of work. The rest I am not so sure about. Terravis has been a test bed for new spell concepts for a while, so I will have to weed out some of the broken stuff before figuring out where to go with the next step on that. Need to figure out where I am on all of these, then make a decision on what to work on next. Maybe one or two will be be reasonably close to being done.

Sounion released

2011-09-12T13:02:00.000-04:00

Finally got this project released. A two year process from the time I did the first file in Sept 2009. It was kinda nice to have an affiliation open last weekend, and a new area project open this weekend. Too bad there is no way I can continue that pace for releases.

Sounion was by far the most complete release I have done to date. Aside from four minor changes, mostly to descriptions of NPC's, I have had to do almost no changes or additions. Vargan was fairly complete when it was released, but I still had to add in a few files to round things out a little more, and there is still room for growth, especially now that Vargan houses an association.

Sounion is far from a completed town. It's missing an affiliation to call its own, has no quests, very few miniquests, and a couple of other things found in the major cities around Aedaris. Had a couple of negative comments early on, particularly right after it opened and people were responding to first impressions. I have an npc that dispenses riddles, and to make it as close to 'intuitive' as I could, I included several of the commands from At'lordrith to give it a familiar feel. I also used one of At'lordrith's random chats, so obviously it was a complete copy/paste of At'lordrith, because that one phrase' just stuck out'. There was also a slightly negative response to the pressure issue at the very bottom of the dungeon maze where the current no longer flows. Also got a negative remark about how you can no longer just kill the king, loot his corpse and get the quest gem.

Mixed reviews came in from the 'dungeon crawl' section, as it was referred to repeatedly. For those unprepared, it was overwhelming. For those prepared, they were looking for more. Apparently the population tends to all load in one place, so the 50 kalashk that should be spread out over the entire 200+ room level end up in clumps of 40+ with a few stragglers covering the rest of that level.

Otherwise, mostly positive initial reviews. Some people really enjoyed the breadth of the new trainers, the assortment of colours in the descriptions, and the uniqueness of some of the NPC's. The area also has alternative damage weapons, which are in short supply. The water weapons are made from solidified water, and do water damage, which means their penetration value sucks and it has a low damage output, but it is an alternative damage type that comes in handy against certain opponents; if your opponent is staggered by the damage type, it doesn't matter if the numbers for a normal weapon end up being higher, since you can continually wail on him and he has little chance of fighting back. The stunning weapons are made by a madman who was struck by lightning and believes that Poseidon has chosen him as a herald. So, he collected weapons from various shipwrecks, laced them with fulgurium crystals that exploded from a ship that was hit in the same storm that lit him up, and then wrapped the handles in eel skin to act as an insulator. The dude's not right upstairs, but the weapons he made do lightning damage. Again, the raw damage output is much lower than better made mundane weapons, and a lot of stuff resists lightning to some extent, even if only minorly. The benefit of these weapons is that lightning damage stuns, although in testing, a lot of stuff was not stunned for very long, or just outright resisted being stunned. Still, it is an alternate damage type. These will be nice and shiny for a while, until more stuff comes out that can do alternate damage types, and then I predict that players will gravitate back to normal weaponry with one or two elemental damage types as a back-up. Or, they will insist upon only using artifacts since anything less would be a hindrance to their play style.

Constant wearing away

2011-09-08T12:31:00.000-04:00

I keep putting in work on Sounion, and things get closer to completion, but I also keep finding more and more things left to do. Most are minor little things, but they just keep coming. The basic setup of Sounion is complete and awaiting just a few more steps. I still need to add in the responses so that the NPC's are more interactive (a trait that seemed very popular when Vargan came out), and I need to do one more walkthrough to make sure everyone has their descriptions and to check for typos. The outlying areas are starting to solidify. I set down the map overlays that I wanted last night, but I have yet to code the population for those areas. I may also go back through and add a few more overlays to give more detail to the entire area, and I may have to adjust some of the map_area() definitions to accommodate some of the newer techniques I have figured out.

Basic predictions: Tonight I should be able to cruise through the population of the current overlays and begin the walk through, notating what new overlays I'd like and where. At the same time noting what changes need to be made to the map_areas(). The rest will have to wait until the weekend, but even then I'll have limited time at the keyboard.

Continued work on Sounion

2011-09-06T14:16:00.000-04:00

I started working away on my list of finalizing changes that I'll need to do on Sounion to get it complete. As I am crossing off two items, one more gets added onto the list, but at least it is progress. I have much better descriptions on several of the NPC's now, and the stores are coming along nicely. I still want to add more riddles to the area, and I still have the outskirts to fill in. I focused so much on the center of the project that the outer edges are just blah. I already added at least two pleasant surprises, and I want to add in some easter eggs to round out the experience. No idea what those will be yet, but they should be apparent while I am adding in the finalizing details and link this project to others.

One thing that irks me about older projects is how isolated they are. It is as if each town is in a pocket dimension off the main map, and doesn't need to reference anything else. There are a few minor cases that have cropped up in recent years, such as the GLC in Camelot and the Knights in Jhan and Fort Shantaari. The longer it has been since a project has been released or updated, the more completely isolated it is. Before I started developing, the Northlands was only accessible via two small paths, and Devonshire was not accessible except by special means (a boat and a hooded figure). So to compensate, I am trying to link my projects to associated areas. I had clues scattered around Vargan referencing other projects, and that will become more relevant once Sloan is released, and the rest of the Gardaic villages follow. Overall, it seems Vargan is fairly successful -- now to see ho successful Sounion and the rest will be. Maybe I can set up so many quality areas that they aren't all swamped with players camping out the xp zones.

Stabilizing Paran

2011-09-05T21:54:00.001-04:00

I started work on Paran back in September of 2009, or at least I did according to the comments I added into the def files. Since then, a lot has changed. When I went into these files, nearly all of them broke. I managed to get them to an unbroken state, and took a look around. The top level is complete crap and will need to get redone. The lower levels aren't bad as far as the map itself goes. The creatures on the other hand, were all sorts of a mess. I couldn't get the alter_element to work at all on some of them. None of them had any custom description, and they were all set to the same level range. This is gonna be one of those projects that I do one or two ifles a night during the week, and then leave it alone while I work on something else. I just can't force myself to invest that much energy into something that is at the stage where it is tediously going through file by file, and seeing next to no results. At least in Sounion, I am able to have visible results from an hour's worth of work.

Fianna released

2011-09-05T03:43:00.000-04:00

Ditched the colour changing spell and banshee's wail spell, and pushed the association live. Before I did, though, I checked over nearly every playable race I could scavenge off of our race list. Also went through the trainer and organized his skills. Good thing I did, since I had a couple of skills listed twice, which would have put him teach to about 460. I cut that down to a max skill he had of 200, with a hefty training reserve on what he would teach.

Once things went live, it didn't take long to figure out where he had been placed. What did take a while, and as of the writing of this entry still hasn't been figured out, was the entrance requirements. Players who were sure they would get in easily were denied, and the four or so who did get in couldn't tell you what made them any different.

I'll just have to give the assoc some time, and the players will point out all of the flaws in it that I have missed. they try various races, guilds, religions, other associations, and combinations thereof. None of the abilities should be game breakers, or exceedingly useful in every situation. Just a little something extra to have, as well as fostering some mystery behind the history of the fey races.

There has been a request made to remodel the colour change spell, since that alone would get a few players to join the association. I'll have to see about that one. Otherwise, I'll be working on Sounion and doing minor patches to Fianna as I come across them.

First part of the weekend

2011-09-04T12:49:00.000-04:00

Had issues with some basic functionality early in the weekend. The merchant that I was setting up to reward xp for foraging was accepting anything of a certain material, even his own goods. It was easy cheese to go into his shop, which sold very inexpensive items, and rack up plenty of xp before he hit his cap. The second merchant at least sold more expensive items, which kinda stemmed the trade cash for xp racket, but it still existed.

I redid the selection criteria of what the merchant accepts, and ran with the Identity Code. This filtered out a ton of crap that he previously accepted, and since the foraged form of what he wants uses that particular identity code, he pretty much just accepts foraged stuff. I haven't tried every single item in the game to see what he will accept, but he seems to work as intended for now. I also had to make sure I had enough blocks to the system so that some enterprising players doesn't forage for one example, then set up a bot program to replicate it, turn it in and soak up idle xp. It can still be done, but the returns are not worth the time investment. The same goes for Burnt Offerings in OIA. I've had two kobolds try for pacifist leveling on the burnt offerings. The higher level got to level 40, and the return of xp vs xp needed to level is slowing his progress down quite a bit.

Other things I got done in this first leg of the weekend-- finalized one more shop in Sounion (including expanding the stock and entire room descriptions), and set up the trainer for the Fianna. Oddly enough Trenck trains to a much higher level. Trenck may end up getting removed, though. The only reason he is in existence is because there was no way to train certain skills needed by the Aligned, so a lackluster developer hacked Trenck together as an initial project (and hasn't done anything else since). Once statically located trainers become available for those skills, a traveling trainer with a weird training requirement may not even be necessary. People scry him now because he is the only source of the skills they want/need. We'll soon have the Fianna with a selection of the skills Trenck teaches, and then there's the music school in Sounion that covers the rest. Both without obnoxious combat levels. The concept of Trenck isn't a bad one, just not very thought out. It was basically "Hey, we need a trainer for this...I'll just make one real quick." Very little went into the background, or linking the character to anything else on the mud. He makes references to statues and artwork that he's done, but none of that is present anywhere. Possibilities, but I have my own projects to deal with. It seems like I am slowly getting sucked into working on the Rajan crap anyway, after a recent episode with death masks and the Corrosion spell from my Undines..

Prep for a long weekend.

2011-09-02T14:09:00.000-04:00

Got a 3-day weekend coming up. I have something planned for Saturday, but otherwise my schedule is open. Spent a chunk of time last night sorting things out to make laying down code a lot easier once the weekend coding commences. I found a new way of handling some of the comestibles, so I will need to redo all of the comestible files from Vargan and Sounion, but that should make it quicker for me to start loading files into Sloan. Depending on how focused I am, I may be able to do a final polish on Fianna and load up the rest of Sounion. The latter will need to sit for at least a week before I do a final walk through, and in that time I will be setting up the rest of the oriental region maps, and the Sloan map.

I have a general idea of how I want the Sloan map to end up, and I have a list going of the creatures and items I want in there. I like how the Vargan gladiator pits turned out, so I may do a rendition of those in Sloan. I still need one alternate damage dealer, one resistor beast, and a heavy. In Vargan, the resistor is the ice wraith, the heavy is the garou shifters, and the alternate damage is the ice drakes.

I also have one more ability to add to Fianna -- it should be a fun novelty, but I still have to test it to make sure it isn't abusable at some point.

Sounion's king

2011-08-30T12:45:00.000-04:00

Did a complete rework on Vestitus, the merking from Devonshire. I also got rid of the stupid requirement for getting his gem by finding his lost daughter (or just outright slaying him). In an effort to steer away from murder for gain on the MUD, Vestitus no longer carries the gem on his person.

I also set up an npc with some riddles for xp. I modeled it after At'lordrith, and changed out all of the riddles to tie in to something from either underwater, or dealing with the differences between life on land and life underwater. The difficult part is coming up with riddles that are not stupid, and aren't so simple that any twit can spout off the answer immediately(or just google the key words). I also have to ensure that the riddles are actually solvable. That part is going to be a pain, but I think I can trudge through it, since it should add a bit more to the area.

I may still use Ariel, but definitely not in the way she is currently being used. If she is going to be part of a quest, I want it to be more than just as a damsel in distress in need of saving.

Inching along underwater

2011-08-29T12:41:00.000-04:00

I set up one of the shop keepers to work on a very minor version of rewarding agricultural help with xp. You go do some farming for him and collect the raw materials he needs to produce his goods, and he rewards you with a very small amount of xp. He has a limit on how much raw goods he can process at a time, and the xp return is so small that most players will completely ignore it. Below level five, the return is so small that it gets rounded down. At level six, on 0 assim, it amounted to 1 xp per unit turned in. I may have to monkey with the xp returns some more.

Aside from that, it is another means of gaining xp that doesn't involve direct combat, and I can use the same implementation in other merchants. This initial form is extremely basic, reacting to only a single type of product. Eventually I want to expand it out to accept a variety of items, possibly to form a more complex end result.

I also started setting up more complex interactions with some of the shop keepers. Some have basic verbal responses, others perform a service upon request, ad I have one that will attempt to construct an item based upon his stock of resource materials.

Overall, I like the progress. Sounion is slowly turning from an unremarkable place barely recognized outside of a small portion of a single quest to being some place worth exploring for reasons other than trying to find the quest item.

Furthering the cause for Sounion

2011-08-28T19:44:00.000-04:00

Sounion recently took a wide detour. I had almost all of it ready for launch, but at the last minute when I was looking over things, I realized I had unused buildings. Then a thought popped in my head about what I could put into one of those buildings, and then the next, and before I knew it, I had 7 more shops to fill in to complete the map.

So I laid out where each shop would be, put a generic version of a shop into that spatial location in the map, and added a generic NPC to serve as the shopkeep. A couple of the shops came together really quickly, but othersc are going to need an extensive amount of work to get them up and running properly. The shops themselves, at least, are laced into the map where they are supposed to be.

Still need to flesh out the newer structures, add depth to the new NPC's, and do a bit of work on the outskirts of the project...the edges kinda fell off the development radar.

Fianna updates

2011-08-28T17:34:00.000-04:00

Did a lot of work on the Fianna this weekend. They are almost completely done. I had to redo several of the spells, but the end results seemed fine so far. I also updated all of the help files, the spec access, the assoc master, the trainer, and the entrance requirements. All that is left is the number crunching and rebalancing, possibly with some much harder play testing than the initial run through. On the first run through, I was just trying to get it to work. Second try was to get it to look right. Third was to make it look pretty. Fourth run is to make sure it actually has use in the game.

Depending on how bad of a week I have at work, I may be able to do the play testing and get it ready for launch next weekend.

More underwater delicacies

2011-08-25T12:55:00.000-04:00

Had to address a major issue with some of the comestibles I had placed in Sounion. They had been designed to be eaten underwater, but what happens when some enterprising player decides to buy the food in Sounion, and then leave the area. The live sea slug would then be no longer underwater, so how would it still be alive? Had to rework most of the dishes, and then expanded the selection by quite a bit. I would be almost complete with the foods had my editor not crashed and wiped out an hour's worth of work. Fortunately, it didn't take an hour to redo that work.

One issue I was struggling to track down. We have set_food_type("food") and set_food_type("drink"), but then we have other ingestion methods. I was trying to track down where the food types were handled to see if I could do something fun with some of these.

Anyway, these last few meals should round out and complete the eatery. The other stores just need some files loaded up and the descriptions updated, and they should be good. After that, the music school and teacher. Every now and then, I think about making the teacher some really exotic race, like a dolphin, harpy, siren, or khalashk, but then I keep imaging a mermaid teacher. That will probably be a last minute decision.

Sounion descriptions

2011-08-21T21:54:00.000-04:00

Had to rework most of Sounion's descriptions. Some were taken directly from above water locations, and just didn't match the rest of the area. The oyster farm and kelp bed both had the generic farm descriptions to them, including the references to rainfall, grazing areas, and a split-rail fence. Had to completely clear those out.

I managed to dig through all of the terrain descriptions. Some are still below current standards, and will need to be completely redone, but they are functional for now and are not doing any damage to the mud in their current state.

As it stands, it will be at least two more weeks until this one is ready to go live. And that will be after I get Vestitus updated, make sure the quest gem loads properly and is transferred properly, make sure the shops all load enough gear, and dig through all of the associated files to ensure they are completed.

Avalon's overland map view

2011-08-21T19:59:00.000-04:00

I started on some of the work on Avalon's maps. One of the first things I did was to check things out with a panoramicon. This immediately pointed out several flaws in the original design. The terrains all had pretty much the same icon as the actual map.conf, which was bad. I altered those, then set up the overlays to be visible on the panoramicon view as well. This showed me where the roads were. They had to be completely redone.

I ended up adding a paved road that goes about 3/4 the way around the island, while eliminating the roads that traveled across the water, through the lake, through solid earth, and just stopped in the middle of nowhere. The roads also connect several of the fortresses and cities all across the island. Very time consuming, but somewhat necessary for me to further develop that region.

Fort Boastt is live.

2011-08-21T19:52:00.000-04:00

Finally pushed Fort Boastt to be live. I can already tell that I am going to need to add some more interaction into it. Laithde and Dyne were the first two on the scene, and they started poking around at stuff that I didn't even think about adding in. Apparently the well completely eluded Dyne. He tried pulling the rope, moving the boards, looking at every single aspect of it that was mentioned in the description. Didn't once 'info well' to see what the syntax was. I also started a list of things they tried to look at and didn't get a response. And a list of words they were throwing out at the talking NPC's to try to get responses from them.

Also, as expected, combat attempts were made to see how much xp everything was worth, and what kind of 'drops' were to be had.

I'll monitor it as best as I can over the next few days to see what minor typos someone has found or where else I need more information. I have long days at work Monday through Wednesday, so the fixes may have to wait until late evening.

revisiting Avalon

2011-08-18T12:50:00.000-04:00

I was looking back over some of the map_areas for Avalon, and realized that the way i was doing them in Kaishima was so much better. So, I went back into some of the code in Avalon and began updating it. One of the first things I did was address how I was handling the air rooms. Previously, I had a map_area() defined for the regions of air just above the various landscapes, and another for the air above that. Completely redundant, since I can just set the map_area()'s for the landscape to be visible from however far away. If I extend it all the way to 5, then even at the upper atmosphere, you will be able to see at least something of the ground below.

The initial problem that I was trying to solve was that all of the air regions were exactly the same, with no variations in them, and this was bothersome and boring to the never-pleased player base. The first attempt to offset this was to do map_area()s above each terrain type, and continue building upward from there, stacking different descriptions the further away from the terrain. this effectively worked, and allowed me to set up variations in atmosphere levels, but it was very time consuming and not an exact science. It was also very bulky in many of the files involved....much bulkier than was really necessary and not very maintainable without hours of consideration for each change. The second run through, which happened first in Mordo/Skarlan, was to design layers of atmosphere. This still addressed the need for variations in atmosphere levels, but it set up very unlikely weather patterns, in that some layers were always cloudy no matter what the weather description said. It did add more variation to the air rooms, especially in the short descriptions. It still had its flaws though.

So I have a more refined version now. The terrains themselves handle how they are depicted from above, by means of mapped descriptions with exit exclusions. This means I can set up a description for how the terrain will look at an number of atmosphere levels above the actual terrain, have a separate description for what it looks like if you are on the same level, and exclude the visual noise of having the map_area() described from each direction. I can also set up how map rooms are viewed from below or from a particular direction. the northern keeps can have a different appearance from the north (out at sea) than they do from the south. I can also eliminate distance viewing from a particular direction, such as Twilight Tower not being able to be seen from the east, because a mountain is in the way.

I also figured out since making Avalon how to set up atmospheric obscuring, so that you don't see markers from a mile underground. Very useful.

This overall process will extend the length of the map_area() files, but the effects will be much better from the rooms themselves. This will leave the entirety of the air levels as a single map_area(), which puts them back to being the same short description. To adjust that, I can set an overlay across the entire z-axis that adds on a short tag about how far up that level is. The side effect of this is going to be thinner air in the highlands and moors, and anywhere else with high elevation. A further side effect is a possible new movement type. Where flight generally means unrestricted movement through non-solid rooms, a new movement type can be set up that simulates gliding, where you can travel around the same atmosphere level, or one less, but you cannot increase your altitude. It also makes featherfall a possibility, since you can now track the various layers of the atmosphere. Instead of descending straight to 0 elevation with a thud, you can move slowly down the elevations until you reach 0 elevation, at which point the effect fades.

Spline reticulation

2011-08-18T12:24:00.000-04:00

Refined the map of Kaishima even more. I dug downward to make the lagoon bottom, ocean bottom, and set up the vents down there. Built up the hilly regions, carved out a valley, and filled in all of the empty spaces with some sort of terrain. The first night of drudgery paid off since it allowed me to built the map much faster. Now I just have to go back through and fix the depictions, and then add on the overlays. I may end up converting some of the map_area()'s to map_overlay()'s.

I also started populating some of the map_area()'s. I used the stock creatures found elsewhere in the mud, but they fit into this region appropriately enough. soon I'll be able to start on the region specific creatures, armour, weapons, and items, which are what really make a region stand apart from others.

More geography

2011-08-17T13:09:00.000-04:00

Expanded the Kaishima map some more by adding in descriptions to the lagoon and beach, then adding the markers for the rice fields, reed fields, willows, cherry grove, rolling hills, and a field of silvery bladed grass. The rolling hills are going to be the segue between elevations, which will be limited to +1 and down to -3. The cherry grove is just so iconic of anime with its falling cherry blossoms, and due to a distinct lack of seasons across the mud, we can have early spring year round and have a constant whirlwind of cherry blossoms falling. Never-mind that they never accumulate anywhere. Also, the reed fields, silvery bladed grass, and willows will all be awesome places to setup a ninja ambush.

I also started digging through the oriental-aligned areas of the mud. Xi Feng Ming will fit better on the main Edo continent in the desert region already planned for there, Miyu's house can be tucked away in Kaishima. Other than that, the oriental flair stuff is all tucked away into Hanoma. I have no idea what will become of Hanoma once these regions are completed. It may be tucked away within one of the projects, or it may get moved to the farthest side, or it may stay right where it is.

Kaishima cliffs

2011-08-16T12:59:00.000-04:00

Made two sets of cliffs for Kaishima last night. The first is a drop off from the land into the water, and the second is more or less a breakwater that separates off a lagoon. I was looking over the topography of Japan for a little inspiration, and it is basically a mountain chain that rises up from the ocean. There are places where there is actual beach, but a lot of places where there is a sheer drop off. That was the part I was focusing on last night. In the process, I set up the basis of an atoll just off the coast, a distinct lagoon, a sandy beach, and some treacherous sections of water where the basalt rises either just above or just below the surface of the water. If you are a small iguana, the water is great there; if you are a large ship, the basalt will shred your hull.

Since I already have the iconography set up, I was able to place where I want the lagoon and the shoreline for it, and see it on the map. The descriptions suck, but I can see them at the very least. If I had any animals for the area, I could populate those map_areas() and then go back and set the descriptions later on tonight. The descriptions take a while to get down in a way that I am pleased enough with, but the process is flowing well enough now that I am able to go from one map_area to the next without tediously scouring for imagery to depict.

Back to populating the map....one of the great things about this setup is that I don't have to stick with a single source book, a single setting, or a single set of legends. I don't even need to stay strictly with Japanese wildlife. The water conditions lend themselves quite well to iguanas and maybe some saltwater crocodiles, as well as plenty of octopods, exotic fish, seals, otters, and a variety of tropical fish, most of which are not found in Japan. These can be built into local traditions, and even their martial arts forms (if we decide to go that route). Octopus form kung fu which employs shifting a flowing moves as well as multiple strike attacks and grapples. The playful Otter form kung fu, which stresses agility and toying with your opponent to keep them off balance while dodging their attacks... a passive form of martial arts employing evasion and using the opponent's strength against them. Just a few ideas.

Most of the mobs I had intended for the area will actually end up in the Edo culture regions, which means I will have to come up with a slightly different selection for Kaishima.

Feeder rings

2011-08-15T13:22:00.000-04:00

Had to make a new dev toy this weekend. I was checking some things out on the map for Burakumin (lower portion of Kaishima) and needed to swim five spaces east to check the border to make sure I had water going form -40 to +40. If I missed a line, it would have filled in with earth, and would be readily apparent once I checked the edges of the map. I started to move, and ran out of endurance.

Developers tend to spend a lot of time incarnate, and metabolisms still affect us unless we make ourselves an ametabolic race, or explicitly set our metabolisms to ametabolic. Being ametabolic means we cannot test out any food stuffs, and I had mine set to Incendivore to test out some stuff I had been tinkering with for OIA. End result, devs have a tendency to be at the brink of starving to death.

To help alleviate that, I designed a feeder ring as a dev toy. Every heartbeat, it reduces hunger and thirst by 1. It may not be much, but it will be extremely useful once it recharges my hunger/thirst, since it will be at a rate that I won't continue to drop. The recovery process is extremely slow, but at least I have more than 0.1 HP for my entire body, and Endurance above 0 now, despite not even being halfway through the regenerative process.

Maybe one day I'll add in a spirit drain to the heartbeat and make the ring publicly available. It would definitely have its uses, at the trade off of occupying a ring slot. The spirit drain probably wouldn't be so terrible that the ring couldn't be worn at all times, but hunger can be staved off while another ring is being utilized in the slot. Currently, though, I am enjoying not having to constantly eval my hunger away, or putting myself back into OIA for the Feed Inner Flame spell.

the Start of Kaishima

2011-08-15T13:12:00.000-04:00

Spent quite a bit of time setting up the map for Kaishima, which is going to be a Japanes-esque location consisting of two regional maps. The division is basically between Upper and Lower echelons of society. I set up the basis of 51 map area types that will be used in both of the regions. Most of the descriptions are crap for now, but I have established the iconography for the maps. In typical fashion, it all started with earth and air. After that, I added in the deep ocean level on the 0 z-axis. After that I carved out the initial coastline and set up the rocky coast map_area definition. I used the same rocky coast to establish the islands, outskirts of the lagoon, and a few other features that will go in later. For right now, it is just a generic symbol on a map so that I can see what is going on and where. Within eight squares in any direction from the coastline, I converted the 'deep ocean' to 'shallow ocean', and replaced the landlocked portion of the map with basic 'earth'. This gives me a really good idea of what the finalize map will look like, and whee I need to continue building at. The shallow ocean sections will be directly above the ocean floor, and the deep oceans will be above at least one layer of water. This is going to give me room to add in a lot of underwater features, such as magma vents, coral shelves, seaweed banks, and a few other things that I have been developing in Sounion. Given the Japanese feel of the region, I have been pulling up images of Japan's coastline and removing the images of anything involved with radioactivity or survivors from the recent earthquake/tsunami.

The placement of the magma vents leads into natural flows for water currents, which make it easy to chart out how the water would flow, where fishing villages would pop up at, where merchants would take their vessels, where ships could wreck at, where estuaries should be, how the coast should form, the placement of sedimentary build-up islands, where cliffsides would go, etc.

Other things I am looking at is bamboo forests, fern forests, poppy field, cherry groves (typical anime style cherry petals blowing in the wind), lotus groves, rock gardens, shinto temples, pagodas, and whatever you call those cliffsides that have bamboo poles that you can to balance across. Stupid monkey kung fu. when it comes to visuals of fantasy Japan, there is no shortage. I just have to keep out the schoolgirls in miniskirts, neon lights, tiny cars, and tentacled horrors. Those will probably come in later due to some fanboi getting ahold of the project. And of course ninjas will probably show up. Not sure how to handle the inverse proportion of ninja power though. Maybe something like if count_of(ninja_present())>1, ninja_power = base_ninja_power / count_of(ninja_present); Single ninja = BAMF. Many ninja = mooks in costumes.

Lost weekend

2011-08-08T13:09:00.000-04:00

I had such hopes for this passed weekend. I was going to expand out those last few spells for Undines and do their change log, push Fort Boastt to live code, and start my maintenance cycle of Gardagh and Avalon, cleaning up their code, adjusting descriptions, and getting things caught up with all of the recent changes. Unfortunately, I had connection issues most of Friday night, was out of town Saturday until far later than I had scheduled and had no internet for most of Sunday.

The only things I got done were to add in the possibility of an offspring for Bartziluth, and I updated some of the Undine spec access. The offspring is a hatchling dragon, so is missing on a lot of the specials of the adult dragons, and its HP is not all that great. I set the name up to be different for each time the baby hatches. I may end up altering a few mechanisms within a couple of files so that more than one hatchling can be around at a time. Ultimately, I'd like them to persist, and eventually grow to adult dragons if left alone. That's a concept that I will need for several quests that I want to implement, where time is a factor and decisions have to be made. Depending on which decision is made, the entire quest changes. That's going to be a lot of work, but has tremendous possibilities. Dogs could be bought as puppies, and eventually grow to adulthood. Each race could be set up on a certain lifecycle, which incidentally was one of the first projects I had proposed when I first became a developer. I ended up simply releasing the Losthaven Pet Shoppe as just a place to buy animals...no life cycles or anything else.

I think if I picked this concept back up, I'd have to set things up as a definition structure for the types of life cycles and link the controlling daemon into the game clock. I had originally linked life stages to level, but that is a whole different set of values to deal with. There is also the issues of metamorphosis, where we currently have 'tadpole' set up as a different race than 'frog'. So much to consider.

Lost update

2011-08-05T12:49:00.000-04:00

Tried to do an update last night, lost connection to the blog server, and lost whatever it was I was working on. Anyway.... Added in a handful of Undine spirits. Nautilus Spirit is an order-y/math-y skills buff. Goose Spirit finally started working correctly. Took a while to iron out what I was doing with Conceptual Navigation, but I finally got it set up how i wanted it. First time through, I was doing a lot of unnecessary checks for things like non-magick zone, which are checked by the spell itself. Can't cast a spell in a NM zone, so no need to check for an NM zone in the spell resolution. I also had the target destination wrong -- I had it set to being in Tursiop's inventory rather than his environment. I adjusted Whale's Might to work off of the caster's unmodified Strength. For the middleground strength characters, there isn't going to be much change at all, since you can still stack it until it maxes. Characters who are naturally stronger will get more benefit faster, and can pass that benefit on to others more efficiently. Naturally weaker characters will no longer be able to use strength as a dump stat then overcompensate with Whale's Might. A strength of 50 can still pump up to close to 600, but it is going to take a lot more to do so than if you had 150 strength. I also lowered the ratings bracket, so the minimum is now only 50 and the max is 300, which means your strength actually accounts for more in the spell as far as proficiency, especially since there is a scaled conversion of your proficiency top determine how much your strength is augmented by this spell. I also extended the duration by 3x. Seemed like a decent trade-off. I also added Tern Spirit, which boosts navigation skills, .

I also was able to see a fledgling Zuth Strormwalker start in the guild. When he first started, he had all of 2 spells, Magick Bolt and Navigator's Eye. By the time he swam over to At'lordrith, he had opened up another 5. By the end of his session, he had a decent number of spells. That seemed to have worked out much better than the previous attempt, which ended in a ranting tirade about how zuth simply could not be played AT ALL. Oh the drama we must go through to prove a point.

Upcoming Undine change entry

2011-08-04T12:22:00.000-04:00

I am holding off on the change entry for the Undine updates for a few more spells. Once those are in, it should be enough modification to warrant a changelog entry. Still working on Anaconda, Arctic Tern, Crab, Dragonfly, Goose, Narwhal, Nautilus, Orca, Albatross, Diatom, Barracuda, and Swordfish. Also have a few more spells to tinker with to rebalnce the rating/knowledge reqs. Anaconda, Arctic Tern, and Crab were originally going to be attack spells, but I have been reconsidering them, and may have found a few new tricks I can pull off.

And another round of Undine updates

2011-08-04T00:14:00.000-04:00

Modded the Corrosion spell so that it has a bit more bite. On weaker iron/steel weapons, it can completely rust them through and they fall apart. On other items that are only partially steel/iron, it rusts them, degrades them, and alters their appearance. It works so much more in line with what I had originally intended for the spell. I also added in Crocodile Spirit as a replacement for Clear Waters, with a few other minor benefits. Then came the Ibis Spirit, which is a minor metaphysical and thaumaturgy buff. May not be exceedingly useful immediately, but it gets stronger as the spell proficiency rises, and it works on others. Also added in was the Toad Spirit, which causes the target to start tripping. Seriously. Like at one point, these little pink quadrupeds come in and start taking your stuff and you can't stop them becase one arm is completely numb, the other is all stretchy and reaching for things, and the other is doing what it wants no matter what you want it to do. Or maybe that was someone else's hand. Tripping.

Shape Water Elemental got completely redone. The shapes are at different costs now, and you can no longer shape a water elemental into a water elemental, or to a water spirit. I took some of the mechanics from the containment sphere spells from OIA, and set the Water Elemental spell to actually make a water elemental, and then reshape it to its final form. Imagine that. A spell actually modeled how it was previously just described as doing. Also added in the Squidshrimp Spirit. I don't have much background with what those originally are, but the code to them suggests some sort of alignment to Chaos, so I set the summons up to do a minor buff to Chaos Affinity as well as a temporary +1 to Chaos Favour.

Turtle Spirit works a bit better now. Unknown objects are identified, and the caster gets a small amount of xp for each item identified. Definitely not game breaking xp, but it can get you a few of the lower levels. Finally fixed the messages for the Alligator Hide spell, and renamed it to Alligator Spirit. The last thing I added was the Plover Spirit. It mimics the old Ice Bomb spell, but in a little more cost prohibitive way. Instead of ice or cold damage, it does cold water damage, and not really enough to warrant using the spell as anything other than to soften up an enemy in the next room, or to clear out some low level mooks in the next room before going in to the bigger opponent. and hoping you don't need that spirit and water energy to rebuff during the fight.

More Undine updates

2011-08-01T01:01:00.001-04:00

Added a few more spells to the Undines line-up. The first one came in after a complete meltdown by a player trying to make a Zuth. Apparently the lack of armour options and the inability to fit through a doorway was entirely too much to handle, so it deleted, but not before spouting off about how Zuth suck. This triggered some other players to respond on how to make a Zuth work, which lead to making a Zuth Storm Walker Undine (hopefully with Storm Lord). Undines can get Amorphism with their Aqueous Form spell, and they have the Superconductor spell (amplifies electrical damage while subduing a handful of other damage types) from back when they did cold damage as well.

This lead to the first spell added -- Minnow Spirit. It basically shrinks the caster down in proportion to their own size, with a requirement that their size must be over 50 to begin with. This eliminates a lot of mechanical issues with munchkin characters who are tiny to begin with, possible getting to negative size, and being impossible to target. The rest of the spell is based around percentages of original size anyway, which caps at around 1/4 original size. It lasts anywhere from 10 seconds to 2 minutes, so the duration isn't that long, but it should be enough to get through a doorway and do what you need to do. The concept behind it is the minnow is always a small fish in a very big sea. When invoked, it alters the world around the caster to emulate being a small fish in a big sea, since it has issues fathoming any other kind of existence. The memory of a minnow is not all that great, so it tends to drift off rather easily to another subject, thus the extremely short attention span/duration.

Second spell was the Turtle Spirit. It serves as an identification spell. The first version had a very basic help file which just mentioned that the turtle spirit was wise and would share his knowledge of objects. The identification part was left out so that player could infer such. Instead, they were casting it in the middle of the ocean with nothing around them, and reporting that the spell was broken or just didn't work.

Third spell was a rewrite of Stingray Spirit to shift it from a single target to a multi target attack. I also went through most of the single attack and area attack spells and changed them to better match what I did over in OIA. All this really did was to stabilize the damage output from single attack spells and make them more viable, and the reduce the overpowering nature of area spells, though in some cases, the power of some of the areas increased for the lower range of the spells. Usually this is when a spell is judged and deemed 'worth casting' or not.

The next spell to go in was the Gojira Spirit. It was designed to be a single target Eskara attack, but it just sucked so badly I had to remove it. I did a damage monitor on myself as I tested it, and it was severely lacking until I amped it up so much that it was instantly ripping limbs off, which was not the intent of the spell. I may end up giving this another try later, but that version had to be removed.

After that, I made the Cave Sponge Spirit, complete with explanation of what the Cave Sponge does. Basic version, it is a low end salt damage attack. I have no idea how long that will stay in, since the salt damage type is so loosely defined right now. Chaos or Twilight may yank the spell with no warning just because the damage type is inappropriate at this point in time I checked a few things around the mud, and saw some minor amount of resistance to the salt damage type, ranging from 18 to 38. So it seems that at least the resistance portions are already set up. Things that I found had no salt resistance also had almost no resistances set up at all.

After that, I added in Osprey Spirit. It builds upon the concept Twilight had over in Empathic Bonds of the majesty of the Osprey and it having dominion over all it sees. The range of the osprey covers most of the other animistic spirits, which is quite impressive. The effect of the spell is a buff to leadership, courage, and social skills, based upon caster's rating in the spell.

I had a short weekend, so that was all I got done. I started on the Squidshrimp, Albatross, Diatom, Frog, Water Mark, Whirlpool, Narwhal, Crab, and Anaconda Spirits, but never got them finished. Once I get these done, I'll changelog it and move on to polishing up some nearly done projects.

Oils

2011-07-29T13:04:00.000-04:00

There is a growing trend in the number of players with unusual diets, particularly sanguivores. One of the downsides to being a bloodsucker is that you can't drink potions. Normally, this is seen as a nominal offset for the benefits of having such as race, but that doesn't stop the player complaints about how it is so unfair that they cannot drink potions, and how hard it is to come by sustenance. I am just generally numb to such complaints, since they are nonstop, but Nilten has taken it upon himself to make bloodified versions of some of the potions. I had done something similar for incendivores by transmuting the potion portion to oil. Despite having similar goals in mind, the process were completely different.

My oils were set up to minimize the amount of files needed to produce any given effect. I have a Base file and two oil files so far. One oil boosts a random_select attribute by a standardized random_select amount. Clone one of them and it comes out as a vial of bright red greater oil of cleverness. Clone it again, and it makes a vial of white lesser oil of toughness. I am fine with that. I can stock 10 of those in a shop, and it may well stock 10 different oils. If they all end up being the same, as soon as one is bought, the next one to stock will be different. No biggie. I can also set up the merchant to custom craft these oils so that he can rummage through his supplies and concoct whatever he can from what he's got available. Not incredible specific, but I am fine with that. I can also use this randomized oil as a miniquest reward. The second set of oils is a bit different. They are infused with certain energies, and can replenish those energies in the imbiber. Drinking a vial of major oil of chaos energy infusion will replenish about 20 Chaos energy. Somehow, the base code that I am drawing from has a timer to it, so you can only drink one of these potions like every 4 minutes. These oils also initialize energy pools in the imbiber, which may or may not be a desired effect. I'll have to see about that later on. It may tie in well with a few other services I am looking to add in. One replenishes elemental energies similar to how a psychiatrist replenishes spirit or a masseuse replenishes endurance. Another is a place where you can sell off excess energies, eliminate your energy pools, and reduce your elemental affinity -- sorta like an exorcism of the elements. Very few immediate needs for any of these, but they do have potential. So few guilds make use of esoteric energies, and those that do have some means of rebuilding those energies.

One possible use for the energy oils is to power specific items to do a specific action. Pour the fiery energy oil over the power gauntlets to produce a fiery effect. They could also be used to fuel elemental summons spells. Or as part of an elemental infusion forging process (eg, use the Ice energy oil during the forging process for regular steel, and it produces a blue steel that accepts ice magick effects, and can do ice damage.) The elemental exorcism could end up being useful if you accidentally drink one of these oils and itgives you an unwanted pool, or you strip from a guild and it doesn't remove all of the energies, or you just want to be rid of a certain element (eg a ringwielder that decides to change rune focus, if they used esoteric energies).

Overall, it is a minor effect to help give identity to one of the cities I am building. When I design a new city, I try to make sure it has at least three area-specific items, some area specific foods, and a few other minor things that can readily e identified as coming from that particular city. I'd also like to include a unique shop or service provider for each new city.

Broken furnaces

2011-07-28T19:15:00.000-04:00

So I was trying to take the concept behind the furnace and anvil in Banir lok and turn them into some sort of extension or module and add in all of the variables I would want in a forge item. The idea was to have the basic functions taken care of, but set variables such as set_preferred_metals(), set_optimum_temperature(), set_max_temperature(), set_fuel_type(), etc.

In theory, this would have worked great. In practice, the log file was not happy. It was a lot like dealing with the DMV, where it would give me six errors at a time, and when I would fix those, six more would show up. Very repetitive cycle, all the way up until I had butchered things so much that any comments I added to the code made absolutely no sense for what it was commenting.

The end result I was shooting for was to have an iron smithing forge that would take wood or coal, heated to a specific temperature to work iron, and would sustain that heat for about 20 minutes before needing more fuel. Then, I could set up a different forge using the same code, but alter the variables so that it was used for mithril, which would require a different fuel source and would burn at a higher temperature, for a shorter period of time. Or a forge that required warpstones and oil, but would burn at a temperature necessary to work xorakas and had a tendency to chaos infuse any other metals worked. Or a forge that required coal to burn, and could burn at two settings -- the lower setting for bronze/brass, and the other for iron. Different materials would burn at different temperatures, and maintain those temperatures for different periods.

I may have to set this up a completely different way, possibly using an actual daemon, and defining the fuel sources and materials to forge, laying out what temperatures are produced, what temperatures are needed, how long a certain temperature can be maintained, etc. With that method, adding in a new forge type would be as simple as adding in two new definitions, or reusing current definitions. But then again, I may just be complexifying this much more than is necessary.

Underwater delights

2011-07-27T12:42:00.000-04:00

Underwater content seems to be vastly underdeveloped compared to land-based development. Sounion is going to be the first step at semi-rectifying that. After Sounion, I should be able to do some updating to the ocean bottoms across the globe. We just recently got support code for the crushing depths. Soon, I'll have to start pushing what I can do to make the ocean floors worth exploring.

Inside of Sounion, I have started setting up various terrains to be used on the ocean floor, ranging from corals to kelp beds, from sand floor to magma vents. Each of these is slowly being built up like a regular above-ground terrain, complete with foraging selections, material proportions, terrain inclusions, fieldcraft skills, etc. At some point, I'll make all of it into a terrain definition, but that will happen after I figure out exactly what I want to do with it. I have a feeling that I cannot edit definitions, so I only get one shot at getting stuff in correctly. Otherwise, I end up like with the lobsters that I cannot use because I set them to have the wrong respiration.

I also set up a decent selection of area specific weapons, armour, items, and foods. The foods were a little difficult to come up with, and most people were suggesting regular seafood like clam chowder and soups, or suggesting things that require cooking. And of course someone had to chime in that sushi was not cooked...idiot. I had to dismiss most of those and consider what underwater creatures actually eat, and try to evolve that into a menu.

Still left to do in Sounion: update the control file to use standard monsters instead of copypasta monsters, set descriptions on some of the map_area definitions, populate the coral reef, expand Vestitus, update Ariel, finish setting up the foods, and finish up the items. I am hoping to have chunks f it done throughout the week, so this weekend I can use my larger chunks of time to get a lot of the next area completed. Then Sounion can start its settling process and wait for release.

Fort and Sounion progress

2011-07-25T14:10:00.000-04:00

Fort Boastt is nearly done. There are a few nitpick details to go over but otherwise it is done. I'm going to sit on the release for another two weeks to make sure I don't come up with any other ideas to further flesh out the area.

Sounion is slowly crawling along. I have some of the food dishes done, most of the citizenry and NPC's, and most of the actual real estate.There's still a lot of refining to do, though. I had some issues with some of the monsters I wanted to use, such as the hydra, but will have to find suitable replacements due to respiration issues. Stupid air breathers.

I have some ideas for miniquests within Sounion, but they are far from complete concepts. Instead of relying upon finding Ariel for the Sphere quest, I want to use her is a separate quest, more similar to the Lost Kentaur. I have a small coral maze built, but it is unpopulated and stupidly easy to navigate. I need suitable creatures for some coral caverns, and a reason why she cannot find her way out on her own. I am also devising a much different approach to how Vestitus hands over the quest item, and this is going very slowly. I also have a few reservations about the area itself. The main concern is that the merman race is so poorly defined right now. It's one of those races that has been around for a while, and never really dusted off because it was never extensively used.

I also need a few more shell items. I may add in another store or two, which is why it is important to have all of the items configured correctly. The stores can stock themselves without having content explicitly set. The coral store is set up to stock items that include Material_Coral. I set up items to include Material_Coral, set them as publish items, and the store does the rest. There are no static items. This process comes in very useful for Devonshire, which has stores that essentially feed off of other areas. Instead of coding a ton of objects in Devonshire that are supposedly imports from distant area, I just set the stores up, then make the items in the distant location. Model it correctly the first time, and things get so much easier to maintain. If my Sounion area gets removed or revamp for any reason, the stores that are using items from there won't break. If things get consolidated, and the items are being used in multiple areas and get moved to LS_Misc status, I don't have to recode the stores that use those items.

The downside to this is the Base items and the extensions. A mass conversion should work around that. One Base item that I have been working on is taking the functioning of the fiery gauntlets and setting that as a Base item. From there, I can have the damage types determined at the object level, and so I can have frost gauntlets, lightning gauntlets, gauntlets of darkness, force gauntlets, or whatever combo is suitable.

Reusable code is so nice. So is code that I really don't have to touch again once it is released. Makes for less headaches, and more time to devote to newer projects.

Fort Boastt meat and potatoes

2011-07-19T12:53:00.000-04:00

Got the main portion of Fort Boast done. All of the meat and potatoes of the original project load and are in place. Heltu got updated, the ogre got updated, and the quest objects all got transferred, mostly as-is since their code was relatively new. All that is left is a lot of polishing and the final spices that will bring this area into its own. I kinda want to put a semi-unique item in, but I have no idea what I want. I asked online last night, but the responses ranged from "That place sucks" to "The whole place could use an update".

The obvious choices for a new item would be either a weapon or some armour unique to the area. As a personal preference, I'd rather have a non-combat oriented item. Maybe something that uses completely new code or something. I like the panoramicons, the belts of suspension, the everful quiver, the chronomimetic hourglass, the lute of inspiration, the ratking flute, the mirror of jealousy, the pibrits, and the lava lamps. Not extremely useful in combat (except for the quiver), but they have other uses. Lots of contemplation to do while I finish up the other minor details.

Evolution of flame colours

2011-07-12T11:28:00.001-04:00

A few weeks ago, I spruced up the message that gets used every time a spell is cast for OIA. Before the change, it was a (select variable for form) of (select variable for colour) (select variable for matter). Then I decided to make things a bit more lively by adding in more fiery colours. This resulted in things like summoning a ball of darkfire fire, a wisp of bright fire light, or a lick of hellfire smoke. Having the name of fire in the colour name for the fire didn't gel too well. So I started working with a few more ways to get this to work a little bit better, and all of them met with failure. I tried to get the fire to work off of user affinity, so set everything up in the Spell.c file to query the affinities that would affect the fire. That kinda-sorta worked, but I had so many variables in there distinguishing actual affinity alterations for the spells and just getting the colour change that it was becoming cumbersome. I split half of it off over to the link.c file, and it started working a little bit better, since I could focus on just one thing at a time. In order to achieve the end effect that I want, I am going to have to add in two new spells. One to alter the flame colour and one to alter the flame form. Don't know how well two will work, since you could end up with purple hellfire or green darkfire, which doesn't flow too well. I may split it so that the basic flame can take on a different colour, or you can have the alternate fire form, but not both on the same spell. That would lead to some spells using a ball of hellfire, and others using a wisp of green smoke or pink flame.

End result\:. Absolutely nothing changed.

Weekend projects

2011-07-10T23:35:00.001-04:00

Bounced between so many projects this weekend. Devonshire was the center of a lot of attention. More than half of its current files are being ported over to other projects. Most are just a better fit thematically than Devonshire. Schola Fervitus will be moving, and the area it will be cojoined with makes much better use of the resident pyraturges than the holy men of Devonshire ever truly would. The Sentinels are also going to be moving, and with that move, I can add in more of a steampunk motif. Fort Bragg is getting ripped from the south of Devonshire, effectively closing that southern gate (or I can open it up so that one can enter the city via north or south gate). Sounion will be replacing the merman's kingdom portion of Devonshire, and it is well under way at this point. Arnedio Shrine will be replacing the Temple of Ilsidahur, and getting located in a place that makes so much better geographical cohesion.

Schola Fervitus will end up going through a lot of changes once the newer city is released. I'm renaming most of the rooms, reconfiguring everything, and sweeping out a lot of the dysfunctional aspects of the guildhall. Some of the room names were set up when the guild was originally called the Pyromancers and they were focussed much more of information gathering. The guild has since evolved well past this, and scrying has undergone immense changes. That one room is no longer a part of either concept. Still, it had to be used as ammo for someone's argument for them to get orienteering access, at which point they also pointed out several other simple words that if joined together and interpretted in one of twelve different ways, indicated that OIA should have tons of orienteering access, just so they could more easily find their intentionally difficult to find trainers. To hell with that. I got rid of the 'scrying chamber', and one of the free trainers as well. I nearly got rid of the wandering trainers as well, but I was distracted in the middle of editing them out by my progress in other projects.

Fort Boastt has come the farthest along this weekend. It has gone from initial setup to being populated. This project in particular was rather easy since it is a fort that was ransacked by a dragon years ago, and everything except the outer wall and a single tower were burnt to the ground. I was able to use stock creatures from the surrounding desert, and what few living creatures were actually part of the project were already coded in Devonshire's update. I should be able to have this one ready for release by the next weekend, giving me plenty of time to adjust any last minute typos that anyone wants to point out. I also have the option of letting it sit for another month in case I come up with a new idea for something I want in there.

The city that will be hosting OIA and the one for the Sentinels also went in rather easily from initial startup to populating, only because the stores involved were already coded for Devonshire. I still have some NPC's to code up, and some items to code to their respective stores to stock, but otherwise, I was able to port over completed stores, with merchants intact. I still have to come up with city defenses, but the work done in these projects is greatly alleviating extraneous work needed in Devonshire. I still have respective maps to finish up, and I still have to place the stores into that map, but that work goes rather quickly.

Argopolis also went through its initial setup. I have about half of the stores done, but very little of the actual city layout. This project is far from being done. It may only be at 5% at this point.

Arnedio Shrine has a complete map laid out, and it can populate. There are no stores for this project, but I still need to update the specific temple rooms and set up a few more definitions and files. This project is geared more towards exploration of an exotic location, with a few things to kill and a single quest object in it. That's about it so far. I may need to let this one linger a bit longer so I can generate a few more ideas for it, but I am not adverse to releasing it as I had just mentioned.

the North Sea is a project that I haven't touched in a while. It would be the connector between Gardagh and the Northlands, and something I'll have to handle very carefully. It has a great risk of being an extremely boring area. It also has the potential to be so much more than a more direct route from Gardagh and the Northlands. It can open up at least two optional cultures, offer extensive underwater exploration, could contain 2 quests completely and serve as a part of 2 more, and it can have sub areas with rich potential.

Over in Vargan, I have identified a few significant errors, most due around me using one version of the code, and then that code changing before I launch the project. One of these was the cleric code, and another was the death location mechanism. I should be able to get those fixed in relatively short order, once I plateau on the development of these newer areas.

Finally, there is Sounion. I did a lot of code on that back in September of last year, and the project has sat around since then. I got most of the unique items done, and most of the population done, but I never got around to populating the area.

So, t seems the order of which I will be working intently upon the projects is:
Vargan and overland map fixes
Fort Boastt
Sounion
Arnedio Shrine
the newer homes for Sentinels and OIA
updating Schola Fervitus

Afer that, everything falls apart planning-wise, since I'll be due for another maintenance run through both guilds and the main maps.

Bleeding Devonshire

2011-07-09T21:02:00.002-04:00

To alleviate the amount of files I have going into Devonshire, I started separating its aspects out into actual projects. I am only on the first two, but it has already started tremendously reducing the amount of work going into Devonshire. The end result will be Sentinels and OIA moving elsewhere as their respective guild cities. Each city should have 2-3 special guardians. What is left for Devonshire, the immediate answer for this would be to have some Clerics of Ares fill in where I am removing the OIA support casters, and supplement the guard with some knights due to the proximity of Camelot. That shifts the entire feel of protecting Devonshire to a much more holy sense, which fits with the description of the founding of Devonshire from the master timeline. It is also separating out elements into smaller areas where they can be focused on a lot more.

With those two guilds gone from Devonshire's remake, it takes out the fire magick aspects and the steampunk aspects, both of which had a lot of potential and were eating up a lot of files. Just more support for the incendivore diet was a huge chunk from the comestibles files. The steampunk process I was working on had a lot of files in the Etc directory that needed coding.

I also set up the groundwork for Argopolis, which is taking another chunk out of Devonshire. All of the frivolous stores are getting ported over to Argopolis. Also set up this weekend was Fort Boastt. This is going to remove the entire portion of Devonshire south of the southern gate.

Boozing Devonshire

2011-07-06T13:21:00.000-04:00

Spent the majority of this weekend's work setting up all of the miscellaneous items for Devonshire. Turns out that if I try to open up every file from Devonshire, it crashes my editor. I had to open them one directory at a time. A lot of the extensions that I had set up failed automatically, since I had not changed them over to make use of Qlippotic and Sephirotic energies, and they were still trying to use Unholy and Holy. While I was in there, I started cleaning up the loadable extensions and making them a bit more unique. A lot of the files I was working on would eventually be better suited in a separate project, especially if we had a necromancer guild. Handling undeath extensions would be so much better there. The elemental extensions would be better in an actual elemental guild, but right now we just have air, fire and water.

There are a ton of items I have to code for Devonshire. With each new area I code, I want to add in items found only in that area. In Vargan, one of the first things people noticed was the new booze. I want to do the same for Devonshire, but I also have to keep in mind that I have a ton of new shops, and none of the current areas have items like what I am wanting them to sell. I am ending up needing to code a few sample items to stock into the stores just so they have some stock, and then I also have the stores set up to automatically add newer stock in after the newer areas are created. At some point I may just rip entire sections of Devonshire's items out and move them wholesale over to a later project. At least I will have the items initially done, though. I see this as a better alternative to opening a store with no stock until a later project is released that can provide the stock for the store.

One example is the maps. Right now I am setting up maps of different areas in the Devonshire directories. Eventually, I will want to move them to either their actual project directories (and setting them to be publically available), or over to a Cartographer's affiliation directory. With each newer project coming out, I can add in a map file, which is easily generated while I am coding things up, or I can set up an interactive system by which an affiliation can create a map object and players can create the maps that get sold at this shop. For the coffee shop, there are apparently two different coffees (not including melange coffee) in the entire mud. We are also in very short supply of cakes, pies, cookies, vegetarian meals, bludgeoning weapons, unarmed style weapons, tiny items, enormous/giant/gigantic/titanic items, candles, and a ton of other items that we should have plenty of. Also, if I want to add in any clockwork, steampunk, elemental, demonic, or alchemical items, I am needing to code the actual items.

The alchemist shop should be a starting point for a huge jump-off project where players can mix different ingredients to be a specific output. Combine that in with variable strength acids to break things down (use too strong of an acid and it destroys the reagent), various reactions, and multi-step projects, and this can end up being a very fun distraction. It may even blossom into its own affiliation. The same goes for the clockwork and steampunk constructs. Take the merchant a specific set of parts, and it can build them into a techton or mechanical spider for you. Very simple, and very limited, but it is an excellent starting point.

I'm hoping to fill Devonshire with so much stuff to do and see that once it is released, it will buy me enough time to do one more maintenance sweep of my two guilds, and do a big push towards releasing the next landmass. Devonshire draws more from Akalahai, but the oriental region would be faster to release, if only because it is less maps to make. Ideally, the newer maps will result in a collective effort from other devs to fill in the huge gaps on the land mass, but I am not counting on it. We all have our own projects to work on, and there are not that many devs to begin with. I just need to push through a few big projects, then I can go back in and start adding in smaller projects that are faster to release. Even if I make a 10 x 10 x 0 village with a minimum amount of individuality, it would at least break up the expanses of empty space. Maybe if the oriental maps are released, it will inspire a player with a penchant for oriental stuff to make a dev and just go nuts making little things to add in all across the map. A shaolin style temple, a small fishing village, an oni cave, a medium sized village that makes more use of the plethora of oriental style weaponry we have, a ninja village, or whatever else they can think of.

Forges

2011-06-30T13:16:00.000-04:00

Forges are something I have been toying with for a long while now. The ideas first started when I was doing work on OIA, and have returned now that I am dealing with some smiths in Devonshire. The OIA concept I had was that they could manifest spells that conjured certain types of fire need to work certain materials. Chaosfire for a chaos forge, hellfire, dragonfire, bellows for normal temperatures, highfire for ceramic stuff, golden fires for ordery stuff, etc. Now that I am tinkering around with smiths, I am thinking of making the forge object, and then setting certain requirements to reach certain temperatures and maintain them at that temperature. this feeds in slightly better with the OIA concepts, in that they can act as ignitors for the special flames, and with a simple energy expenditure, ensure that the flames stay at a certain temperature. The flames needed to work iron or steel shouldn't be too bad of a drain for a typical OIA, but would require a certain degree of attention from the smith were magick not used. Chaosfire, holy fire, dragon fire, demon fire, hellfire, etc -- those would require special materials or an OIA spell to ignite, and the drain would be much higher. Some may even be so high that a typical OIA would not be able to sustain the fire long enough for a forging procedure.

When it comes to the actual procedure of forging, it basically becomes a series of checks against numerics. Check what temperature the forge is at when step 1 is complete. If it is within range, proceed to step 2. If it's not within range, depending on how far off it is, either degrade the final product, or terminate process. I can also add in skill checks after each step which can perform the same functions, or completely alter the outcome of the process. You started with some iron and wanted to make a set of bracers. First two skill check were successful, but the third had a higher portion of armour lore, which you failed. You ended up making a pair of horse shoes. No skill xp for armour lore on the failed check. This way, you won't have player sstanding around cranking out thousands of horse shoes in order to become the best armour smith in the world, without ever successfully making any armour other than horseshoes. I might even figure out a way to can the amount of skill xp gained from successfully crafting certain types of armour. Crafting easy stuff over and over again really doesn't make you more capable with the more extreme types of crafting. You get really good at the easy stuff, but you never really grow. Crafting more and more complex equipment can call forth different stages of the forging process, which have their own checks and skill xp rewards (and rewards thresholds). So, if you attempt the hard armour to craft, get halfway through and fail, you potentially gain more skill xp than if you had stayed with the safe and easy things to craft.

Combine the skill checks, temperature checks, and progress checks with endurance drains, energy drains, and tool checks, and we are looking at a very lengthy stack of code for a short onscreen appearance. Another factor I'd like to add in feeds onto the number of checks performed. Horse shoes are fairly simple to forge, and don't have a lot of steps to it. With each step of the process, a successful check adds 1 to the final result tally, and a failed check subtracts 1. The end number determines the overall success of the forging process and the craftsmanship of the item created. A horse shoe with 3 steps to the forging process would max out at 3, meaning no one, no matter how awesome you are at forging, is going to create unearthly or preternatural quality horse shoes. The end results are about the same between a barely competent smith and a phenomenal smith when it comes to horseshoes, but the barely competent smith can rarely go beyond just that. The phenomenal smith will be able to do it faster and spend less energy on it, and then move on to forging something worthwhile. If he must do something extraordinary with the horseshoes, he can make an artifact level item, which requires many more steps and more progression checks.

Just random contemplation while more and more goodness goes into Devonshire to replace the stagnant crap that it currently has evolved into.

Player suggestion

2011-06-29T17:46:00.000-04:00

I copied this over from the guild chat. And people think my spells are overly destructive to the caster....

[23:20] LYS!

[23:21] I have a spell proposal... would you listen? @_@

[23:21] yet one more thing I need to code...

[23:21] automated spell proposal system

[23:22] I was testing colors for an adventuring company is all... @_@ lol

[23:23] I began thinking about brimstone strike and how it's kinda like a meteor spell,

and that got me thinking about an actual meteor spell, and that kinda turned into this:

[23:27] The core of the spell idea revolves around the Fire Plane and how we have spells

that open to planes to unleash their various powers... But what if there was a spell that sought to truly unleash the

fire plane? What would happen? What would the effect be, how would you balance it, and how would you gain access to

something that was so potentially devastating? I thought that there were two other associations that knew a thing or

two about the Fire Plane, those being Agnihotri and Stalkers... The spell I came up with was this:

[23:27] True power cannot be controlled, it can only be unleashed, and at enourmous risk

to the person that is arrogant enough to do so.

[23:31] So, limiters to the spell would be Magickal pacts with Mirandys and Ragi (because

they fear for the safety of towns) that render the bearer of the spell incapable of casting it anywhere that uses

streetwise as an area designator. The pact also opens access to the spell itself, the secrets of it being taught by

those individuals... There is also a boon for being in both associations... but more on that in a minute

[23:34] The spell itself would function like a containment sphere spell. But the power of

the spell scales according to the number of fire gems that are dropped in the room. If none are dropped, the spell

fizzles entirely. A minimum of three must be present to use the first level, 6 for the second, 9 for the third. The

third level also has the requirement of being in both associations.

[23:35] When the main spell is cast on the sphere, your inner flame is extinguished, and

the enormous energy channeled at once stuns the caster.

[23:37] The problem there being that if the caster is caught in the spell, they will be

subject to the effects, which will most likely overcome their fire affinity and result in their death. Damage to worn

items also occurs if they're caught in it.

[23:41] The effect is like an elemental storm of sorts where the prime plane is ripped

asunder, flamra crystals striking, and uncontrolled fire entities 'leaking' out and attacking everything in the room.

At the third level a great fire elemental pops in and ravages everything, slowly dying once it appears because it

cannot survive outside of the fire plane.

Digging into Devonshire

2011-06-29T13:41:00.000-04:00

Spent the majority of the weekend digging into the core of the Devonshire rewrite. At one point, I had removed a lot of the shops just to cut down on what I needed to code. Turned out, some of those shops were more complete than the ones I had left. Anyway, pulled most of the shops I had removed back into Devonshire and placed them into the map, and set up the exits for all of the current shops. Then I set up a map in Excel to get a better visual of what shop is next to which. In order to have the exits set up, I went to each and every shop that was loadable and saw where that exit went to. Some of them went into other shops, but by using a panoramicon (actually, it was Navigator's Eye, but same effect), I was easily able to figure out what the correct exit should be. While I was in the shop, I made a list of all of the things that were still left to do. Ended up with a 30 page document of stuff, but at least I have a set direction to continue coding in.

Looking over the map, I still have a lot of real estate not accounted for, so I may have to come up with a few more shops. I think one of the reasons I took so many shops out before was the raw number of items I would need to code. If I code smarter, and can condense a lot of the extraneous files that are mostly copy/pasta into a single extension, and set the merchants to be able to add in the variables. For example, instead of coding in 35 different elemental weapons for fire, another 35 for earth, 32 for ice/cold, and 16 for water, I can make one base class object and an extension/daemon. Within those two files, I set all of the basic operations that all of these objects will have in common, and then establish a set of variables. In this case, the variables would be weapon type, material, alternate damage type, and damage type from telesmatic special. Then, for the merchant that sells said items, have them set those variables from their own list within their individual code. That way, the operator of the Pyroturgist Services Shop can specialize in daggers, staves, swords, and short blades (variable list 1), made from a small range of materials (variable list 2, which may just be bronze, copper, steel, and flamra, but speciifically avoid wood and other flammable materials), sets variable 3 to heat or fire, and sets variable 4 to fire, heat, light, or smoke. The Telluriphrast can have variable 1 set to hammers, axes, bludgeons, and maces, variable 2 set to select only materials above a certain strength, set variable 3 to earth, and set variable 4 to earth. Repeat these example to customize the water mage and cryoturge, and the overall process reduces the 150+ copy/pasta files down to less than 10. It also sets up future stores for an easy transition, since I would then only have to create the merchant and store, then he will set his own stock.

This process means a lot more prep work going into the initial stores, especially setting up specific stock rooms to load stock from, and setting up the processes to fill said stock rooms. I'll probably end up with a ton of extension, definitions, modules, and daemons, but I'd rather have those making a ton more objects each and be reusable than one specific file per object. Maintenance is so much easier when I can change one file and it affect all future version of what I am working on, rather than having to pull up 90+ files and change all of them the same way.

More Undine modifications

2011-06-23T18:26:00.000-04:00

A couple of spells are getting overhauled. Some are just getting renamed, others are getting messaging changes, and some are just getting mechanics spruced up. I want to charge through these minor changes quickly so I can move on to a weekend dedicated to a different project. Could be Arnedio Shrine, Devonshire, Sounion, or the overdue overhaul of Avalon's map. I could throw some work at the Malefici, Expugno Magi Potens, Drakkarim, or Loremasters, but I'd rather put out an area or two before doing more guild related stuff. The multiple abilities to see maps is helping significantly with the acceptance of the larger maps, since it allows you to visualize the surroundings much better, rather than an endless line of overland text that gets reduced to short description if you take more than one step at a time.

Anyway, I dragged Polar Eruption out of extinction and re-manufactured it into Polar Bear Spirit. Whale's Song got changed over to Siren's Song. Arctic Currents got moved to Beluga Spirit. Arctic Tradewinds will eventually become Arctic Tern Spirit, Cold Sphere will become modified into Plover Spirit, and one of the Shark spells is going to be redone. Other upcoming spells include an endurance regen and some more minor buffs.

Also added in these spells
Lamprey Spirit - Absorbs nutrient from target
Turtle Spirit - Identification
Blowfish Toxin - sprays area with poisonous spines
Clownfish Spirit - Poison resistance
Penguin Spirit - cod resistance
Polar Bear Spirit - area cold attack

All-in-all, Undines now have 61 spells available to them. With all of the recent changes, I am starting to see a lot more activity in the spell log. They are still nowhere near FoTM or top ten guild choice, but it is at least some favourable feedback.

Spell updates, sweep 2

2011-06-20T18:52:00.000-04:00

Did a lot of changes to spells over the weekend, both in OIA and Undines. OIA got the first treatment. Whee the directed attack spells used to have a scaled conversion for their attack power, now they just have a set attack power. This would seem like it would neuter the higher level, more proficient casters while superbly benefiting the lowbies, but there is already a mechanic in place that works behind the scenes called accuracy. Higher level casters can hit more accurately more often, thus doing more consistent damage. Lowbie gained the benefit of when their directed spells hit, they hit much harder than before. Area Attacks all got set to a Moderate strength level. This is lower than most directed attack spells, but the math works out better. You can either hit one target hard, or split the damage up and hit a lot of targets all at once. Added into that mix is the DoT that gets added on. I finally found a balance to where area attacks do not completely overshadow directed attacks in every single situation. This was a complaint I had heard about both OIA and Ringwielders -- once you get an area attack, the single target spells are completely obsolete. Also as a test, I set up soulfire to have a bit more reliance upon sephirotic affinity. Apparently one of the mages has a ring or something and has nearly maxed out the rating, and seems to be completely owning with that one spell.

Flamra bolt got modified so that it now scales the number of bolts produced based upon the caster's proficiency in the spell. Flame Shield finally got the targeting fixed,so it no longer recasts on the caster no matter if they have one or not, and no longer orphans copies of itself into never-never land to lag down the mud. Immolate got changed significantly. The contact damage is gone for now, as is the drain upon energies. It also scales much differently. It doesn't buff as much, but it also isn't as detrimental as previous versions. Fire wine now only targets comestibles, which conveniently include corpses. I tested this with a carnivore, so I don't know how well it works on other diets, but in theory it should still work. I added in a wider range of colours to the base guild selection, and modified the dancing flames to have a wider variety of possible affinities.

With the Undines, I opened up every single spell they had and started making adjustments. One of the first things I ended up doing was how the animism spells were handled. I ditched Invocation from the guild completely, replacing its use with Summoning. Where Summoning once was as a knowledge requirement, I replaced that with Spirit Lore. I then went through all of the spells to make sure that the animistic spells were using Spirit Lore at some point. I also redid a lot of the summon commands. From OIA, I like how you can cast the spell mostly by knowing the spell name, and wanted a similar tactic for Undines. so, if you are summoning an animal spirit, it mostly uses 'concentrate on summoning the Spirit', with minor modifications for targeting. These changes will probably break a lot of the current Undines, but it should be recoverable rather easily. Once the skill points in Invocation decay away enough, swap those over to summoning, or split them with Evocation, and then adjust some specs for Spirit Lore. For the most part, Spirit Lore is one of 3 or 4 skills that add together for a total score, so not having it for a bit won't be hugely detrimental. Even if it is not specced, it shouldn't be a hinder skill if you bothered to have specs in the fieldcraft skills, legend lore, or animal lore. Even so, I added in another Undine trainer that teaches a small amount of Spirit Lore, along with a handful of other minor skills. I still have to tweak him some more, but I'll prolly make a changelog once I am done with him.

I also have about a dozen spells I want to either add, update, or completely revamp. They shouldn't be too difficult to get in, but as I am trying to add them, I start seeing rampant minor fixes I want to do with the guild and then end up going through everything once again.

More spell work

2011-06-13T13:09:00.000-04:00

OIA and Undines both got some work this weekend. Undines now have Alligator Spirit, Salamander Spirit, and Mooli Muli Bird. Mooli Muli is a large wading bird found in tidal pools and beach wash zones; the effect it grants is the same as Tidal Currents, which it has replaced. Alligator Spirit conjures a hide suit for the caster. It's nothing spectacular, but it does make combat a little bit easier until better armour comes along. Salamander Spirit grants the caster fire and heat resistance, while strengthening the bond the caster has with Elemental Water.

OIA lost Protection from Fire, but in its place they now have Protection from Elements. This newer spell grants expanded resistance to the esoteric energies that OIA use. This means specifically protection from fire, heat, light, and smoke, to a degree determined by the caster's proficiency in the spell. Apparently, several players interpreted 'resistance to the esoteric energies that OIA use' to mean complete immunity to any spell backlash from all of the OIA spells, and were very surprised when they lost limbs due to not having enough protection from sorcerous flame.

The latter part of the weekend was spent on my own version of OM, which will probably never make it into production. I have 21 of the 23 spells translated and mostly functional. I removed the blood component, set up the two attack spells to use energies, and started adjusting the spells to be a little more coherent. Then the heated debates started over the direction OM should go. One group disliked juggling the blood components, but offered no actual alternative aside form not wanting it to be a pool to manage like energies. Another vocal group disliked the idea of OM having pools of Entropic and Unholy energies, citing that if there are energies at play from the players, then the entire concept of the guild has been missed. Apparently they would rather have Asmodai at the player's beck and call at all times, so the players just have to designate the target, and then the dark god does all of the work. They had explanations, but none of them really made any sense to me, much like any interpretation of anything based around religion. All that drama aside, I started setting up daemons to handle different aspects of the guild, and definitions for the various spell types. I don't want to burden down the guild with a ton of skills, so separating out the spells into types, and each type working ona certain build seems like a viable option while still allowing internal guild flexibility. If you want to use more blood magick, all blood spells are set up in a certain manner and use the same skills. Daemonic spells work slightly differently, but they are all using the same skills, just in different amounts. I also started a base for some rituals, but all I have is the concepts for the end result of the rituals. An object loaded onto the player after a ritual that allows them to cast a certain number of spells, duration determined by the success of the ritual. Complete a ritual involving thondur blood, and for a certain time period you are able to cast spells that require thond blood, such as Fabricare.

This method still retains some value for blood, but instead of a pool of blood in a pouch, it is a investiture within the caster itself. Perform your dark rituals in the privacy of your hidden sanctum, then go forth into the world charged with power. It can also be built up to include other casters, other reagents, or even a live sacrifice.

Still, I need to separate out rituals, curses, regular spells, blood magick, thanaturgy, and demonic spells just to keep everything straight. Each aspect can be expanded out and offer a ton of possibilities to the guild. Demonic spells can be set up so that the demons in question require certain tasks or payments from the caster for their services, and these can be something like the traveller challenges (services rendered, then the challenge is placed upon the caster, and can be stacked. the caster can either pay off the challenge 'debt' or keep accumulating in hopes that they don't completely screw over the character), or a specific sacrifice, or an attribute/skill reduction. Thanaturgy spells can be set up similarly, making deals with the spirits of the dead in exchange for power, and brings with it the option for power over the undead, which would be awesome. Blood magick can be set up so that specific blood types have a specific effect, spells require a certain amount of blood, blood rites affect blood spells, or actual control over blood to the point of being able to forge hemosaur.

There are enough curses possible that an OM could have a long career using just those. The current setup is that the spells either load a curse object, a buff object, or perform a directed attack. All of the debuffs are categorized as curses, and these are usually where OM spend the most of their energies. Add just a few more in for more flavour, and the guild can be successful without even delving into the other aspects. This would be the ultimate goal for any of the aspects, but most of the current players just want to have as many of the abilities as possible at as low a pc level as possible without any kind of specialization, leaving them spread thin on their specs. I see this a lot in OIA, where people thing that in order to maximize the guild, you need to know every spell..

Then there is the possibilities of regular magick spells. This is how I have Vastare and Enervare set up. Regular black magick, making use of typical magickal skills and cacoturgy. This would be the realm where he caster could start altering the light levels to enshroud themselves in darkness, defensive spells, flight/musca, do some simple buffs, have an expanded arsenal of attack spells.

How all of this will end up evolving is unknown, but should be interesting to see. OIA have evolved quite a way from their RM roots, so maybe OM and Undines will do the same.

Water work

2011-06-07T13:06:00.000-04:00

With the removal of heat and cold energies from the Undines, the total number of spells took a major hit.. Any spell related to cold, steam, ice, heat, salt, mist, or any other amalgam got removed, dropping the total number of spells to under 50, and removing most of the ranged attack power of the guild. The loss of Cold Sphere seems to have been a huge crushing blow. I also made a few changes to the spec access at the request of the only steady player in the guild at the time. Spec may also be getting changed yet again now that the newer spells are coming out.

So far, I managed to drag the number of spells up to 51. The two most recent are previous spells with vastly improved mechanics. Barrier Reef replaced Bubble Barrier, and has been set up to extend duration rather than stack. The defenses are also greatly reduced, being limited to just the mundane physical damage types and magick, capping at around 25% blockage. It's not anything huge, but it does help out quite a bit for newbies in the guild. Lungfish Spirit replaced the old Water Breathing. Water Breathing required the caster and nearby teammates to be in an environment that required altered breathing,and would lapse as soon as anyone could breathe normally again. Since the Undine itself is capable of breathing air or water, checks for their respiration automatically fail, so I cut the caster out of the equation completely. The current version of the spell checks the caster's environment for anyone befriended, then checks their respiration. If they have lungs, it gives them aqualungs, gills become aerogills, and spiracles become polyspiracles. Anyone not befriended is not affected, and if a friendly has respiration like Membrane, Internal, or None, they are unaffected. Faeries and Nylocs are no longer forced to breathe due to this spell.

The major boon of these spells is the mechanics, though, which I can begin adapting to the other spells. It's great that the Undines now have a small group benefit, aside from Water of Life, but more importantly they have a much more stable defensive aura and a mechanic that can target area friendlies rather than area opponents. he mechanism has been there for a while, but I was using it strictly to filter out friendlies so that opponents could be better targeted. I also have a short series of animistic invocations that I can start adding in to make use of the mechanics and help round out the flexibility of the guild. I want to push Undines into a much more flexible position without converting them into typical glass cannon squishy magi, CMed addicts, or SD junkies. At the rate I am working, I may only be able to get one new spell into working condition every other night. It is much slower than what I wanted, but it should get me through the next week.

Over the weekend, I am wanting to try to get Immolate back into working condition. I'll probably have to completely redo how the effect functions and how the spell manifests. Despite two days wasted upon it, it still has a bad argument 1 to call_other() in its maintenance cycle.

Beginning water spells

2011-05-31T13:30:00.000-04:00

On what little time I had at a computer this weekend, I went through the Undine spells and started recrafting some of them. I dropped all of the minimum ratings by 50, and started adjusting some of the spell rating calculations to make the spells more accessible to beginning characters. Luckily enough, one of the players is completely bent on making a sleestak Undine. The racial max of 50 in Charisma is kinda low for a mage guild, and the racial intelligence max is also lacking, but apparently an aquatic sleestak is what this player wants. With no training at all, I managed to get him 3 spells to start off with. Navigator's Eye, Magick Bolt, and Beaver Spirit. Not exactly the most optimum spell selection, but he had an attack and something to help move around. The buff had a minimum rating that he was just short of, but at least he had an idea of what to train.

If I get the time tonight, I'll see about adjusting a few more spells to make them accessible earlier in an attempt to set the guild up to be a bit faster on the uptake. One of the healing spells, Wash Away the Pain, should be available early. Collect Water is also an early necessity, since esoteric energies no longer work on the 'sit around and regenerate' system.

There are also some newer spells in development. Turtle Spirit can be cast to allow the caster knowledge, particularly in identifying items in their immediate surroundings and inventory. I have the spell partially functional. It identifies the stuff and tells you what it is, but you aren't familiar with it and cannot memorize it. It also has messaging issues. Another main problem found with the Undines is the lack of armour. Combined with the oddly shaped races people favour for the guild, and this can become a problem. The warrior magi that are supposed to augment their combat prowess with battle magicks soon start looking like glass cannons, without the cannon capacity. Maybe a defensive spell available at beginning level would be applicable.

I did this same process with OIA a few months back, and it really helped retention. What also helped was the change-up of the spells and how they were used. The players now know that at 50% proficiency on a Directed Attack spell, it will do something different than it did before, so they have a defined short-term goal to work towards. There were some let-downs, though. Some of the higher end spells were being cast by a transient to the guild. Level 160+ dragon who also happened to be the archmagus (so +100 to all of his spell ratings in addition to twinky stats and high levels). Lower level normal magi would strive to get those same spells, and were dismayed when they didn't have the same amount of raw destruction. Guild stats and mechanics aside, it's a comparison of a very experienced dragon to a slightly experienced human. The dragon ~should~ be a lot more destructive. Also, a dragon is an exception to most of the rules, as are anyone over level 300. It is a completely different level of power compared to normal players. The destructive capacity is still available, just not quite how it was advertised. An example from last night was when one of the normal players stated via OOC that he had used Spark of Intensity to kill a hyperiad with fire. What wasn't mentioned was that it had been an ongoing battle, he had cast other spells in addition, and the four casting of that spell depleted him of most of his esoteric energies. The primal energy was effective, but it was not quite as easy as casting a single spell and utterly destroying the target in one shot.

Another member of that guild spent the next two hours getting the requirements for that same spell, and then died soon after. A single shot of it did indeed do damage, but not enough. And that caster didn't have enough esoteric energies for all five shots that it would take to take down the mob he was fighting. Is the primal fire spell overpowered? Likely not. The main uses of it would be towards so-called boss mobs, who have an insane amount of HP to begin with. You'd have to stack up a lot of fire gems to have enough fire energy available to support enough castings of the spell to take down the like of Cthulhu. An extensive amount of prep work, go in with a tough meat shield, and use team work to take him down with the fire mage doing a lot of DPS. That kinda sounds like how things are supposed to work for a mage. Then you also have to weigh the advantages of the other spells. Spark of Intensity may be primal, but it doesn't have a caust to it, whereas most of the other spells do. Stack up 4-5 different caust effects, and it can make a battle go by much faster.

The other spells that have the potential to be overpowered are the containment field spells. The initial versions were set up in a geometric fashion, with a foreach leading into a foreach. The more targets available, the more times it dispensed damage. 4 targets would unleash 16 attacks on each target. 11 targets would unleash 121 attacks on each of them. Use it in a room with more than 20 targets, and it is no wonder player think the spell us uberly powerful. I fixed the math sequence in the initial test spell, so that 4 targets each get one special attack. That may sound like it is no different than a typical area attack, but containment spells do not require the caster to be around when the spell goes off. Summon the containment sphere, load the spell into it, and walk away.

The downside of the containment sphere spells is when a caster gets just the containment sphere spell and nothing else. I have watched players try to load every single spell they could possibly cast into a sphere, including trying to stack healing spells. These aren't mimetic motes or containment spheres from the old Red Magi. And of course said players volunteered me for even more work because the help file 'obviously' made it seem like you could just cast any spell and a few seconds later it would go off on its own. Addressing help files to be as uninterpretable as possible is not high on my priority list. Fixing damage mechanics and making the Undines more playable at lower levels is much higher on my priority list.

Landmasses and curses

2011-05-24T13:03:00.000-04:00

Most of my time online recently has been spent adding custom rooms to the main maps. At the borders between two maps, there is a little bit of a lack of communication. When I originally set up the maps, I made sure to keep the elevations the same straight across the border. Players, on the other hand, insist upon travelling in diagonals, so when they go southeast across a border, they have a chance of ending up either inside the mountainside or in mid air. Terrain following will normally adjust for elevation on the declines, but on inclines, it will still adjust down. One layer under isn't all that bad, since you can still use an exit like southeastup and end up at ground level. Usually, a player in speedwalk mode wouldn't even notice. When the terrain following lines up with an incline, players can end up 2 levels below ground level, in which case they need to backtrack a few steps, move one east, and then proceed southeast. Since it is impossible for them to be trained to use the roads provided for them, I get to go in and add custom rooms to either remove a specified exit that will lead to underground, or manually set the exit to the proper room. This is a very tedious task, since most places have multiple increases in elevation, and I have to make sure I get both sides of the border.

To alleviate the tedium, I have been poking around the Ordo Maleficus code to see how difficult it would be to get it up to semi-recent standards. So far it doesn't look like it would be too bad. All of the curses are set up on a module, which can either be left as a module and expanded, or converted to an actual daemon. The spells themselves usuallyeither load the curse onto the target, load an enchantment object onto the caster, load an object into the room, or do a special attack. All guild buffs are handled via objects, and one spell removes these objects to remove the enhancements. Those are easy enough to convert to a definition structure to handle the spell casting, and coves 90% of the guild's current abilities.

So, to satisfy my own curiosity, I set up a fake Maleficants guild. Using OIA as a template, I converted the spells.c daemon over, made a LOT of adjustments to handle the differences in the two guilds, updated the link.c, and started my own conversion. A lot of the spells went quickly. All I had to do was open up the 4-5 files that contained the information in OM, and shift it over to the spell definitions. The buffs could be handled a little differently, but they could also be shifted over to use the standardized Personal Enchantment code we have. I haven't had time to test out the spells, yet. I managed to get the test guild to load onto a test character, but still having issues with the help files, like I do with every guild that isn't in production yet. If I had stuck with just the conversion, it would be a lot closer to being done. I keep going back to the maps to fix the rogue border exits, though.

I don't know whether or not this conversion will even make it to live code. Possibilities exist, but I have a lot of other stuff to take care of without adding OM maintenance on top of all of it. If the conversion did go in, it would make it a LOT easier to do multiple smaller updates, maybe even one spell at a time. That's the beauty of the definition structure. Currently, in order to get a new spell added, you'd have to update at least 3 other files, as well as the header file itself. Using definitions to handle the spells, you just add the new spell definition, and any object that is involved with it, and the system dynamically updates everything. What's even better is that the knowledge conditions and ratings can be adjusted, so that spells can be learned over time instead of knowing every guild ability from the start and just lacking blood. If I come up with a new curse for OM while doing some refinements to OIA, I can quickly code up the spell definition, code up the curse object, load it into the live code with insane reqs (like devmode required or you need the Godhead skill to know of the spell), test it out, adjust the requirements to make it publically available, and then go back into OIA.

But like I said, it's just a diversion from the tedious work of tracking down rogue exits, so just for fun for now.

Recurring Quests

2011-05-18T13:33:00.000-04:00

Part of revamping Devonshire includes updating the quests contained within the project. Part of what draws me to the gaming aspect of games is the 'why' factor. This is missing on these quests. Devonshire Murder is not set up to be feasibly repeatable. The variables involved are the victim's name, and the same 5 variables for where, who, and what weapon. The five variables are the same every time the quest is attempted. Someone is always murdered, and it is always in one of the same five locations, with one of the same five weapons, and by one of the same five suspects. Why was the person murder to begin with? Why are these five names always used? Why does the Devonshire Guard never even attempt to track down the murderer on their own (aside from the fact that they are extremely stupid and undermanned)? All of this I want to change, and I have several options brewing in the back of my mind about how to go about this.

The Pzyruxal Sphere Quest is also lacking in 'why'? Why does this old man need 200 different adventurers to go get the same five gems from the same five locations to solve his puzzle? The Catelius puzzles are set up as puzzles and are designed to reset. The sage from the Sphere quest is amazed every time someone solves the puzzle he could not. I can understand needing someone else to collect the gems, but seriously, how is he amazed after the third adventurer through town is able to solve this?

For the Sphere quest, I may be able to just adjust the sage and his backstory to make is workable. At the end of th quest, instead of being so amazed that it was solved, he can tell you how long it took from the time the first piece was obtained until you completed the quest, the use his magicks to teleport the gems back out the where they load so that the next applicant can stop by to test their intellect on his amazing puzzle. Or I can have him clone up five miniature containment fields and send forth the applicant to collect certain energies from various locations. This would be a much more involved quest, since it would potentially involve sub-quests for each of the gem targets. Collect fire energy from the dragon, water energy from the merman king, holy energy from the temple, some energy from the fort, and some other energy from the lich. or something along those lines. Each of the gem targets could also have several options for how to collect said energies. They can be claim from the victims lifeless corpse, or via a non-bloody path for the pacifists by giving the gem targets something in exchange for their energies. For instance, answering a series of water or nautically themed riddles for the merman king, giving a certain artifact to the dragon for her hoard, or fixing the broken statue at the temple. The current setup of the quest has nonviolent options on only one of the gems. There is a nonviolent workaround for the merman gem, but that is just cheesy abuse of the mechanics involved. The dragon, lich, and ogre all must die in order for you to get their gems, which means a pacifist cannot do this quest without someone else's help.

For the murder quest, I could switch the initial victim concept a bit. Instead of a named Devonshire citizen that was murdered, it can be an unnamed immigrant. Devonshire is a harbour town, so having a flux of immigrants and tourist is kinda expected, and if one of them shows up dead, the local authorities may ave no idea who they are, and it may just be a waste of resources trying to track down the actual killer. This would explain why the Devonshire Guard doesn't want to expend their own manpower on tracking down the murderer, and can explain why it can be repeated over and over. The victim can be found floating in the harbour with their throat slit by some bladed object. There are plenty of bladed objects in the game, and plenty of stuff that can cut like a bladed weapon. The random weapon can be changed to include just bladed weapons. This helps answer why a certain set of weapons were suspected. The five suspects could all have some tie to the habour, and could have been found near the scene of the crime in possession of an item that could have done the slashing. Each suspect could have a different reason fr being there, but they are at least linked ot the quest in some logical way. The locations really do not matter. The original reason for those locations was to force players to explore the city to find the locations. Now players have a different reason for exploring the city, so I can change the why of this option as well.

That still leaves a few holes to fill for the murder quest, such as what is going to be at the location to determine the guilt of the killer and link to his identity. One thing I know I am definitely going to do, though, is ot move the murder quest control daemon. Right now it is held inside the captain of the guard npc object. No idea why.

World expansions

2011-05-11T15:31:00.002-04:00

With the new logic that Chaos hammered into the system, lag has let up immensely, and I was given the green light to continue expanding the overland maps. I have many different options with where I want to start the expansions. Wintercrest, North Sea, Atalantic Ocean, Cathy/Nihon, Esartur, Akalahai, and the Underdark (for lack of a better term).

Wintercrest is the arctic region north of Almeria, and will include the current Northlands. I have at least two more dragons ready to go for such a region, as well as expansions for two warring factions, some yeti developments, and the possible roots for some actual ice magi.

The North Sea is the region that connects Gardagh to the current Northlands. This would be possibly the least intrusive of the maps to add, yet still hold a lot of opportunity in the form of sunken ships, ice bergs, new arctic creatures, vikings on longboats, and some development on connecting the maps to the weather daemon.

The Atalantic Ocean would be the other six regional blocks that would complete out the actual ocean. I know Ringwielders are wanting this so they can have a shortcut to ST, and Undines want it so they can have more places to dominate. The downside is that unless you have Deep Dive, most of the ocean is kinda boring and looks the same.

Cathay and Nihon are the China and Japan equivalents for LS. It also draws in some of Mongolia, Tibet, Thailand, Malaysia, and Korea. While only 2 regional maps, the content within these maps has the potential to be quite meaty. We have a ton of oriental style weapons that we aren't currently using, in excess of 70 oriental creatures that have no home, and there is a lot of resource material available for such regions. Ninja, Shukenja, Samurai, Shaolin style monks, elemental monks, Wu-jen, private girl's academy haunted by a tentacled horror, oriental demons, ronin, bushido, martial arts forms, an honour system.... the list of stuff that can go into here is very drool-worthy. Some players always want to point out that we already have Xi Feng Ming (BS area that is out of place and not exactly a top-notch area), Hanoma (just how many things can we try to cram into one small island), and Yui's House (broken old piece of crap) as our examples of Oriental flair. The only reason Ebiria is housing those areas is because they didn't fit anywhere else and I didn't want to obliterate that content when I made the main maps.

Even more drool worthy is Akalahai. It is the massive desert continent south of Almeria, and it can house content from Dark Sun, Al-Qadim, Egypt, Arabian Nights, the central portion of Australia, the American Southwest, Dune, Nubian Desert, Sinai, Israel, the Sahara, Rajanistan, the Dead Sea, central Iran, Tatooine, Aiel Waste, Anauroch, and so many more. It can give rise to psionicists, desert warriors, dervishes, summoners, elementalists, psychic warriors, templars, houri, bene gesserit, defilers, preservers, the origins of the Phaethon, and so many more goodies, making this my favoured option.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is Esartur, the dark continent. While there is a need for more evil things, my creativity is not tending that way right now. I might be able to pull off the Drakarrim (dark knights), but other than that I am running pretty dry of ideas for evil stuff, particularly evil regions.

Now, the LS versions of the Underdark can be quite interesting. A place of limited space and limited resources, where everything has to fight to merely survive. Unique animals, unique races, and more drow stuff that can steer them away from a gamer's S&M fantasies. It'd be nice to be able to hero a character without grinding and without every seeing the sun. It'll also be nice to delve further in various drow cultures, nylocs, svirfneblin, duergar, and dwarves.

Small Undine changes

2011-05-09T18:50:00.000-04:00

Since I had removed the Heat and Cold amalgamal energies from the Undines, I had to go through and remove the skills that were associated with them. There was simply no need to have 12 access to Thermaturgy when absolutely nothing was using Heat Amalgamal energy. I removed the -turgy skills (except for Thaumaturgy) from the control file, then had to do a rush job of scouring through the spell files to remove the skills from the spell rating list. The instant removal of these additional skills has dropped several spell ratings down, some by quite a bit considering they had large investments from the removed skills. Luckily, I covered this during a slow period and no one logged in to the guild before I was done with the changes.

After I had some time to look over the effects on the ratings, the ones that were hit the hardest are the ones that I am wanting to remove anyway. The ice spells and steam spells are now separate energies, and I am wanting to pull the Undines back around to their original concept. Predominantly warriors with a few minor water spells, and a few invocations of spiritual entities associated with water. I am working on a technique to get these other amalgams worked into existing spells, but thematically, there's nothing in the spells I want to remove that cannot be replicated via spiritual invocation.

I am working on setting up the groundwork to simulate the effects of the ice and steam spells in a vastly different way. If I manage to get this concept to work, it will open a whole new door for how I can have spells interact.

Breathing underwater

2011-05-06T12:31:00.002-04:00

Completely redid the manner in which the Undines get their underwater breathing. I set it up in the guild link itself, so that it is more of a natural development from the guild than an on-demand spell effect. The first version just threw aerogills on you no matter what. I modified the entire process, and the amount of code going into it is much longer than before, but it also takes into account the different forms of respiration. Lungs become aqualungs (normal humanoid breathing can now be done underwater), gills become aerogills (allowing water breathers to breathe air), and spiracles become polyspiracles(stupid insectoid breathers). If you are unbreathing (ex: faerie or undead), have internal respiration, breathe through a membrane (slaan), or are somehow unaffected by needing to breathe while underwater or out of water, no changes take place to you. Much more sane result. Just to make sure, I started warping my test character. The breathing mod stays in place until reincarnation, relinking, or the link resets for whatever reason, at which point it updates properly. Warp from kobold to faerie, and respiration changed from aqualungs to none. When he warped over to slaan, respiration went to membrane. Rapidly changing races at Kurd causes a little havoc with the respiration, but reincarnating fixed any issues built up by changing races so quickly. Test character's stats got totally screwed in the process, but whatever. Now to make the spell that buffs others for a similar effect, and I should be good on that front.

I also modified the deep dive pressure resist mechanism. Newer Undines aren't quite strong enough to deep dive. Even after doing some serious training, deep dive was not possible. Crank up the guild ranking, and deep dive was no issue. Little fish stay at the top of the water, leaving the murky depths for the big fish. Thematically, it makes more sense than everyone who joins the guild being able to scour the deepest trenches. Wax boys should leave the real waves to the kahunas.

While I was setting tat up, Gilden Radiance started acting up. Being that I was in the middle of working on the Undines link (syntax error on one of the lines when I tried to reload the first few times), I couldn't just drop what I was doing to fix one bad fire spell. If an Undine logged in to a link error, instant panick button attack. Gilden Radiance seems to be the one Containment Field spell that didn't get updated, and it was an unnecessary spell, so I ditched it. I kinda want to steer away from the order/chaos/holy/unholy branches all having the same spell setups anyway.

I've got to remap most of Devonshire. If I keep the current map and just move the shops, most shops will have at least one back room to use for whatever. The original intent was to have those back rooms for where the in-shop crafting would take place. The baker would have the oven and mixing station back there, so players could go in with some ingredients and try to make a cake. Ended up being that if you went in with all of the ingredients, you were a success, and if you lacked anything, you failed. And there was only ever one recipe to make. Not exactly the system I wanted. Until I figure out a better method for what I want, I may just have empty back rooms, or inaccessible back rooms that don't count towards exploration.

Devonshire hysteria and Undine initial changes

2011-05-05T12:15:00.003-04:00

Some of the stuff I had lined up for Devonshire was very ambitious, to put things lightly. Some of the NPC's I set aside were turning into templates for new guilds, and would have been much better executed after the guild was coded. Case in point: Kenmanus the Lay Healer. The concept behind the lay healer was that they would transfer wound unto themselves, and then their natural healing processes would mend the damage. I didn't have a transfer mechanism so much as I was removing a disease from the target and making a new copy of that disease on the lay healer. Mechanically, instead of transferring actual wounds, the healing 'spell' had a HP cost to casting it. Workable as a guild concept, especially with some of the strange diseases, limb amputations, altered anatomies, warpings, curses, etc. Limited combat specs would land the guild solidly in a support role, but their healing abilities would be on par with a cleric, and could keep an entire group healthy. Xp could even be granted on a successful transfer of damage. I might even be able to tweak around the transfer mechanism to allow a group member to automatically transfer damage to the healer. A workable concept -- a group of philanthropic bleeders, but workable. My implementation was far below all of that. If someone came in with more HP than the healer had, limbs would just fall off, or he would die outright and not even give a full heal. On anyone except a newbie, the mechanics were a complete fail.

I had many more examples very similar to this, including some sort of psychic archer, elemental enchanters to bind all sorts of additional damage onto weapons and gear, alchemists, clockwork mechanics, steampunk engineers, a ton of different craft mechanisms, enchanted candles, bards, stuff for player managed keeps, and even a store with sports equipment, which would entail a non-combat oriented competition mechanism. All well beyond my abilities at this point.

Even after the cullings, things are set up so that clerics could get a huge update, spreading out into either separate guilds, or having enough differences between the aspects of the guild that having separate temples would be warranted.

I finally started digging into the Undines last night. Decided to ditch the amalamal energies and focus just on elemental water energy. After I removed all uses of amalgamal energies from the spells (cranking up the amount of water/spirit needed at the same time), I removed the energies from the guild energy list. This in turn called for the removal of Extract Cold and Convert Heat. Murky Depths and Water Breathing also went away. I modified the guild link itself to cover these aspects. I may go back in and redo the mechanics a little bit, since the respiration mod doesn't check for current respiration. If you go in as an unbreathing race, you end up getting forced to breathe via aerogill. By the time I got this much working, it was already late, and I am already zombieing through work as it is. I also shifted the pressure resistance to the guild link, making it an subconscious adaptation rather than a willful adjustment to your surroundings. I scaled this based upon guild standing, which I had to add in. I may tweak this some more, since right now it is relatively easy to gain enough guild ranking to be able to deep dive. I want to steer clear of every single Undine being able to deep dive at a very low level. That just invites a utility character designed to scavenge stuff off of the sea floor.

I also found out that it doesn't really take that much resistance to be able to deep dive, which is another factor I will have to build into the math behind how the resistance is granted.

With each set of changes going into Undines, they are turning more into sturdy fighters than actual magi. With the way skills modify each other based upon environment, and the amount of Swimming and Underwater Fieldcraft the Undines get, they are amazing under water. They are still nice outside of water, but they have some truly impressive numbers under the waves.

I'll have to code in more content for the bottom of the ocean. All in due time, though. Still plenty of changes left to do to the actual guild, and still plenty of cleaning through the other projects I have.

More cullings

2011-05-04T15:21:00.003-04:00

Cleaned out some more of Devonshire's files. The weapons directory went from 386 to 54, and I can probably reduce that down with some *_Base.c files. A similar process went on in the /arm, /etc, and /ext directories. What's left should be rather easy to finish. I went ahead and made the description for the Temple of Ares before jumping over to work some more on OIA. There are some new Conditions that I was wanting to play with, but none of them were applicable to what I was working on last night.

The stuff I have left in OIA is mostly relic stuff from either Red Magi, or stuff I hacked over from OZM or Ringwielders. One request that I had considered fielding from the players was to put some value on the flamra crystals. They are used in so many spells, and cost all of 1 gp. Adding value to them is easy, since I can just add a secondary material. I decided against this change, though, since OIA have a spell that can create these crystals. If they become valuable, OIA would instantly be among the richest of all of the inhabitants of the faucet economy. This would be even worse if I added something like Orichalcum to the mixture, making flamra crystals valued in excess of 1 million gold.

Throughout most of the stuff I am fixing, I can tell that either it was a copy of old, and probably bad, code, or I was trying to figure out how to get something done. This is also reflected over in Undines, who are due for an almost complete revamp. So much of their code looks very much like Aligned code, especially the first dozen spells I tried to make. At this point, I have fudged around with enough code to have some small inkling of what I am doing without direct copying/replace variables. I've also had time to rethink how I want to execute a few things. there is also the issues that have arisen from the changes to the cosmology -- the same issues that hit OIA. Heat and Cold energies are far removed from Water, so all of that may need to be redone. Of course, we now have Steam and Ice as amalgams, and I was using heat and cold to convert water into steam and ice. The process of converting the energies over is really simple, since that is controlled by one file, and I just need to change the names of a handful of spells and reconfigure them for the proper amalgamal output. What energies to convert to is the issue, since adding or not adding one could change the feel of the guild and what options are available for spells. Of the amalgams adjacent to water, the one I immediately know I don't want is Thunder.

Devonshire culling

2011-05-01T15:36:00.002-04:00

Culled a lot of the stores from Devonshire. Took it from 186 shops to 56 shops. Some of the culled stores were nearly complete, but most were just strings of ideas of what would be sold there, or what services would be offered. In each case, they fit the theme of a different city better. Even some of the current locations within Devonshire would fit better elsewhere. OIA would fit better in a city dominated by fire energies, or near a volcano, or somewhere other than a port city. Sentinels would fit better in a place much more geared towards steampunk (pun intended). Once the new cities are built, I may well move these two guilds, but for now I have to find a place within the city for them to reside.

There are a few associations that may show up in Devonshire in the distant future. Of the stores that are remaining, most are about 80% done and set into the map. I'll probably tend to those sporadically throughout the week. I also need to weed out the etc/, wpn/, and arm/ files to take out the items that would have been sold in the stores I removed.

I shifted all of the removed stores to a separate file, so when I start on the next big city, I'll already have some done. Instead of one EPIC city that will take at least another 2 years to develop, I can make eight to nine much smaller cities that can have unified themes to them.

I also need to go back through the non-attack OIA spells and the Undine spells. Those need a significant cleaning. It wasn't until late Sunday night that Sonar Echo finally got a duration set on it. Definitely something I'll have to look into for the other buffs.

110 Fire Spells

2011-04-25T22:14:00.002-04:00

Managed to cut down the number of OIA spells to 110. This happened when I combined several very similar spells into one progressive spell. Torrid Tempest, Searing Heat, and Heat Vent all combined into Sirocco. The combo was suggested by one player, and the name by another. The name derives from a desert wind, and all of the spells had something to do with hot wind, desiccation, or desert heat. The end result is a directed heat spell that is affected by affinities. At lower levels, it is just the affine heat. At higher levels, it starts dehydrating the opponent.

Thermal Pulse replaced Aurast Pulse, and became a bit more aggressive. At 50% proficiency, the initial thermal pulse ruptures on the target, and sends Heat Darts into a nearby bystander. At the upper level of proficiency, the initial pulse hits the designated target, then swarms of Heat Knives spin outward, striking two different opponents nearby.

Burning Redemption now incorporates what used to be Angel Fire, and added on an upper level of proficiency effect name "Vile creature, be purged in fire". Urfire Bolt, Urfire, and Golden Blaze all merged into a single spell named (at least for now) Urfire. It is an extremely powerful spell now, and has a targeting specification that the victim much have Chaos Favour of 1 or greater. I went to test it out on a Vargan gladiator, and momentarily felt a setback when the spell completely obliterated the gladiator. Then, I realized the random race it had loaded with was Imp, which has Chaos Favour naturally. Tested the spell on the next gladiator, a dana, and the spell didn't launch.

Blaze of the Exoma swallowed up Chaosfire Bolt and I think it was called Chaosfire Gout, or something. Whatever it was, it was named literally after the damage type and vector that it cast. Triad of Fire merged with Fan of Flames, and is now quite a nice spell.

I also managed to adjust enough of the Area Attack base file so that the current area attacks can be greatly reduced in file size. I threw in two variables, one for the damage type done and another for the message it gives when something is victimized, and the entire spell_call can be removed from the actual spell files. I still want to tweak that some more so that I can alter some of the delay messages, but that should be easy compared to what I have already put into the base file. The spells are literally dropping from 336 lines long down to 106, and the predominance of that is in the spell knowledge and spell rating stuff.

Still need to convert the rest of the area attack spell, adjust a bunch of spells that are currently called area attack but are actually multitarget (they do not damage the environment), set up the containment field spells, and continue the cleaning process.

Spell selections

2011-04-22T12:14:00.003-04:00

I started making selections of which spells to merge and which ones will be getting the axe. I pulled up all of the spells in the OIA arsenal, then took off all of the unique spells, such as the utilities, the enchantments, conjurations, buffs and healing spells. I went through the spells that were remaining and put them into a chart, listing spell name, spell type, and damage type. Sorting this list immediately pointed out where I had a lot of overlap and where I should begin merging spells. It also pointed out a few inconsistencies with the namings of the spells and descriptions of their effects. Fireball is listed as an area attack spell, but the mechanics of it are actually a multitarget spell. At least 13 spells will end up converted into aspects of another spell, and I can bring back my knives and darts versions of several damage type. I will also be renaming some of the spells, since they were originally named after the damage types they were doing, and those have a tendency to change.

The basic progression of a bolt, in most instances, will be bolt -> spikes/darts -> blades/knives -> caust version, or bolt -> bolt with multilimb targetting -> add caust. Some will just be a different attack description, but so far that is just for the poison/fire attack (can't add caust to poison, since poison IS caust) and for Phoenix Claws.

Even some of the multitarget attack are going to get a staged progression. Triad of Fire is already an example of this, shifting to Fan of Flames at 50%, and then to a modified version of Raging Fire.

Just a few more things to clean up in OIA, then I can bounce back over to Vargan to add more interaction to them. Apparently, several players are very keen on the idea of NPC's giving responses to certain statements. I also need to refine some of the overland maps. Players have a tendency to throw fits when they cannot do something they think they should, and it usually only happens in 3-5 rooms per map. Looking over the list of complaints, you'd think that every map had issues with more than half of the rooms.

More cleaning

2011-04-20T12:35:00.003-04:00

Finally dug through the last few stages of setting up the spells so that all of the information is presented in the same order. Now I just have to dig through and remove all of the unnecessary bits of code, like the set_spell_can_call() from any of the Directed Spells, since that is covered in the Base file. Once that is done, I'll compare the live copies to my copies to make sure I'm not overwriting anything important, and then saving my progress thus far.

Then the ravaging begins. As I have been going through the spells, I have found at least a dozen that are very much alike, except one has a bigger area of effect, or one does a caust, or the number of targets changes. These can all be crammed into one single spell divided up by proficiency progression. That will eliminate a lot of the "use only spell x, until you get spell y, then only use spell y". y will be just a higher proficiency of x, in the same spell. This process should free up a lot of spells, so I can begin importing some of the more exotic varieties that I have been sitting on for a while. I also have the esoteric energies I can play with that were previously assumed to be just an aspect of fire, such as light, heat, and smoke. Those I will have to toy with to determine what kinds of spells will evolve from them.

A similar process is going on over in the Undines. I have batches of spells revolving around a particular animal, and those can be combined in with some conditions applied. The two biggest examples are the Whale spirit and the Mollusk spirit. I can convert the spells over to invocations, and cycle through the effects depending on the circumstances. Out of combat, Mollusk can apply its buffs or summon its minions. In combat, it can do the slime web thing or the vomit or the slime explosion or the poison spittle. My main concern with this method is that they may begin to feel like lower level ELF knockoffs, with fewer invokes and less raw power.

General cleanups

2011-04-19T13:03:00.002-04:00

Somewhere along the lines I managed to pull in everything from my revamp of Devonshire into the current model of Devonshire. This left a ton of orphaned files that were just taking up space, and getting found during searches for files set up in a certain way. While not completely detrimental, it was rather annoying and took up disk space that didn't need to be taken up. I also had copies of all of the world maps in my directory, which was a possible danger in case Chaos or someone updated the file, and I updated my copy in a different way and overwrote whatever they did. I have altered my processes to avoid this as much as possible, but it could still happen. So...

I went through all of the Devonshire files and removed any file that was not actively being used somewhere in the project. this included several very old files, like the precursors for the platemail of fiery cloud, the dancing sword's many variants, the wight, Ariel's bikini (which includes the bottom, so she can't wear it.) and the girdle of giant strength. I also cleared out all of the old files I had in my home directory, with the exception of my two guilds, which I am in the process of updating. total of 2433 files deleted. Still more cleaning to be done.

Area attack spells

2011-04-18T12:52:00.003-04:00

OIA basically have 2 different method of delivering area damage. One uses a for_each and a set of variables to determine what to hit. This method generally avoids friendly fire by selecting a specific set of targets, which can exclude befriended individuals. The second method is a much more involved process that damages everything in the room -- friend, foe, and items alike. I set up the area attack base definition last night, and converted over most of the crunchiness of the second method to that base file. I still have to go back in and tell it what all of the variables are and get those set up as specific settings within the individual spell files.

OIA cleanups

2011-04-17T23:02:00.002-04:00

Spent like 2 hours tinkering around with the flamra armour, never quite getting it to do much of anything. Chaos says"Hold on a sec", followed by "Oh". Four seconds later, BAM, the armour is fixed, adapts due to the new adapt code put in, and it shrunk half a page of my messy code down to two concise lines. Seemed to work fine on a variety of anatomy types. From there, I cleaned up code from the rest of the armours in OIA, and then switched over to the weapons. The only thing I got done there was to switch the ruby shield over to an aurast weapon (was previously loading the flamra weapon base, then adding aurast) and coloured it properly. Then I jumped over to /etc. These files were a bit more involved to adjust properly. I mainly stayed in the effects from immolate and fire web. Fire web got changed to use predominantly fire to produce the effects, and then just spirit to maintain the effects, and the amount of damage done by the flames was greatly reduced. Now, it is a really good aide in combat, not a cheesy way to kill something, whether for the eq or just to get passed them, without invoking aggro. Immolate got changed in a way that the OIA online that could cast the spell seemed to like. It no longer does the flat nonregen/nonrecup thing. Instead it does a constant low-level drain of all of the guilds esoteric energies. While this is a vast improvement in playability, it still has serious drawbacks. Most magi will be able to regen energies faster than they drain, until they get into combat. Also, spell energy costs are being adjusted upwards and refined to better reflect the exact nature of the spell.

In the actual spells, I started going through all of the spells in a very systematic manner to ensure all of them are set up the exact same. This started pointing out small discrepancies, such as spells that had set_spell_requires_argument(False), and no other mention of arguments for the spell. I also started weeding more data over to the base Directed Attack Spell to clear up some more space on the individual spell files. I also set up the Multitarget Attack Spell base, and started weeding data over to that file as well. Once I do the Area Attack Spell base, that's when a lot of lines of code will be stripped from the individual spell files. Also, some spells were listed as area, when they were actually multitarget. This also pointed out that there are several very similar spells that can be combined into one. Generally for one altered type of fire, such as urfire for the order favoured, there is the single attack bolt version, the widespread disjointed limb version, and the DoT caust version. I can scale these into one spell, and based upon your proficiency with the spell, it determines what the outcome is. Three spells condensing into one definitely has some benefits. The way I have fire bolt set up is that it is the normal fire bolt until 50% proficiency, when it becomes fire spikes. At 75% proficiency, it becomes fire spikes with DoT caust. I may be able to split it up even farther and incorporate fire spikes and fire knives into the mix. Dunno yet, though.

Overall, though, OIA are slowly starting to shape into some semblance of a current guild. A few more weeks, and there might be some visible results.

Vargan vs OIA

2011-04-05T22:38:00.002-04:00

Checked on Vargan. Only had a few things to touch up, one of which was a dual up-down exit near the bottom. I had two exits too close to one another, but after I adjusted the floor plan and set up the exits to only work one way, the exits performed as expected. I also shifted the bottom level so that there is no more exit to the outside world by walking too far north and going through solid ground to the main map.

Then started working on OIA. So many things are wrong with this guild now. I parted out the repetitious portions of Directed Attack type spells into Directed_Attack_Spells.c and I am using Fire Bolt as the test spell to make sure everything works the way it should. It still left a sizable portion of the spell intact, since all it really took out was the set_spell_type(), set_spell_can_call(), and set_spell_can_continue().

While I was poking around at some of the spells trying to figure out what I wanted done, I deleted a handful. Mostly the *knives and *darts spells went away. In exchange, I changed several spells over to being known just by being in the guild -- flame of knowledge, cauterize, burnt offerings, funeral pyre, internal warmth, and protection from fire. Even with no training, these spells should be available, though the energy requirements may be beyond and initiate until after the first training session. At that first training, another handful of useful spells becomes available. I have been watching new initiates when they join. Typically, they immediately ask the guildmaster what they teach, then head off to explore around some before they find the actual guild teachers. In that amount of time, they try to figure out what spells they have, and some get immediately discouraged when they see that they have no spells and no immediate 'powers'. At least at this point, they can burnt offering their way to some amount of skill, which should open up more spells. I'll probably have to do the same with Undines when I get to them.

Vargan mods

2011-04-05T12:39:00.002-04:00

Started making some modifications to Vargan last night, but a storm came through before I could make sure everything came out okay. Still have a few touch-ups to do with the map_area()'s, and I want to update the NPC's a little more. Then it's off to Schola Fervitus to get that straightened out, and I need to do a lot of work on OIA and Undines. The cosmology change altered a bunch of OIA spells so that now the damage done is not reflected in the name of the spell. I'll probably have to redo a majority of the spells anyway. I have some ideas that could clear up a ton of work for me. All of the Direct Attack spells have a lot of code that is exactly the same. If I can extract that into a base file, that should clear up a lot of lines in each spell. The same for just about every other attack spell I have. I have also been tinkering with some of the direct attack spells in a way that may eliminate some spell completely. With the staged progression I have in Fire Bolt, there is almost no distinction between it after a certain point and Fire Spikes. As far as I am concerned, Fire Spikes can just go away. I may also be able to combine Fire Bolt with Triad of Fire, and eliminate another spell. So much to think about and plan out.

more Gardagh updates

2011-04-04T00:35:00.001-04:00

There was a lot of stuff in need of updates in Gardagh. My first time through, I tried to update everything at once, but I ended up breaking some stuff and needing to undo all of the changes I had made. Second time through, I focused on just one aspect of change for all of the map definitions. That way, when something broke, I knew what it was instead of trying to guess from among 30+ changes.

One of the first things was to change the actual map. The topography is the same as it was, but I took out a lot of the overlays. Most of the previous overlays were for the landmark viewing of distant terrain. I moved those over to the actual map_area definitions.

Second thing was to get all of the definitions aligned properly. Some had jagged indents, others were straight, but not of an equal indent space as others. That was causing issues when I tried to swap out data from one definition to another. At this point, I can freely swap lines of code and not have to re-indent anything or adjust the number of tabs.

Then I fixed the exposure settings. Previous version had exposure set by the base file to Exposure_Exposed. I cut this out and set exposure on each map_area so that they were properly modeled. Now I don't have full weather exposure at the bottom of the ocean, I have Exposure_Cover in the wooded areas, and if I move forward with any underground areas or bottom of the sea content (like a sunken viking raiding vessel), I don't have to redo everything.

The next item of contention was how I had some of the abstract_items set up.

Identity_Nouns : ({ "thick layer of fallen needles" }),

This is just wrong. It should be

Identity_Adjunct_Adjectives : ({ "thick" }),

Identity_Adjunct_Nouns : ({ "layer" }),

Identity_Adjectives : ({ "fallen" }),

Identity_Nouns : ({ "needles" }),

Previous version would not give you the description if you tried to look at anything except "thick layer of fallen needles". Second version combines everything together, and you can look at just the Identity_Noun, or combine it in various fashions (layer of needles, fallen needles, layer of fallen needles, thick layer of needles, etc), and it is still accepted.

Walked through the area checking the descriptions, and came across some really bad examples: An "icy icy field" and some "dragon oaken figures" among many others. I also noticed that the panoramicon was painting a bit of an ugly picture.

Next step -- reassign the map_feature_visualize() so that the map makes some sense when viewed. That didn't break anything, so I completely refreshed by local copy of all things Gardaic. My previous mistake was to try to edit too much at once. This time, if I mess something up and have to undo everything, I only undo up to the last known good configuration. I also added map_feature_visualize() to the overlays, such as rivers and boardwalks, to make them easier to spot on a map. Makes a ton of difference.

Next came the materials components. Adding these the correct way has numerous benefits. The first being color that I don't have to change or manually enter. The second comes from the Undine spells, specifically the ones that look for water or snow in the environment. The room description says there is snow all around, but the spell can't find it because it is not set as a material composition. Very frustrating for a novice mage.

Then I went through and customized some of the room descriptions to better match what I was wanting originally. I also had to remove the (if !random(4)) statements. I was content to have it alter the description 25% of every time the area was initialized, which is typically once per boot, and not changing. I was also content on it doing that for every room the definition touches. Apparently I am not supposed to do things in this manner.

Identity_Nouns : ({({ "hills", "red-mottled brown" })}),

got changed over to

Identity_Nouns : ({ "hills" }),

Identity_Color : "red-mottled brown",

I have no idea where I picked that up from. In most cases, the additional colour was unnecessary after the materials were added. This is the part I ran into issues with earlier, since I was trying to use Identity_Color : ({ "shimmering white" }), which kept returning

Error: Bad type of arg to '+'

At that point, I had caught up to where I was before I borked everything. More updates later.

More minor updates

2011-03-31T00:02:00.002-04:00

Had to do some minor patches to Vargan. Added in Material_Dweomer to the ice tipped arrow and the cryomer-tipped arrow so that they are magickal in more than just their written description. Some questions came up about the other arrows, and if they did alternate dtypes -- ice dtype for ice tip, cold dtype for cryomer tipped, salt dtype for salt tipped, etc. I am leaning away from that concept. Alternate dtypes will have to come in later in completely different arrow types, and then only doing the alternate dtype with the At_Launch_Damage(), otherwise some skaven is gonna be running around wielding them like daggers and hacking things apart.

Updated magick dart and fire bolt for OIA. They have slightly different effects depending on what your proficiency in the spell is. I also factored Prestidigitation into how effectively the actual spell hits.

The skill of producing the precise patterns of gesture that form a key part of many magickal spells. The more skilled a magician is in the techniques of

prestidigitation, the more quickly and reliably a series of arcane gestures can be executed.

I took that to mean that you can form the gestures faster and more precisely, making your spell attack more precise. This also adds in a means by which a mage can train prestidigitation. A high-level mage should be quite adept at this skill, considering how many spells they would have had to cast to get to such a point.

I also patched up several more typos. This brought me around to the Vargan NPC's, which is where I stopped for the night. They need a bit of work to help flesh them out, and could use a better response setup.

OIA Upgrades, Hour 66

2011-03-30T13:34:00.002-04:00

Actually incarnated as a player for once in a long while. Used it for the dual purpose of testing out various aspects of OIA and checking out the maps. Vargan seems to be holding up rather well, and seems to be a nice little area. Plenty to kill, plenty of xp to be had by a lowly mage, and a couple of new things to flesh out the world. Found a couple of typos that hadn't been reported yet, and a few things that may need some better description, but otherwise I am liking it.

On the OIA side of things, there is plenty of stuff that needs fixing. I like the idea and visuals of immolating, flying somewhere, and then shutting off the fire via Disperse Personal Flame. There are a lot of spells my player doesn't have access to yet, but the ones I do have access to have a lot of room for further development. For a guild built around burning things, I didn't do much burning. The dancing flame was kinda awesome, but it keeps hogging the xp. Still, things do die a lot faster with that little guy around. Smoke bomb sucks. That just needs complete re-engineering. The rest of the spells I am tinkering with little by little as I actually play the guild. Plenty of fun concepts that are not properly implemented, but those should be addressed as I go through. Progress may be slow, because I am also addressing issues that I find as I explore the world again. Fixing a typo here and adjusting a description there takes time, and starts adding up considering I have so many things that I have pushed out already.

OIA game play is kinda fun, and the xp rewards from using Burnt Offerings are a nice addition, but I can see why not a lot of people are in the guild. It seems incomplete and only offers a different way of killing things, not a completely new way of playing. Much to think about, and much to fix along the way

Reloading

2011-03-28T22:56:00.003-04:00

Time to start a new maintenance cycle. Typical project management technique -- finish one project, go back through previous projects and see if you can apply what you've learned from the most recent project. But first, I had to tidy up Vargan and Gardagh a bit.

To start with, I cleaned up the unused files in the mon/ dir, since some of them were duplicated over in LS_Monster, and I was using the centralized version anyway. I also removed some of the flavour mobs from Gardagh that would be duplicates of the ones found in Vargan. The original versions were just a sampler of things to come, and now that I have the actual village that they are from, I don't feel the need to have the preview versions on the maps.

I also added exposure settings in all of the map definitions, and while I was doing definitions, decided to set up the border overlays. Vargan is no longer in a small box, and you can actually leave by wandering too far in any given direction, and end up back on the main map.

To close out the night, I went through the sysreport typos and started cleaning those up. And of course now that I am fixing the typos, it is exposing a few issues with previous projects, such as Schola Fervitus, Avalon, and Gardagh. Combine that in with the new elemental and amalgam changes that recently went in, and I may well be spending the next month or two just fixing stuff with no progress on any new projects.

Vargan release

2011-03-28T12:25:00.003-04:00

I got Vargan done 'enough' and went ahead and released it. It is far from perfect though, and I have several things I have to go back and redo. I conveniently left out Exposure settings, so that royally screws over everything that relies upon exposure to do anything, like the Coven night regen or any of the various 'fly home' deals. I also need to add in the borders that lead back into Gardagh. Right now, the entire village exists in a box with one way in and one way out. I also found out that I can indeed edit files in /obj/monsters, so I can centralize the mobs that are found in both Vargan and Gardagh. That's going to be a minor undertaking of itself just to make sure I have all of them covered.

There are also some optional things that I can do for the area. I can add in some more herbs, some more cryomer/ice objects for the cryoturge, adjust the cryoturge to use more ice/cold magics, add a trainer, add a wider variety of weapons, add different types of gladiators, add some more armours, split out the pelts into distinct objects, pull the fenric culture out of storage, pull certain mobs from the Gardagh map so that they are more specialized to just Vargan (pit wargs and great wolves in particular), set up better responses, set up a map of the area, add in some minor magical objects found just in Vargan, and adjust some of the equipment on the gladiators.

From what I saw of the first impressions, more people were interested in finding the new stuff than in killing anything. The new stuff that caught more attention was the alcohol for sale. A couple of players poked around the gladiator pits, but interest soon waned, and conversation wandered off to VV and their bonds again.

Fortunately Twilight is putting Aislynn through the area and seems to be pushing things a lot farther than I did when I went through. Once all of the little details are sorted out in Vargan, I can start in on other villages, and shouldn't have nearly as many issues trying to get them opened. It's a long trial process in coding, and rarely is anything perfect on its initial release.

Further delays

2011-03-25T13:12:00.002-04:00

Two files left in Vargan to finish up and it can go in. Was looking around for where to put it, but as soon as I started to determine if a location was suitable for it, Chaos would reinitialize that region. It looked like he was trying to centralize all of the monsters in certain regions to eliminate a lot of the copy/pasta that I had done. Some of it was from trying to trouble-shoot where the fishies were coming from that kept popping in the middle of Cimbra, and I just never reverted the files back to drawing from either Almeria or Tenochlan. I remember specifically avoiding using LS_Monster() files because I do not have the ability to edit those . The same goes for race definition files. I can write them, but someone else would have to put them into the mud, and if I had made a mistake that I was unaware of, I can't change it. For example: in the ice troll race definition, most of it is fine except for the third add_race_description should use Description_Index : Material_Horn, instead of the current Description_Index : Material_Hair. It wasn't until after it was already in live code that I realized my mistake, and by then it was too late for me to change it without bothering someone with the correct privs to put the file in again.

I had looked at either the village north of Losthaven, two possible spots in the Northlands, or for Vargan to become one of the villages already marked in Gardagh. Gardagh was hit heavy by the Chaos change machine last night, getting reinitialized repeatedly for well over an hour. I didn't realize I had done such a bad job on it, but it apparently needed so much work that I got a short blast of vulgarity when I inquired about it. I was hoping that was more of the "I'm knee-deep in this, don't bother me right now" yip than the "you are such a retard and now I have to fix your mistakes because you can't be trusted to fix them yourself, you worthless excuse for a puke-stain". It definitely didn't have enough f-bombs to be a notice of a significant amount of change, like when characters were made carryable, or when a majority of the elements were ported over. still, I figured it best just to delay trying to put anything in.

OIA and Undines are also on delay until resistances can find their way into more of the mud. For now, steam spells are ({ "water", "heat"}) instead of ({ "steam" }). If nothing is set up to resist steam damage as an amalgamal energy, then it may as well be primal. Sorta the same conundrum of the sunfury sais. Nothing was defending against that damage combo, so it was continually ripping through things.

Any other projects I have kinda require those three to either be significantly being worked upon, or out of the way. No point in starting something else when I have this many open projects. Just gotta let things settle down some, and continue to offer my menial services where they are needed. Mostly my coding skills are too lacking to be of any use, but maybe something will come along that more skilled developers just don't want to sully their skills with.

Vargan concepts

2011-03-22T11:41:00.002-04:00

In building Vargan, I had to keep a handful of concepts in mind, all through the development process. Several ideas I had were not incorporated even though they had been developed. The concept is a smallish village of northern barbarians whose culture is at odds with most of the civilized sections of the world. It's a common theme where barbarians are concerned. Their life values are different, especially in regard to their personal freedom and personal worth.

I wanted to build a small village depicting their lifestyle and build in more character to some of the mobs I have wandering around the northern parts of Cimbra, the Northlands, Gardagh, and the northern reaches of Avalon. I also wanted to incorporate some of the timeline into the village, so that it is more than just a really long document to which only developers are privy. The village is built directly into the forest, with the only roads being worn footpaths. To depict their closeness with nature, I tied the village heavily to a particular animal, in this case, the wolf. Each of the upcoming villages have a certain animal that they have a certain kinship to-- Vargan has wolves. Most of the villagers have a wolf as a pet that accompanies them everywhere. Provided it gets the okay from either Twilight or Chaos, a handful of warriors will have developed an empathic bond, the ultimate in kinship between Vargan warrior and the wolves they live among. A wolf motif is spread throughout the village in various places.

Also built into the NPC is the sense of value upon personal combat. Only one NPC uses ranged combat, and he gets a lot of crap for it, and is usually not included in most social gatherings. Most of the rest of the men are quite proud of their physique and their warrior traditions. The stores also reflect the tie to physical combat and a closeness with nature. There is a limited amount of metal used, while fur and leather predominate the armours available.

From the timeline, I used the portion where the Altrian Empire was at its full extent, reaching all the way through Avalon. The frontier of the empire was at the northern portions of Avalon, where there was resistance from the natives of the highlands and moors, and from the barbarians on the northern islands. The concept of a ruler was not something the locals accepted very easily.

Eventually, the Empire collapsed, and the barbarians were left to their lives of freedom. Before the Empire collapsed, though, a few traditions managed to find their way to the frontier, and had become deeply rooted. Gladiatorial games were frequent throughout the Empire. In the borderlands, this took the form of pit fights and makeshift arenas, since there were no large structures dedicated to bloodshed. The barbarians enjoyed watching one-on-one battles, and personal glory could be found for the gifted warrior who participated. Rather than a public spectacle where slaves were forced to slaughter one another, barbarians faced each other for honour and glory, with their kin in attendance to witness the occasion. It became more of a sporting event than an execution, very similar to how jousting tournaments were being developed throughout Avalon and Cimbra.

With the collapse of the Empire and subsequent power struggles, various governments asserted themselves over the people and established new rules. Slave trade was shut down in most civilized places, and bloodshed for sport was outlawed in many provinces. Such laws were not applicable to the northern barbarians, and so the games continued on an annual basis. The people of Vargan eventually began training their wolves to participate in the games, and some wolves were specifically bred for the arena. Pit wargs were bred and used extensively for several years, though full blooded wolves tended to be more intelligent and more easily trained than their more aggressive cousins.

Initially, gladiatorial games were only played in the winter months, when the lake was frozen over. The ice added an additional element of danger to the games. With the coming of the Cryoturge to Vargan, the lake was able to be frozen year round, and so more and more games were played. With a more permanent location for the games, the arena eventually grew larger and larger until it had several sections. Vargan also added a temple of healing just off the lake shore to aid in the recovery of the warriors.

The different types of combatants found in the arena also grew. What started as just the warriors soon spread. Gungnir started competing, testing the might of the thrown spear against the warrior's close combat abilities. Yeti were drawn to the ice field, and garou soon became a welcome addition. Bandits found a natural home there, placing wagers on various aspects of the game while 'participating' in the games to hedge their bets with a few well-placed knife wounds. Every now and then a faun will also take to the field, and on a rare occasion a valkyrie will be sent by the Aesir to watch over the games.

The set up ties in some of the garou from Avalon, the local mythology of the Aesir, makes mention of the valkyrie (which the only only I know of is trapped in ST), the barbarian types from Gardagh, the gladiator types from around the rest of the maps, the yeti from the Northlands, some basic cryoturgy, the altrian empire's expansion and limits, the pit wargs, the great wolves, and a few other things currently already found in the game. The setup of the gladiator pits is similar to the dungeon crawl of Spiderwood in that the opponents get stronger and worth more xp as you descend through the levels. Unfortunately, I do not have an elder god at the bottom level for the boss battle.

I had attempted to add in some frost magi, some ice maidens mounted on colossal ice spiders, various ice elemental offshoots, and a ton of gladiator style weaponry. Most of that was removed in favour of solidifying the central concept of the village -- barbarians, wolves, ice, and gladiator combat.

The way I have things set up currently, a few minor changes can completely remove the gladiatorial arena if it is deemed completely outside of the direction that the powers that be want to head, or if I just handled the entire thing poorly. The entire project can be stripped down with very little effort to become just a village of barbarians that breed wolves as companions. There are also aspects that can be expanded later on if need be. The cryoturge can be opened up with more ice magicks, a trainer can be added, an association can be fitted in, gladiators could be made into their own affiliation, barbarians can be set up as a culture, and other villages can easily be set up in a similar fashion. Vargan will basically be a test village to see how in depth the mud as a whole wants, needs, or expects the villages to be. The whole thing could fall into being just an out of the way xp farm, could lapse into complete obscurity, or the culture could take off immensely. I don't know yet. It will probably be at least six months after its launch before I even start getting indicators.

Finishing up Vargan

2011-03-21T12:06:00.002-04:00

For some reason, Vargan is much farther along than Fliu Gulch, which was supposed to be the first of the villages released. Vargan would have been released already, but I used a test character to walk through everything and check out how tough the opponents are. XP yield was sucky at the beginning, so I adjusted that. I had a few issues with descriptions, so those had to be updated. I still have 9 files left to do. The area could go live without them, since most players set description to short and just look for things to either kill, use to kill, or sell.

I also have to go through all of the changes and make the necessary updates. That shouldn't take long at all. Once Vargan is released, that will take one project off of my ever-growing list. Over the next few weeks, if I can set aside enough coding time, I might be able to push out Sloan, Sounion, and Fliu Gulch, maybe even releasing the Fianna.

I also need to do a maintenance sweep of OIA and Undines due to the cosmology changes. I made mention of that on the guild channel and at least one player panicked thinking they needed to start speccing the skill cosmology.

I'll need to update the regions into which the new areas will be going. The areas themselves will need either a map_area or map_overlay, and the populace of the region may change. This will become increasingly important as I flesh out the concepts that are tasted in some of the regions. The berserkers in Gardagh are a particular concern, since they could end up being an actual guild or association, and their current incarnation has a crappy equipment selection and skill assignments. Same goes for any of the gladiator types, the gungnir, the galdr, vikings, knights, hunstmen, etc.

Vargan Development

2011-03-14T11:35:00.003-04:00

Spent most of my time working on Vargan. It is one of several area projects that I started, got mostly done, then drifted off to another project. It didn't take much to get Vargan to almost completion -- just some attention to detail and a few minutes to discern what was actually appropriate to this project. The project has a cryoturge, but that doesn't mean it should have every animal ever associated with ice, snow, or cold. Like so many other projects, it had a lot of ideas thrown in, and several different layers of things going on. I cut out about three dozen files, and the theme of the area finally solidified quite a bit.

I have 9 NPC's left to code up. This will involve establishing what they look like and their back story, which feeds into how they interact and what chats they will have, and what skills they will have picked up. Once there is a visual and a personality, the rest falls into place. The main hold up on this is just finding an image that I want for the characters. After that, I need to do a thorough review of every file to check for spelling and content.

Depending on how long that takes, I may test out a few things with a weather daemon just to see if the changes will actually work. If they do, I may make some modifications to the actual weather daemon, which would lead to a huge chunk of changes in the rest of the mud.

I could have taken the easier route and had most of Sunday's work already done. I could have just set up the stores and had them load already made items. Instead, I decided to make custom mugs for the village, add in some foods and beverages specific to the village, added in some weapons and armour, and tinkered with a pelt item. The down side of the pelt is its materials and craft level, which is what determines the value of the item. Raw craft of hide and fur is very inexpensive. Even the largest, most luxurious fur pelt I made ended up being valued at a fraction of a gold coin. I think I sold 24 for 4 gold.

It seems to be a recurring theme for my projects that I start out with one super project, then start breaking out pieces of it for a smaller project, where certain elements make more sense. A couple of the items came from Devonshire and some came from the Northlands. I had ideas, but they were poorly implemented, and somewhat forced to those projects. Setting them into smaller projects fits better, and the items can still be used for the regions. The same goes for some of the mobs. At some point, I'll have projects that will better incorporate some of the mobs and give them better equipment selection (not a selection of better equipment, but a better method of selecting their equipment). The dana and garou from Avalon come to mind, as do the gladiators from Gardagh and most of Almeria. The equipment selection process is just bad, but it works for now. It's not exactly broken right now, but I should be able to fix it up better once I start adding in the smaller projects that can properly house the issues I will be addressing.