Builders wanted

I think Soulkeeper has gotten to the point whereby some builders can start creating some (hopefully cool) content.

If you like writing, have a good imagination, and think a medieval/fantasy setting is right up your alley, come on by...

Soulkeeper is at soulkeeper.mcp-server.com 5111

If your unsure how MUDS work, or how to connect to Soulkeeper, hopefully this will point you in the right direction.
I recommend SimpleMU on windows, and tinyfigue on Linux
SimpleMU Client download

If you have any problems, or are just new to MUDS, drop me a comment on here and I'll give you a hand.

Cleanup and housekeeping

I've often said, it's always the small fiddly tasks that take the majority of time, when your coding significant changes. As I run a test character through, I'm improving things here and there... go back to the character, spot something else, fix that, go back again... etc etc. You get the idea. It's a slow process, but an important one at the same time. Polish, polish, polish.

Looking back at my to-do list, I see only a couple of major changes left. The automated battle call system. Whilst the battle code and arena are already coded, test and working, the automated system isn't there yet. Actually the majority of the work isn't in the automated battle calls, but rather the league tables for each level range (1-5, 6-10, 11-15, etc).

Another reasonably big change is the magic system, where spells have a delay time (Dependant on the spell, average probably 2 seconds), and if the spell caster is damaged at all during casting, the wait time increases. To counter this, spells will do more damage. Thus introducing some tactics, where spells can be countered with appropriate skills.

Diablo III inspired bosses

Dev continued today after a bit of a break. I've added special building commands to allow the damage to be set for each mob individually. It allows for a more engaging experience I think. That's in and working properly now, and I will also add some degree of customising hit points for a mob, rather than being simply level based.

With diablo III announced, I wonder if it will be a long dev period as normally expected from Blizzard studios. If so, perhaps we can expect some players looking for a diablo clone, and find that MUDs' are actually a more social atmosphere and probably a bit healthier at that.

We'll see !

Soulkeeper MUD dev pt 7 - Combat changes

Spent today putting in critical hit combat events. While I was doing it, I thought it would be pretty good if you could see the actual damage you did each hit, so I've added that after the damage message as well. The critical hits work for spells as well as melee damage.

I also did a bit of play testing, to see how things are meshing together. Found a few oddities, mainly because a whole heap of vnums are hardcoded into the header file, and they point to rooms like guild-only locations, which just by chance overlap the vnums of the city I have developed. So when it wouldn't let me enter some rooms, it took a bit of digging to find out why. Tested other things like scaleability, instance hardness, etc. It's looking more complete by the day!

Soulkeeper MUD dev pt 6 - Hot reboots

Another feature worked itself into soulkeeper mud today. Copyover, or as some people call it, HotReboot, is a great bit of code that allows the mud to be rebooted, with new code updates, without disconnecting everyone. It's now on soulkeeper and works like a charm. It didn't play well
with mccp at first, but I got that fixed up.

Didn't quite get around to doing the combat enhancements, hopefully I get some time tonight to do those!

Soulkeeper MUD Dev - Pt 5

Yay! I've finished all the mob creation routines for instances. Now a builder can set the flags for bossmobs in the room definition, and it will pick one randomly from the created boss mobs. I'm keen to set up a low level player and start testing it. Soulkeeper now has 48298 lines of code, using 'more *.c | wc -l'. That's not entirely accurate of course, but a good roundabout figure nonetheless.

Next on my list is a revamp of combat code. Part 1 is going to be adding critical hit chances, that do double damage. This is also because one of the possible item affects is adding to critical hit chance. This will be seperate for spell and melee. I'm toying with the idea of having a location-based damage system. I have to be careful of scope creep though, otherwise I'll never get this finished.

I guess I'll have to prioritise. I'm also considering opening up the mud soon to builders and IMM applications.

Soulkeeper MUD Dev Pt4: Bug squishing + mobs

Found some more bugs today and fixed them. I don't know how I missed them in the first place! It pays not to ask someone why some code is crashing... 'Cause your a shit coder!' is the inevitable reply. I'd have to agree with that, after seeing some of the blindingly obvious bad pointers.

Anyway, after fixing those few bugs, I've moved on to some mob generation in the instances. I was originally going to let the builder of the instance create a list of mobs that could appear, but I've changed my mind. I've instead opted for a more automated approach. The builder creates as many mobiles as he/she wants, within the vnum range of the area, and the instance generation routines chooses the mobile automagically, based on the level (the instance is supposed to get harder the deeper you go). So instead the builder chooses a level range for possible mobiles for each particular room.

Also had a play with some MCCP routines, so that it shows total bytes/compressed bytes for each user at request.

Next job: deal with special mobs, including champions (extra hard), mini-boss, and instance-boss.