What do you want to see next?

Suggestions for additions and modifications to the existing Barren Realms code.
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Joysinger
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Post by Joysinger »

i of course like that idea. but in response to stars i'd like to note that it doesn't really matter how something has to be done, once someone managed to solve it there will be folks who can just get that information without having to work it out themselves. :) of course, that shouldn't keep us from anything!
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Slart
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Post by Slart »

Divebomb wrote: I know there is speco ability to fire an event merely by giving an item to someone (speco fired for receiving or giving on the receiver and/or giver) but it's not easily customizable and it doesn't seem like it could handle a SET of objects.

Other things could be very simple:
1) cast a spell on a mob and it tells you some piece of information
2) Say a specific keyword and it causes a mob to respond or a door to unlock etc - all being part of a series of events leading to a quest prize.
3) Touch a series of no-take objects in a particular order to fire an event
The entire speco subsystem was dramatically enhanced to support foul rites, which was more complex than anything we'd tried to do with them before that. The mob spec subsystem will get a similar overhaul as part of the greater area file format upgrade. The speco subsystem will benefit from this as well. A room spec facility will also be added to support interactive room keywords, doors with event-based keyless locks, things like that. Sometime (relatively) soon, I will be circulating a preliminary draft of the new format for review and feedback. The new stuff won't all go in at once, of course, so you guys will have your chance to comment on prioritization.

Having a more focused idea of where we're going will speed development in more ways than one, hopefully improving the mud for everyone. That's what this thread is about. I have already incorporated three or four ideas posted here into the new area file format. Meanwhile, I have another iron in the fire right now as well, so please bear with me.
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Post by Solomnius »

WOW! this has to be the best thread i have read all year!!
mobs that can summon/tele/track - switches/voice activated doors
i'll all for it, where do i sign?
i now have the inspiration and motivation to continue writing my area
i stopped after finding out i couldn't get one of my mobs to flee, heal and summon the attacker back to it's lair *grin* now it sounds possible!!

keep up the good work - i'll post some ideas when i'm not so excited.
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Post by Solomnius »

First things first, how many times have you been incapacitated with -hp, poisoned, cursed, affected by plague and not a single druid within over 100 steps - even if their was you are too stunned to communicate (unless hero or group) and there is nothing you can do about it.....
When someone is near death in the movies, they can choose to hang on to life for whatever reason (need to tell someone something/then die instantly after the last word has escaped their lips)
I think their should be a command to end your life in situations like these, let go and head for the light, at present we have no choice but to hang on to life no matter what, no matter what pain and suffering it causes us, i want to have the choise to let go.
What does everyone think? a new command to let go of our earthly bodies when our hit points drop below 0?
Respect!
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Divebomb
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Post by Divebomb »

This is one of the most logical, interesting ideas i've seen in awhile. :)
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Post by CrazyChaos »

I think it would be interesting to see every item changed to level 1 to use and personalized. To prevent people from just hurting the mob with their high level chars, and then killing it, you could make it so that if more than one person attacks the mob, the item is unusable by all. I know this is crazy and never be implemented, (probably not even considered) but I would like to see what it would be like if that would be coded in.
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Post by Solomnius »

as we are implemening teleport/summon mobs, would it be extra work to add the same specs to rooms? for example, lets say someone does something wrong in one of my areas and a guardian sees this injustice, the mobs sends your name to the jail which summons you. (no exit, no recall room) just like the council teleport, a timer is active when you enter the room teleporting you outside the jail after a min or 2. ( i know we could prolly put mobs in the jail to do the summoning in and another mob outside the jail for the summoning out)
how much effort say would it take to add a <send char name to jail> on the end of a <stop theif!> mob trigger, or <help blah is trying to kill me> trigger, or even a <protect the innocent> trigger?
just curious.....
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kiri
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Post by kiri »

we do have no magic in and no magic out, or do you want something more specific?
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Post by Everybody »

I'm pretty sure that he wants the possibility of modding some mob specs to have an (optional) teleport to a specific room. And nearly this is possible with speco_teleport already... just have it set on a very short timer, instead of having it trigger with the guard spec.
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Post by Solomnius »

yeah sorry, what EB said - i probably did mean the added mob spec to teleport INTO the jail - getting out i spose there could be a guard inside to teleport you outside...
I was curious about the room_spec though, mobs can have spells, chests can have spells (well only harm spells atm) - can rooms have spells?
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Post by Everybody »

No. There is no specr (equivalent room code to spec/speco for mobs/objects, respectively), although (I believe) it's one of the things that's likely to go in when Slart redoes the area formats. Chests have spells via traps, it's not the same thing as a speco at all.
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Post by xorex »

Well for right now, I just had a couple of extra ideas that I didn't see mentioned specifically yet....

1. I think area based weather is pretty cool. Would that make control weather only work by area as well? In addition to area based weather, I'd like to see room based weather. There are two ways that this could work. One way is to expand the terrain feature of rooms as it is. Currently there are city, field, mountain, inside, underwater, desert, etc. We could add a few more like tundra, rain forest, etc and make the weather take the terrain into account. This would be nice so it wouldn't be raining all the time when you go to Dragon Desert or there wouldn't be a warm wind in the Wastes of Skelnar. The other option would be to make optional weather flags for each room, just like the flags area, nomagicin, etc. Then you could let most of your area have the same normal pattern of weather but maybe up on top of the Dark Tower for example it would be almost always lightning and raining. Weather doesn't play too much of role in the game now but if more effects were added, being able to make them room particular or more probable in certain rooms might be nice.

2. I think it would be nice to put in changes to make some things work more smoothly that clever builders have already found certain ways around because these creative fixes are really imaginitive but sometimes they're confusing if you don't know that such a thing is not possible and that that is what the builder is going for. It would also make them easier to do. Some of these have already been suggested like the rare repops for some objects and mobs or making some doors block pass door. I think a good suggestion to add to this list would be room containers. Currently the only way to hide a container in a room is to give it a blank long description. But this gives the trick away to a certain extent since you can do "get all" and see if there is an object and you can also tell by either the blank line that is added when you look at the room or if the builder gets fancy and hides the blank line then if you drop a second object it looks funny....So a good solution would be to just make room extras that also function as containers and can hold things. They just don't show up as objects when you look.

3. One more along these lines would be to make doors that can only be opened by key word and not by "open east". This is also sort of possible already but it would be nice if it worked more smoothly.
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Post by disaster »

for weather, first of all, control weather should only work for the area not for the entire realms. even better would be if inside the area the rooms were put in seperate lists, which would function as weather zones. that way the weather in the desert part of the area would be different than the weather in the forest part of the area. along with those lists would come a list of possible weather types, to avoid rain in the desert, etc. individual rooms could also have thier own disallowed weather types and a default weather type. then, when the weather in that particular weather zone is dissallowed within that room the default weather type would apply instead.
for instance, the whole dark tower could be a bright sunny day, but if the top of the tower isn't allowed to be bright and sunny then the default of stormy and lightning would apply. if the whole dark tower was a hurricane, that might be allowed at the top so the top would be a hurricane. there should also be more of an effect to certain types of weather, for instance a hurricane should act like a random current on flying players, or possibly even do minor damage while they're exposed to it. rain and really hot weather could each increase the movement cost of walking through an area. wind/hurricanes could affect the swimmability of some types of water (might need a new terrain type for that, one always swimmable, one never swimmable, and a new one that depends on weather), could also add in some new terrain types to mimic latent magical effects, like sources of power or sources of disruptive magic. one would make spellcasting easier/more effective, the other would do the opposite. could also have occasional magical storms (probably NOT affected by control weather) that would act similarly. though if there's going to be the ability to have specr it might make more sense to do it with a specr.

doors would be really nice if they were changed a bit. first, no-pass would be really nice if it could be done without the elaborate builders' tricks it needs now. so would passworded doors that don't have a key but would open with an "incantation <password> <direction/doorname>" command, or something similar. a version of this could create doros that won't open with "open east" but that need their specific keyword to be opened. also, it would be really nice if doors had a short description, so that they could be called "door of the small hut" or other multiple word names, instead of just "door" or "red", etc.. doors could also be reworked in order to make more difficult mazes possible. the first way would be for a character (or group) walking through a door to trigger a re-shuffling of the room's exits before determining what room the characters end up in. that way exit, scan, and birdseye wouldn't help to navigate the maze. the other way would be less traditional, and to treat doorways as teleporters which would take characters to any one of several vnumbs coded into the doorway. this would allow more than the standard 6 exits from any one particular room, as well as setting up the possibility of rooms that are not always accesible, but depend on waiting for the teleporter door to cycle around to the right room. for teleporter doors they could allow exit/scan/birdseye into the next room, or be combined with the reshuffling type of door so that the room to which the characters go is chosen randomly as they're walking through the doorway. it would also be really nice if doorways could be trapped, not just containers. in fact, it would be nice if rooms could be trapped as well, with either a specr or a new terrain type?

another new terrain type (or specr, or whatever works) could be created to mimic the effects of REALLY disruptive magic, like centuries old demonic altars and the like, which could interfere with the normal workings of spells. in game terms this could act like a dispel magic cast on the players at intervals while in the room. it could also increase the probability of spell misfires, or possibly have a chance of turning the spell into a random one instead (damaging spells would damage the player casting it).

a new act bit for mobs, stronger than sentinel and used to make them immune to currents and to stay still even when hit by a thrown projectile, would also be nice.

a new spec hate_all

a new affect bit for see_sneak

having all types of negative spells work for traps, not just the damaging ones. also, having all the spells on a potion work not just the "good" ones.

a new object flag or speco, "cursed", for magical items. this would cause a chance of backfires when trying to use the item, the chance ideally set by the builder. when the item is brandished/zapped/recited if a backfire occurs the spell would affect the one using the item instead of the target for "negative" spells. for objects with "good" spells, the item would go "poof" and cause slight damage to the player.

a new, more powerful version of invis for mobs and objects which can't be seen by non-imms. this would make it really easy to create hidden containers, since if you can't see it you don't get a message saying "you can't take that".

slow-alias rooms, either by terrain type, specr, roomflag, whatever. aliases would still work, but not at avatar speeds inside these rooms.
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Post by Stars »

I didn't read it all through yet, but I saw this...
disaster wrote:a new spec hate_all
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this just a regular aggro mob? The only difference I see might be that hate/love mobs can attack sneaking players. I think what we could really use is...
disaster wrote:a new affect bit for see sneak
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disaster
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Post by disaster »

see_sneak would actually be much more useful than hate_all, but since i have no idea of the difficulty of creating see_sneak i figured i'd suggect hate_all as well. unless i miss my guess hate_all is likely quite easy to create given the hate_race code we already have.
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