Daze/Stun abilities redo:

Daze has been redone. It no longer prevents multicast. Being dazed means your effective skill in ANY skill or spell is reduced. Points of note about these changes are:

• Daze is bad for skill users as well as spell users.
• Having equipment to boost a skill % over 100 makes you less affected by daze for that skill.
• Daze is easier to tune by simply changing the degree of the effect.
• Weapon skills are also affected, but to a lesser degree.
• Weaponsmaster wish does NOT override this affect - your base skill is automatically 100%, but that does not mean other affects are ignored. With that being said, the daze penalty on weapon skills is slightly less when someone has weaponsmaster.

The affect that some skills have of making you ‘rest’ is gone and is replaced with a ’stunned’ effect - almost the same overall difference, but prevents bugginess with being able to walk away from a fight after being forced to rest etc. Skills that used to both daze and force rest now do just one or the other. Stunned is more annoying in some ways because you can’t do _anything_, but won’t mess up your weapon hits.

Skills that stun do not daze (if they ever did). The list is:

• Bash, Trip, Stun

Skills that daze do not stun (if they ever did): The list is:

• Shield Punch, Sweep, Black Root, Hammer, Bodycheck, Headbutt

Goal / Quest Interface Changes:

Several changes were made to improve usability of the ‘goals’ command:

• Typing ‘goals here’ will show goals in the current area only.
• Typing ‘goals stats’ will show how many times each goal has been started and completed. The ’stats’ option can be combined with other sort options, for example, ‘goals stats byname’.
• New sort options to goals - ‘bytaken’ and ‘bydone’. This means you can do ‘goals stats bytaken’ and ‘goals stats bydone’ to see sorted lists of goal stats.

Other upgrades and fixes this reboot:

• When the thief skills were converted to ‘nofail’, this was only applied to the damage part with the chances of landing special affects no higher or lower than before. The check on sweep for making a character ‘rest’ was missed and landing with every use. Now fixed. (Cadaver)
• Rather than having a single object key for campfires which makes it impossible to customize them, there is a new item type called ‘campfire’. The heal code has been changed to search for this item type rather than a specific item. Expect an announcement shortly with costs once this option is available.
• Using .s or .sn in note write will show the note header as well as content so far (Tymme).
• Using ‘fence all’ or ‘fence all.‘ will now show only items actually sold and not failed items. You will also see a summary of items sold and total value. (Mondaine/Atreidess). Using fence with a single item will still show the usual full output.
• Poker max buy-in is now 100m. (Nasdaq)
• Have lowered the timeout on assassinate a little.
• Changed the message on balor - it reduces health not ‘power’.
• Summoning someone will remove stealth. (Alessandrew)
• Check for improvement on ‘remove curse’ was only working for an item uncurse, not a player uncurse. Now fixed. (Orcwarrior)
• Aylorian Enchantment Clinic (weapon flags) is now included in ‘find’ and ‘runto’ with keyword “enchanter” and “wflag”. (Meeper)
• Both the note editor and description/lua prog editors have a new option. Entering “.sr” will show the content with raw color codes. This is only the actual data being edited - the headers are still colored. (Fiendish)
• Dissolve is now available at healers. Its cost is 100 gold @Wper level@w based on the player of the target. (Sezeku). The healers will now also show how much they are charging you.
• Ftalk was not showing channel tags when friends enter/leave the mud. (Alhena)
• Fixed an obscure crash causing bug in retreat/mobprogs if a mob tries to pull back a player who is retreating. (Domain)

Several new goals were added this reboot, there’s a nice variety of difficulty level and complexity in these goals, we hope you enjoy them.

Imperial City of Reme:

Welcome to the Grand City of Reme, where Justice, Mercy, and the Humane
treatment of seagulls is a distant memory. The Emperor has gone mad,
the Empress spends more on her dogs’ breakfasts than the yearly income
of a family of peasants, and seagulls have infested the place.
Want to help? The Priest of Claire is looking for a few brave souls who
might be able to clean up the city!


Land of the Beer Goblins:

Lying. Adultery. Alcoholism. These are considered the key traits of any
politician in this day and age. Though all it takes is crossing the wrong
person and one’s political career can be cut very, very short. Help aid
those who thirst for the blood of Brewington’s Mayor Laporta and the title
of “Beer Drinking Champion” and a lifetime’s supply of beer could be yours.


River of Despair:

The water flowing through this vast river is grey and bitterly cold.
It is the lifeblood and lifeforce of the Aquamarine King, and his
life is quickly running short. A brave adventurer might tiptoe
his way into the tunnels and caverns of the River of Despair, but
he will quickly find himself confronted by legions of spirits,
sprites and ghosts which have taken this place as their home.

The Aquamarine King isn’t happy about it, though, so visit him and
listen to his story to see how you might assist this unhappy monarch.


The Covenant of Mistridge:

Rumors have been quietly making their way around the realm about the
Covenant of Mistridge. Tales of dark magical experiments and insanity
crossed with a lack of leadership make for dark tales indeed. With few
friends to help but many troubles and trials to endure, Mistridge is a
problem looking for a solution. Only the brave and strong need go; the weak
will be grist to evil.


Snuckles Village:

On a cloudless night, a full moon hung majestically in the sky
illuminating Aardwolf. The northern winds blew cold through the realm
forcing many adventurers into their homes. As dawn approached, the ground
began to tremble as magic took hold of the land. Maps began to magically
recreate, memories were altered and roads were formed. As the magic
trembling stopped, it was as if nothing happened. Only, it wasn’t nothing.

A new forest came to be that night. It is almost as if the forest was
ripped out of its existing realm and was neatly tucked away off the trail.
It is a very colorful forest where each tree has leaves of its own color,
each different from the next. The forest is inhabited by faeries who keep
the forest colorful, full of growth and fight to keep the forest alive.
The forest is also inhabited by some strange creatures new to the realm
of Aardwolf. The creatures are yellow in color, medium in size and appear
to be very curious.

Stories ring through the land of this new forest and the creatures that
live there. It seems the creatures were ran out of their old land by
wolves. Unfortunately the wolves followed them and are now also roaming
the forest causing havoc and dismay. Rumor has it an evil wizard has
control of the wolves…

Can you be the one that helps Shay bring peace and order back to the forest?


Masquerade Island:

On a privately owned island, surrounded by shark-infested
waters, a party has been organised. However it is not just
any party, it is a Masquerade Ball. The owner of the island,
Lord Nassah, has invited everyone to attend his Ball. From
the smallest sprite, to the tallest giant, no one is excluded
from this Ball.

The only challenge you have to overcome is to venture
across the seas as he did not reveal the location of
the island.

The rumor floats in the air that the island is not so
safe lately. Are you brave enough to still attend the Ball?
Can you solve the mysteries that roam this island?

Aardwolf MUD V3 - 6 month review

It has been 6 months since V3 of Aardwolf went live. Hard to believe that so much time has passed already. One of the most surprising things about V3 has been the general stability and lack of any major issues.

Anyone with MUD coding experience can imagine the potential nightmare of going live on a rewritten codebase with hundreds of active players. We have come out of it in great shape and the credit for that goes to the detailed and endless V3 testing process. The folks who helped with that know who they are, and we all owe you a big thank-you!

Looking at other progress in the past 6 months, the major updates to the mud since v3 are:


Lua / Mobprogs:

The integration of Lua with the MUD and the conversion of close to 4,000 old mobprogs to Lua is easily the biggest single project. Many players helped with converting the mobprogs to Lua and overall, the project has been a huge success. Lua itself is extremely lightweight, greatly extends the capabilities of the scripting system and is very stable. It is the first time ever I have not regretted not building Aardwolf with LPC from day one.


Goals:

The goal system originally came about because I needed to rewrite the mud school and wanted it to be more interactive with player progress tracked at each stage.

While developing the framework to track progress through the Academy I found myself thinking “It would be great if all area quests could use this”. Eventually, it turned into the goal system we have today.

The task hints came later, which was the last major feature to goals and made a huge difference in how goals are played.

At the time of writing we now have 41 goals live and plenty more to come. Not everyone sees the value in them, but overall they have been an extremely popular feature.


The Academy:

The academy itself has been very well received. Some players don’t like the fact that it takes so long to go through, but there’s a lot to cover.

We have also receive a lot of compliments from other mud admins on the depth of the academy. It is worth noting that with the framework now built into the mud, the academy itself is 100% Lua. In theory, any builder could create a new “academy” in their area.


Mushclient:

Mushclient was another “not planned” project, or at least not to the level we took it. I contacted Nick Gammon to see if he would mind me releasing an “Aardwolf version” of Mushclient which would basically be mushclient+some plugs pre-installed to help new users play the MUD.

Nick got interested in the project himself and made many changes to Mushclient and actually even wrote most of the plugins. The telnet options and tags systems also came out of this project.

Since the first release of the Aardwolf version, Mushclient itself has had some fantastic upgrades including the addition of many image handling and processing commands, clickable hotspots and hovering windows. The second release of the Aardwolf version will be some time away, but will be worth the wait.


Blog:

Creation of this blog. I’m still not convinced it is worth it in terms of time spent updating it that could be spent on the mud itself, but will give it at least 6 months. Readership is very low and feedback is non-existent.


Areas:

Several new areas and stock area replacements were added: Onyx Bazaar, Rosewood Castle, Cloud city of Gnomalin, Adaldar. Many other areas were significantly tidied up or remodeled for their goals.


Subclasses:

At the time of writing this, 20 new subclass skills/spells have been added, which means we’re only just beginning the full implementation - subclasses will be the main focus of the next 6 months. Many of these are so much more than ‘just a new skill’. For example, the chaos portal changes were a full rewrite of the chaos portal system. Ambush is a whole new type of affect. Navigate and Pathfind use pathfinding code that was new in v3.


Server Move:

Although the impact on the player base is (hopefully) minimal, moving servers is always a huge task. It always sounds like something that shouldn’t be, but it is.

Moving the mud itself is the least complicated part other than the volume of data. The website, clients, pictures pages, etc etc are all very time consuming. Getting the servers out of Orlando into a more stable environment was worth it though.


Everything else:

The sections above are just the bigger single changes. There has been so much more, some of the highlights include: runto/runprefix, identify wish, ice ages + auto-qreset, many updates to support room and object scripts in lua, autopk toggle, ignore on channels, the gold/other values for > 2 billion, glance, rawcolors and hundreds of minor fixes. (Side note, my own personal favorite as a player is ‘runto’).

Challenges/Disappointments

It is great to list the things we’ve been able to do, but also worth a look at the things that didn’t work out so well.


Player base:

Almost all MUDs have had a tough year in terms of reducing player base. I’m not sure why this year in particular as most of the big popular MMOs have been out for a while now. Players leave a MUD for many reasons, and those reasons often have nothing to do with the MUD itself - family, work, other hobbies, etc. The idea of playing a text game is so alien to the average teenager today that we just don’t get the backfill of new users as older players naturally move on.

I do strongly believe MUDs have a lot to offer, if I didn’t I’d put up a 404 page and be done. The MUD is still very actively developed and we have so much more to come. We need to figure out how to reach others who might be interested in MUDs. Word of mouth is still the best advertisement there is - so tell your friends!

None of this is to discount the fact that some players do leave MUDs for reasons to do with the MUD itself. Their tastes change, there are changes in the MUD they don’t like, or they don’t think progress is being made quickly enough. This last one I’m sure is quite common with some of the folks who left Aardwolf over the last year. Unfortunately, it was a necessary evil while V3 was developed. But it is done and we’re past it now.


Participation:

There was a time when almost everyone built the MUD, it was a community effort. That seems to be shifting more and more towards “entertain me!”. That isn’t necessarily a problem in itself, but we’ve had a hard time engaging people in building, helping test new features, creating graphics, writing guides and whatever else needs to be done. If you’re a player of Aardwolf and interested in helping with any of these things, please contact Lasher on the personal board.


Subclasses:

While a good start has been made on subclasses and it is moving now, I wish we were further ahead. This has taken way too long. 6 months from now I hope to be able to say we’re close to done .


Client:

The client itself is a great start for new users. The challenge here is having to prioritize (and subclasses win) … it is going to be a while before we get to fully convert the plug ins in the original version of the client to take advantage of the mini-windows and other features recently added to Mushclient.

Looking Ahead:

As already mentioned, subclasses are the main focus for the next 6 months. The rest of this is a list of “things we’d like to do”. In no specific order and with no guarantees:

• More PK games / action. Subclass abilities themselves will go a long way towards this.
• More “end game” activities. This is vague. It’s hard to come up with features that will last indefinitely (such as campaigns) vs a one-time event that eventually everyone has done and you’re back to square one just a year later.
• Further work on the client.
• Integrate the forums with the web.
• Experiment with some graphical maps overlayed in the Mushclient mini-windows.
• Build out races - v3 has a lot of potential for races that is not currently being used.
• Find new ways to promote and attract people to Aardwolf.

Would love to hear your feedback on this post in particular. What have we missed on the achievements/disappointments lists? What are some of the high and low points for you on Aardwolf in the past 6 months? What would you have liked to see mentioned that isn’t?

Subclass skills and spells
Several new subclass abilities were added this week. Details below:

Necromancer:

The spells ‘Strike undead‘ and ‘Blast undead‘ are like lower level versions of necrocide - they will always target the mobs lowest resistance and only work against undead.

Avenger:

The Avenger class has a new spell called Righteous Anger‘. While affected by this spell, all damage done by an avenger against someone who has wronged them will be doubled. The spell can be cast while in combat.

Shaman:

Shaman has a new ability called ‘Gaias Focus‘ which allows the Shaman to fix the damage type done by Gaias Revenge to one of the four types that are usually randomly chosen. It cannot be cast while Gaias revenge itself is up, but otherwise there is no recovery on it. The 4 damtypes are air, earth, cold and water. Syntax: cast ‘gaias focus’

Not new spells, but the durations of Totem Force and Totem Guidance have been increased to the point that Shaman with high wis and con will have periods during which the two can overlap.

Crafter:

While all rangers have the ability to skin corpses to make their own armor, experienced crafters are able to study the construction of a previously skinned piece of armor and rearrange it. A crafter will usually find a way to improve any skinned item, regardless of other enchantments that may have been placed on it. Once a crafter has studied and rearranged a skinned item it cannot be improved further.

The skill ‘reskin‘ randomly rearranges the stats on a skinned item and adds a random stat. The real value of this is that it will work no matter what other enchants have been used. It sets the recharged flag on the item - was no point using up a flag when recharged will work just fine for this. You must be at least the level of the item to reskin it.

Hunter:

The hunter class has a new skill called ambush‘. To use this skill, type ‘ambush [target]‘ - if a player or mob with the name [target] enters the room you will attempt to attack them. Abbreviations do not count, the full name or keyword must be used (on a mob with multiple keywords, only one full keyword is necessary). Normal attack restrictions apply so the attempt to attack them can fail for many reasons.

If the ranger moves while ambushing, the affect is removed. The ambush affect is also removed after an attempt on a target whether it is successful or not. You will notice that ‘affects’ shows the target of the ambush - this is the first affect of that type.

In terms of the target entering the room - ambush is checked when a character walks into a room, when a character arrives via a portal and when a mob resets. This does mean that you can attempt to ambush a mob that does not exist yet and will attack it upon repop.

If more than one character is attempting to ambush the same target in a room, the last one to walk into the room (regardless of order of ambush itself) goes first.

When a character is ambushed, they are incapacitated for a period of time based on their con and luck vs the ambushers con and luck, but a minimum of 5 seconds. A hunter cannot ambush another hunter - keep in mind that some mobs are hunters, and other mobs will _sometimes_ be hunters (if not assigned subclass is random at repop).

Oracle:

Oracle has a new spell called ‘Sense Danger‘ that has a change to show ambushes in an area. There is a chance to ’save’ the spell. When the spell is saved, the Oracle will still sense danger of some kind, but will not be able to determine specifics. As other features are added to the game that fit in this spell they will be added, right now it just detects ambushes.

Important MUD changes this reboot:

• Gold on hand, bank accounts, clan donated/taxed amounts and clan account themselves can now be over 2 billion. The limit is 50 billion, which can also be easily increased if needed.
• Entering an argument after ‘inventory’ will filter the list displayed to only items where either the keyword or name matches the argument. For example, ‘inv sword’ will show only items with sword in their keyword list or name.
• Access to the newbie channel now continues up to level 50. The limit of 200 hours online still applies.
• You can now see coordinates in Vidblain. Entry room is still random.
• Minor bug in call upon faith made strength weaker than the other stats, now fixed.

New Area: Onyx Bazaar

Ancient stone archways mark the entrance to a cavern of sensual delights and desperate despairs from the Land of Evilstar Coast. Off the Sea of the Horn, a casual shopping day can turn into a world of pain for some or a multitude of pleasures for others. Don’t forget to pay your respects to those in charge or surely you will lose everything you hold dear.

On Market day, those with the means, the will and the way, may enter the market and thrive, or die trying. What cannot be bought above can be both bought and sold in the Onyx Bazaar. Both buyers and sellers, beware!

3 other new goals were added:

The Port:

On the surface, the Port appears to be a peaceful seaside town, with little of interest to offer the average adventurer. But within the town’s underbelly, certain nefarious individuals are recruiting for
organized crime. Ambitious thieves may wish to pay a visit to The Port, but only if they have the skills and the stomach for it.

Black Lagoon:

Alas, there is a great scourge threatening the planet. Time is of the essence! Do you, great adventurer, have what it takes to make the perilous journey deep under the lagoon?

Nottingham:

Robin Hood and his Merry Band of Outlaws aren’t quite so merry. Maid Marion has been captured by the Sheriff and is languishing in his dungeon. Try as they may, they have been unable to get her released or rescued. Things look bleak indeed.

Unless there is a brave soul who might like to help? Defeat the Sheriff, rescue the damsel, all those things that sound like an old legend. Might you be the one to do this? Chances are there will be a reward. Unless
you’re one of those rich folks that oppress the needy!

Nottingham, where things are as simple as they seem. Or maybe not.

New Goals and Quests:

There are new goals and tasks in the following areas:

• The Death Gate - Lumina
• Sirens Oasis Resort - Nikkei
• Pet Store - Tymme
• Gallows Hill - Domain
• Gilda and the Dragon - Citron
• Island of Lost Time - Citron
• Faerie Tales 1- Citron

Each of these areas has a helpfile listing basic info on the goal.

Still looking for help converting other areas if anyone is interested.

• Campaign targets will now automatically be sorted by area when the campaign is requested for area type campaigns. Room name campaigns remain the same. (Ivru)

• There is a new wish - ‘wish for popularity’ adds 40 more friend slots.

• There are several new tags types (see ‘tags’ command) and the format change previously mentioned is now in place.

• Some shopkeepers buy nothing at all and are there only to sell, these remain the same. All other shopkeepers will now buy all item types.

• Whenever an item is sold to a shopkeeper, the price it will pay is reduced based on how many it already has. This reduction amount has been lowered - you will generally get more for duplicate items.

• The amount of gold shopkeepers replenish has been increased greatly. It took around 3.5 hours for a shopkeeper to go from 0 gold to full, now it takes about 30 minutes.

• Running with the new mapnames/mapexits tags on was not showing them, now fixed.

• Using ‘listen’ on a mob now uses ’sayto’ rather than ’say’, so only the person doing the listen sees it.

• ‘Quest reset’ is now a global alias to ‘qreset self’. (Feight)

• It was possible to steal 1 gold from mobs that don’t actually have any, ultimately leading to what you see below. Now fixed. (Felt)

• You get -1 gold coins from the hacked corpse of the High Priestess.

• Fixed ’seared by’ message not showing weapon name correctly. (Culpable)

• Blockexit was working even if you didnt have the skill yet. Now fixed. (Craven)

• Fixed trailing space issues in ‘find’ and ‘goal [whatever]‘. (Nulonna)

• Typing ‘rebuild’ with a third argument anything other than valid trains arguments will now give an error rather than proceed with a normal rebuild. (Starky)

• Minimum chance to succeed at blockexit (regardless of stats) reduced slightly. (Windu)

If you have been following this blog, you already know that we have been working on a custom version of Mushclient for Aardwolf with plugins pre-installed. As the work on the first version comes to a close, it has been a great learning experience on both sides - several improvements to both the MUD and the client itself were made as a result of this project.

One of the problems we consistently faced was how to handle configuration. If the MUD needs a player to have specific options on for a plugin to work, we have to make sure they’re actively in the game and at a prompt to send the commands to activate them. The alternative is relying on players to manage numerous tag and config settings themselves. This is not practical for new users.

To try to solve this, we experimented with various tags but it was never quite right. Nick suggested we look into the possibility of telnet negotiation and after some research we settled on using telnet code 102.

The first phase was to make the mud accept telnet 102 codes because most clients can send them. The general structure of a telnet sequence of this type is: IAC,SB,102,data,data,…,IAC,SE. To send these in Mushclient you do:

SendPkt (string.char (255, 250, 102, 5, 1, 255, 240)

To send the same in zmud:

#sendprompt %char(255)%char(250)%char(102)%char(5)%char(1)
%char(255)%char(240)

This tells the MUD to do something, as if you had entered a command. However, the point of this is that it happens at a level of communication lower than anything to do with commands, timeouts in the game or player state. It works completely independently of where your character is at.

The particular sequence above turns on channel tags. This would work if you were afk or in note mode. If you were at a login prompt (no character loaded yet), it would remember those flags and attach them to your character when you logged in. The only time this wouldn’t work is if you were link dead as there is no socket to receive the options. As the mushclient plugins initialize themselves on connection, this is not an issue.

For enabling plugins and making sure the player has the right tags on in the mud this is extremely helpful. Any client that can send the above codes can use these sequences. The list so far is provided below. To use any of these, send IAC,SB,102,option,1 or 2 (on or off), IAC,SE:

So, this solved the problem of the client being able to affect player settings in the mud without needing to care if they’re at a prompt to receive the commands. As a bonus, it also cuts out a lot of “spam” the player would see as output from regular commands sent to turn tags on for each plugin.

What it did not solve is the problem of how can the client know for sure whether you’re active, in note mode, during a login sequence or otherwise paused and unable to receive game commands. By default, clients would be able to send these sequences but not receive them - the client would eat them as telnet sequences not negotiated.

Nick decided this whole setup had enough value to other muds to be worth implementing in the client itself, and did so somewhat extensively. Plugins can listen to telnet 102 sequences and even “wake” and do something on receiving one. You can see his own post about how this was integrated into Mushclient by reading the Mushclient 4.31 release notes.

Having the client capable of receiving these telnet negotiation sequences means that the same can happen in reverse - Aardwolf can send status back to the client without the client having to trigger on anything.

For example, the tick timer in use in the custom Mushclient plugin is always in sync - it receives a telnet message on every tick regardless of the player being in note mode etc. For controlling plugins such as spellups, whenever you go from note mode to active mode to afk to sleeping, the client knows about it.

The telnet sequences being sent from the mud to the client, once type 102 negotiation has been completed, are:

Whenever the player switches from one of these states to the other, the codes are sent. These are easily extendable. For example, it probably makes sense to have a 100,8 which means “Sleeping/Resting”, although this information is already available in statmon.

The only other notification being sent from the mud to client via this mechanism at the time of writing is 101,1 which means “the mud just ticked”.

Unfortunately, for this half of the project, most clients won’t be able to make use of the messages unless the clients themselves are changed to negotiate receiving telnet 102 sequences then make the data available to their scripting engine. CMUD can accept arbitary telnet SB sequences (see comments), but is the only one I’m aware of other than Mushclient. If you know of others, please post in the comments.

The ‘102′ protocol has the potential to be extremely useful for many things between the client and the MUD server. As there is no fixed protocol after the 102, MUD owners could provide many messages available for consumption by players of their games interested in creating their own scripts.

This whole thing may not go any further than Aardwolf <–> Mushclient, or could become a new standard widely used. Either way, it is cool to have been part of creating something new like this and even if nobody else adopts it, we’ll get a lot of value out of it. More to follow…

So why, after all these years, an Aardwolf blog? Several reasons. There is a huge amount of activity taking place building out the MUD right now. A lot of this activity is not worth announcing until finalized, but many people are interested in what we’re up to. A blog will be the perfect place to talk about that.

Having a blog will also allow us to cover a level of detail on changes and the reasons behind them that would not be appropriate for the announcement board.

Finally, reposting announcements to the blog will allow people to subscribe via RSS to see what is changing in the MUD.

The design needs a lot of work at the moment, but as you can see, will basically be the same style as the Aardwolf web page.

I decided to require user registration before comments can be posted. There is no value to anyone if I spend half my life tracking down spam rather than working on the MUD.

Well, that’s about it. Comments welcome. Good idea? Bad idea?