Up to Main Index Up to Journal for December, 2019 JOURNAL FOR FRIDAY 13TH DECEMBER, 2019 ______________________________________________________________________________ SUBJECT: En garde! DATE: Fri 13 Dec 19:37:42 GMT 2019 I have been asked, very politely, to stop fiddling with code that works and to move on to adding some new features to WolfMUD. “While the recent improvements are nice, can’t they wait?”, “Can’t we have more new stuff please?” and so on… My goal of the recent improvements was to make sure the foundations are solid before piling a lot of work on top of it. If more features were added now and it later turns out there are problems — that’s a lot more code to fix :( However, it has been quite a while since anything new, especially for players, was added. How about we look at adding combat? :) Getting from where WolfMUD is now to a working combat system is going to require adding a lot of new features. Combat involves: health, health regeneration, food, eating, armour, weapons and damage. Items can effect health, damage inflicted and received. Skills can effect health, armour and weapons. Resource spenders can contribute bonuses, penalties, attacks and defences. Note that a resource spender in a fantasy setting is typically ‘mana’ and is used when casting spells and performing magic. It could just as easily be mental skills, paranormal abilities or something else depending on the setting. WolfMUD is pretty agnostic when it comes to creating your own worlds. There is no reason why different resource pools couldn’t exist in the same world based on a character’s race or profession. What would complicate things a lot is one character with multiple resource pools. Hrm, something to consider while adding features… Then there are fun things like missile attacks where you can attack things from a distance, like in the next room: bows and arrows, thrown daggers and axes, fireballs :) Other things to consider are friends and enemies — mobiles will never attack friends and will always attack enemies. I’m not sure what order I’ll be adding the new features. The basics are a good place to start: I want to be able to pick up a sword and hit something with it. That will require attributes for health, some basic weapons, combat events and what happens when something dies. One interesting feature of combat in WolfMUD is that one opponent will always land a hit. There are no “You take a swing at Diddymus and miss.” messages. This makes combat faster and more exciting. Each opponent always has a chance to hit — even a novice has a one in a million chance to hit a sword master. Each year I try to pick a little project to work on for the Xmas break. This is going to be my project for this year :) -- Diddymus Up to Main Index Up to Journal for December, 2019