Aardwolf MUD Blog

Chaos Portal Changes:

• When a navigator casts chaos portal, if their first attempt is a continent they will try again. This does not mean they won’t hit a continent room, it’s just a second chance not to. There is no new skill/spell for this, it is just part of the Chaos Portal spell. If a navigator wants the chance to land a continent, they can add the argument ‘continent’ to the cast.

• Blank chaos portals are now available as a tpspend option for 5 trivia points. The syntax is ‘tpspend bcp’.

• There are some new types of blank chaos portals. These are random when buying chaos portals with tpspend and when using ‘merge chaos’. They are also rare, and only a navigator can turn them into active CPs.Silver : Impossible to land on a continent, areas only. Still sets ownership.

Platinum : Chaos portal has a 50% chance for the target to be the room the navigator is standing in. Does not set ownership. When the room is not the room navigator is standing in, continent room still impossible.

Diamond : Chaos portal will always be to the room the navigator is standing in, will always turn into a golden cp and will not set ownership. These are incredibly rare, you may never see one. Then again, you could see one the day after reboot, all down to chance.

When using silver and platinum, existing chances for the final CP to be golden are not affected.

Ranger - Merge Chaos:

Nature is Chaos, Rangers understand Nature. Crafters in particular understand the chaotic nature of certain artificts found within Andolor and can recyle a small amount of magic from those artifacts into a
new creation.

Basically, the spell ‘Merge chaos’ allows a ranger to combine 5 existing chaos portals into a new blank chaos portal. Extremely powerful rangers may even be able to lower the number of portals required.

Great care must be taken when using this spell to make sure you don’t accidentally destroy CPs you don’t intend to. When you cast ‘merge chaos’ the code will check your inventory for 5 unkept chaos portals and list them. If you don’t have enough it will tell you. Study the list carefully and make sure these really are the portals you want to merge, then use the syntax cast ‘merge chaos’ confirm to complete the spell.

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Other Code - Main Changes:

Campaigns:

Superheros can now take a new campaign each day. There are some differences between SH campaigns and regular campaigns:

• There will be more targets to kill.
• Every now and then, the level range will be completely random and
  not restricted to SH mobs.
• The 24 hour timer starts from when you request a cp. So if you take
  more than a day to finish your current CP, you’ll be able to do another
  one right away.

Pk:

By default, a player using area attacks will no longer initiate PK with another player. Once you are in combat, they will work fine. A player should attack someone because they wan’t to, or in response to someone in-range attacking them - not get tricked into attacking massively higher level outlaws / raiders. If you want to make an area attack include ALL targets in the room including potential pk targets, add ‘all’ to the
cast - for example ‘cast ultrablast all’ or ‘charge n all’.

Spells/Skills modified for this are: Earthquake, Hand of Justice, Ice Storm, Ultrablast, Ice Cloud, Wrath of God, Call Lightning, Death Field, Fire Breath, Fire Rain, Purge, Toxic Cloud, Charge.

Goals:

Just one new goal this reboot - the infamous Helegear Sea converted by Ariel.

Navigator Spell:

Navigator has a new spell called ‘timeshifting’. When this spell is up, each time the player’s lag is checked, it has a chance to reduce the lag a little. The overall effect is that they will recover from spellups slightly faster, be able to cast in combat slightly faster, etc. The downside is that the Navigator can only manipulate time once - the ‘timeshift’ dodge does not work while this spell is up.

Other:

• Gamestat 10 shows subclasses of players online, broken out by primary
  class.
• Desolation at the high end of stats (>450) is now more powerful. You
  won’t notice any difference at lower stats. (Cordelia)
• Increased the base damage on Gaia’s Revenge a little.
• This was mentioned on general board a few days ago - reconnecting no
  longer bypasses any skill lag or lag from other commands. It does still
  clear client-side command queue, nothing I can do about that.
• Options to the goals command:
• goals notdone : Shows goals you haven’t completed yet. (Bremen)
  goals new : Goals you haven’t completed OR opened yet. (Atreidess)
• For quite a while you have been able to lock/unlock a door if the key for
  the door had been left in the room by another person. You can now do the
  same with container. (Tsubaki)
• Ravi now uses sayto instead of “say” for all feedback. (Cecil)
• Have renamed the ‘Craftsman’ skill to ‘Crafter’.
• Mobs in the room can prevent pick lock or bashdoor. This was also
  happening if the mob was a pet or charmed mob. Now fixed. (Sirene)
• Most v2 clanskills will now show sfail tags on not known or already
  affected. Most v1 clanskills that add affects are not actually considered
  ’skills’ by the code so there is no skill number to report. These are
  going to be more complex to change. (Ninja)
• If you have the identify wish, identifying an item by an means (appraise,
  bid, etc) will show the full information of the item. (Jaenelle)

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.

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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!

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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.

Subclass skills and spells
The subclass project is now moving again. The first group to come in is below. The amount of new abilities each reboot will depend on time available and complexity of individual skills/spells, but you shouldsee steady progress now. Also, don’t assume a group of abilities coming in for a class mean it is considered done.

Note: Very abbreviated descriptions. For full information see the helpfiles on individual skills/spells.

Navigator:

The spell ‘beacon of homecoming‘ creates a beacon in the room that a navigator can return to by casting the ‘homecoming‘ spell.

The homecoming spell itself can be used from a norecall room but NOT a prison room. So, you can use a beacon to port into a prison room but not out of one. When a navigator uses homecoming, group members in the room are also transported. This is useful for groups, but also means you should take care when grouping with a navigator as you can never be sure where they will port you to.

The spell ‘beacon of light‘ creates a beacon in the room that allows a navigator to find a path to from anywhere in the same area. The path has to be huntable, but otherwise works just like ‘find’.

The skill ‘navigate‘ is used by navigators to find the path to their beacon in an area. The syntax is ‘navigate beacon‘. Although this is the only use for navigate right now I may add other things to it later on,
so might as well get people used to using the full syntax from the start.

The command ‘beacons‘ will show a navigator where their beacons are and the time remaining.

There is no recovery on homecoming/navigate, only on actually creating the beacons. Beacons also do not save so quitting / reboots will remove them.

Hunter:

The hunter subclass has the ability ‘pathfind pet‘. If their pet is in the area, and a path can be reached via hunt, it will be shown.

Necromancer:

Necromancy is a tricky business, the dead don’t always want to be brought back and often attack their would be master. Over the years a successful necromancer will become well practiced in dispatching the undead back to wherever dead things go.

Necromancer has a new attack spell called ‘necrocide‘. This spell is can only be used to harm a mob flagged undead or a vampire, but when used the damage type will always be whatever the target is the most vulnerable to. This not only increases damage, but means the chance of the spell being “saved” is also lower.

Necromancer has a new spell called ‘Detect Undead‘. When this spell is up, undead will show in the room with either (U) or (Undead) depending on your flag settings.

Evoker:

Odins Spear - basically immolate with lightning type damage. Not *all* subclass abilities need to be complex.

Oracle:

The spell ‘Eye of passage‘ will show which key opens a locked door. It only works on locked doors - even if an open door is usually locked. It does not work in clanhalls and you must be at least the level of the
low end of the area range for it to work.

The spell ‘Eye of discovery‘ can be cast on self or another target and will display a random unexplored room. It has a 30 minute recovery that is reduced a little by wisdom.

There was debate on whether to put these live at all yet. They are hardly going to incite everyone to rush to Oracle, but that doesn’t mean useful little additions can’t be added along the way.

Part of the reason for starting this blog was to give more detail on the background of things that will never be announced on the live port because they are “behind the scenes”. This post covers some changes to the Lua integration. If you’re not interested in the building / Lua side of the MUD, skip this post.


New Lua MUD function: getobj
The function ‘getobj’ works similar to getmob/getroom and can search in a room, on a character or inside another item. Full syntax with examples can be seen at:

Getobj Lua Function Documentation / Examples

New Object Properties available in Lua:

Property	Description
obj.aname	Returns the object name with A/AN/THE on the front of the object name removed, but with color codes intact. Useful for constructing messages containing the object name without running into problems such as “The a long sword glows brightly.”
obj.room	ROOM var if the item is in a room or NIL.
obj.char	CH var if the item is on a character, or NIL.
obj.inside	OBJ var if the item is in a container, or NIL.
obj.root	The top level container if the item is insider another container. Returns a copy of itself if not in a container.
obj.loctype	Used to check the type of location an item is in. See below for list of values.

obj.loctype returns one of :

Value	Description
OBJ_LOC_PLAYER	Object is on a player
OBJ_LOC_MOB	Object is on a mob
OBJ_LOC_ROOM	Object is in a room.
OBJ_LOC_CONTAINER	Object is in a container.
OBJ_LOC_NOWHERE	Object is nowhere (auction or bug)

New Lua Object Trigger Type: Expire
There is a new object trigger type : ‘expire’. If an item has a timer, any Lua scripts attached to an expire trigger will be executed just before the item is removed from the game.

Most of these changes were added to make use of the expire trigger type. You need to be able to know where an item is when it expires to decide what to do. You might want an item to damage everyone in the room or blow up a door to the north (open it) when it expires, but need to know if it is actually in a room first. Another item may have an expire script that does something to a player holding it - before proceeding you need to be able to make sure the item is actually being carried by someone.

To see the infamous exploding pie triggers and how simple they are, check out the bottom of:

Lua MUD Object Prog Documentation

Please note that rawDamage is not yet tested or documented and should not be used until announced.

Two new commands related to speedwalks were added to the MUD this morning:

Runto Command:

The runto command provides basic speedwalk capability using the directions listed in the ’speedwalks’ command.

When standing at the Aylor recall, typing ‘runto [area keyword]‘ will execute the speedwalk to that area.

From anywhere in an area that has find locations, ‘runto [find location]‘ will execute the speedwalk to that location. For example, from anywhere in Aylor you can type ‘runto bank’ to go directly to the bank.

As some find locations and area names/keywords overlap, the order of priority when using runto is:

- exact match on area keyword
- exact match on find location in current area
- partial match on area name/keyword
- abbreviation of find location in current area.

To see a list of speedwalks with keywords use ’speedwalks keywords’

To see a list of find locations in your area, use ‘find all’

Runprefix Command:

The runprefix command is used with runto to add default start commands before a ‘runto’ to an area is executed.

For example, if your default recall is a private manor and the path from your manor to Aylor recall is west then north, you could use:

runprefix run wn

This would mean that runto now works from your manor.

If you use an aard amulet with serial number 123456, you could make your runprefix:

runprefix hold (123456;enter

Because some clients will interpret the semicolon character themselves, you can also use a comma or tilde (~) in a run prefix and they will be converted to semi-colons.

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5 new goals were added:

Sundered Vale:
An aid worker has traveled from Aylor to the Vale to help out. Unfortunately, she doesn’t seem to be able to find her way through the destruction. Travel to the Sundered Vale and see if you can help.

Arisian Realm:
The city of Arisia has long prospered under the aegis of the Goddess, and her whims have steered the leaders of this fair city for centuries. Not so many years ago, Arisia rose up in war against her sister city, Eddore, in retaliation for offenses against the Goddess.

Now once again, the Goddess is displeased, and it’s up to a bold adventurer to find and solve the problem. Find your way to her sacred Sphere, and speak to the Crystal Dolphin who contains her power.

Unearthly Bonds:
The realm of Unearthly Bonds is a Guild where humans and dragons join together in lifelong partnership. The Guild House is spread over a large area containing a pristine lake, meadows, classrooms, and pavilions.

However, as with any place, a criminal element has taken root underground. Criminals venture forth, and now a necklace has gone missing. Should you choose to help, you will be deputized to find and return the stolen necklace.

Drageran Empire:
Welcome to the Empire. The land lives in a careful balance between peace and war. However something threatens to disrupt that balance. An assassin has appeared in the Empire. But who is the target? That is less clear. You are hereby recruited to find the assassin and rescue the target.

Aardwolf Zoological Park:
The Aardwolf Zoological Park is filled with wonderous animals of every sort. Ever wanted to come face to face with the Grendel, or pet the silky soft fur of a chinchilla? Well, now’s your chance.

Unfortunately, it’s vacation time for Aardwolf, and all the snotty, platter-faced brats and arrogant, snide teens are out in force at the zoo, and only one of the Zookeepers is doing his job. Head on over to the Manager’s office to see if you can lend a hand!

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Other Minor Changes:

• There is a new command called ‘glance’ which is basically the same as ‘look’ but does not show room desc or map. (Cera)
• Navigators casting doorway can now reach level 200/201 characters. All other checks still apply.
• Removed lag on ‘page’ when the target is yourself. (Rathik)
• With spelltags, true seeing was not giving ‘already affect’ tags when you alread have all the detects, making it constantly try to recast.

Short post because most of the content is elsewhere. A basic test version of object progs in Lua is now on the test port. Full details are on the Lua coding page : Lua MUD object progs

With this type of trigger now in place, it makes sense to revisit room progs and command blocking to add the new types of prog.

We had a full reboot this evening. The main reason for the reboot was some extensive upgrading done to the goal system. The new ‘tasklog’ system gets the goal interface overall close to where it needs to be. Time to move on and start subclasses again. In the meantime, the announcements posted in the MUD are:

Tasks Command:
The goal/task system has been rewritten to help with the problem of keeping
track of hints you get at various stages. The ‘tasks’ command now shows a
summary of hints as you unlock them, making it much easier to work with.
Full details on this can be seen at:

Background information on the taskhint system

To see the old abbreviated list, use the ‘tasklist’ command instead.

Additional new arguments to ‘tasks’ are:

tasks : see all open tasks.
tasks here : see open tasks in current area.
tasks : see open tasks for a goal.
tasks all : see all tasks for a goal.
tasks : see a single goal task.

Goals Command:
The ‘goals’ command now shows all visible goals (there are none hidden at
time of writing).

If the argument to goals exactly matches a goal keyword, you will still
get the goal detail page for that goal. Otherwise, new options are:

‘goals open’ : Show only open goals.
‘goals completed’ : Show only completed goals’.
‘goals [from] [to]‘ : Filter by level range.
‘goals ‘ : Search based on a name.

The default sort is by level, these options can be combined with any of
the above:

‘goals … byname’ : Sort by name.
‘goals … byrating’ : Sort by difficulty.

The number of goals completed also now shows in score under quest time.

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2 new areas were added:

Cloud City of Gnomalin:
Stories are told of an ancient race of short, stumpy little people who stole children and left gifts. The legend says that they were always about, but hidden from ordinary sight. Over the centuries their population diminished until most thought gnomes were the stuff of fantasy or the imaginary playmates of children. Recently, however, evidence of the existence of gnomes has appeared in the southern reaches of the mesolar. In the midst of a grassy field, a flattened area is sometimes occupied by a huge airship designed and constructed by the gnomes to transfer cargo and visitors to the city held within the clouds above. Quite amazingly, the city seems to hold together just fine, although the wind does cause slight shifts in the walls now and then. Venture forth, then, and brave the flight. The Cloud City of Gnomalin awaits you.

Adaldar:
Long ago, in the beginning of time, Mannyn the High God swept his hand across his realm, creating two powerful people who were to live in harmony with one another the Elves and the Trolls were born. Mannyn had 2 sons, Aethoryn and the eldest, Gleon. Mannyn, after countless centuries of ruling his domain, began to tire. He wanted to move out and see the world. He finally decided it was time to leave, he placed the control of his lands in the hands of his two sons, and quietly left. It wasn’t long before Gleon (being the Eldest) started to covet his brothers half, he felt that succession should have fallen completely into his hands. Gleon gathered the Trolls and formed them into an army, launching them against the elves. Aethoryn horrified by his brothers actions, quickly united the elvish tribes under one banner, and formed up for defense of the lands and cities.

War has raged for countless years, Manynn finally returned to reclaim his kingdom, but instead, he found a battlefield, he visited his sons, and after asking them what had happened, they ignored him, war continuesto rage.

The stock areas New Ofcol and Circus were removed. New Ofcol because Gnomalin replaces it, and Circus because it was linked in New Ofcol and the number of people using the area was close to zero. Removing all stock areas is still the plan, with the exception of Descent to Hell and the Underdark. There were both Farside areas which we have permission to continue using.

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2 new goals also came in this reboot:

The Dwarven Kingdom was redone by Arial to add a nice new low level goal.

The Amusement Park is different than most of the goals, it’s just meant to be fun on the rides. Most of the rides/games are also playable after you complete the goals.

Both of these goals also have unique rewards that you might not even notice what they are right away … but are very useful in a number of situations.

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Other Minor Changes:

• There is a new command called ‘rawcolors’. Turning this on will make the MUD send all output to you with color codes on. Useful for cut/ pasting with color, but I wouldn’t try to play that way.

• With spelltags, true seeing was not giving ‘already affect’ tags when you alread have all the detects, making it constantly try to recast.

Feedback welcome as always. Particularly interesting in your thoughts on the new ‘goals’ and ‘tasks’ commands. I personally found Hotel Orlando and All in a Fayke Day much more fun to go through with the task logs tracking the hints.

It’s been quite a day. We are now live on the new server at Softlayer in Dallas and not in the middle of Florida during hurricane season. The MUD’s new IP address is 208.43.193.234, but by the time anyone is reading this, aardmud.org DNS should have been updated for everyone.

The website was moved earlier in the week and the test port / builder’s port have been off site for a few weeks now. So this is it, once we get a comfort level with stability, the T1 can go. Overlapping costs for a month or two is a pain, but worth it to make sure the MUD is in good hands at Softlayer before being fully committed. The Aardwolf.com website and the test port are at Liquidweb in Lansing, Michigan. Hopefully this means a situation in which both are down would be extremely unusual.

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3 new goals also came in with the reboot:

• All in a Fayke Day which is a very detailed and complex quest and definitely earns its ‘difficult’ rating.

• ST:TNG which is smaller and more straightforward quest, but still has a couple of twists and an optional bonus extra.

• Rosewood Castle which is a remake of Amador to lose the Wheel of Time theme. Not that there is anything wrong with the Wheel of Time, but we’d like to work out the areas based on other’s intellectual property over time and it made sense to change this one while it was being converted for goals. ST:TNG on the other hand would be a complete rewrite of the area - that one can wait.

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Flash Client Improvements
We also put online some enhancements to the Flash client made by Matt Adcock:

• The client now supports ; for command separation, making it much more useful for pasting speedwalks into.

• There is a split-screen mode for reading scrollback more conveniently.

As always, feedback is welcome. Is anyone reading this, or is the time better spent on the MUD itself?

Enough has been written about the client already, so this is just an announcement that it is finally live.

Check out the screenshot below, hard to believe it is even a mud:

The following links give all the necessary info on the client:

Aardwolf client download page

List of available plugins

Aardwolf client screenshots

Client help and FAQ

Comments, bug reports, etc welcome…

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.

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Other game changes this reboot include:

• 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.

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Shop changes:

• 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.

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Other minor changes this reboot include:

• 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)