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My NaMuBuMo Experience
I stopped working on the game engine’s hardcode changes for the month of October to build a world instead. Since all of my Alpha One content has been scrapped (it served its purpose and generated a lot of feedback), I needed to build a game world for the upcoming Alpha Two testing. I stuck to the minimum viable product philosophy throughout. 100 rooms is a lot! I did not build any open wilderness areas for this contest. No room description was used more than six times and most of them are unique. I started creating basic maps in Excel before the contest began so that I could hit the ground running on day one. I focused a lot of my free time this past month on the project (and Russell was very patient throughout the experience). I still ended up finishing room #100 at about 11:30 pm on Halloween. Learning
Why Dawn of Time Is Great for Builders
If you’re still shopping for a MUD codebase to get started on your world-building project, look no further. I’m going to introduce you into the shiniest of the ol’ crusty Diku’s out there. Dawn of Time may have very old-school roots, but it was improved upon lovingly for years by very talented programmers, builders, and community managers. I am biased as hell and for good reason. You Can Build a DOT World Without Changing The Hardcode – Dawn of Time’s superpowers come from its Editor tools. You can create, edit and delete everything you need for a dynamic world from inside the game world itself, without having to change the game engine’s programming at all. Here’s a list of DOT’s editors: area editor – Areas or zones are collections of rooms, mobiles, objects, and scripts. clan editor – Clans or guilds are social groups that allow players to recruit, promote,
Snippet – Random Weapon Generator
This snippet (compatible with the latest version S of Dawn of Time) will allow you to have mobs load up a random weapon through use of a MUDprog like this: mob random_weapon wield all
5 Things I Learned From My First Alpha Test
Alpha Test One for Lands of Oneiro just wrapped up. It was four days of fun, excitement, and nerve-wracking anxiety. I had set the deadline for the first alpha test at only 2 months into the project with the hopes that having a hard date would keep me motivated. I believe it worked, that I achieved much more than if I hadn’t announced the Alpha Test was coming up. The biggest benefit from the test was the feedback that I got from the players who came to the test. Here’s what I learned. 1 – Hours of Building = Minutes of Content Players will zoom through any well-built area. If there are no bugs or issues to slow them down, they can be FAST. The first player who logged into the game had killed her first bat 5 minutes and 4 seconds after connecting. After 26 minutes and 56 seconds,
Example MUD Prog – Randomly Restrung NPC’s
These progs will show you a simple framework for randomly named NPC’s. The example will randomly set the gender, name, short and long description for the NPC. The mob will load a random set of clothing and possibly a piece of loot. Please note, these MUD Progs were written and tested on a Dawn of Time version 1.69s_beta5 MUD. The scripts do require my snippet to give mobiles access to the SHORT and STRING commands in the MP Commands List. You need a generic mobile that will morph into a random npc when it loads into the game. I’m using mobile 3006, a Dusk Elf. The program that kicks off the random generation is number 3200 in my example, so I have set the Dusk Elf mobile to call that program with a repop trigger. MUDPrograms for [ 3006]: Mudprogs on this mob will not ignore questers Mudprogs on this
Snippet – Giving NPC’s the String and Short Commands
By giving mobiles the ability to use the immortal commands STRING and SHORT, amazing things can happen. In my next post, I’m going to show you how to write three scripts that will give your cities a plethora of randomly named NPC’s. Those scripts depend on this snippet. Please note, this snippet is compatible with version 1.69s_beta5. mp_cmds.cpp add to the delcarations near the top: DECLARE_DO_FUN( do_short); DECLARE_DO_FUN( do_string); Then around line 197 in the table of mp commands, add the following: {“short”,do_short,”Works just like the Imm command SHORT.”}, {“string”,do_string,”Works just like the Imm command STRING.”},