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                    JOURNAL FOR FRIDAY 13TH DECEMBER, 2019
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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


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