Up to Main Index                             Up to Journal for March, 2020

                    JOURNAL FOR THURSDAY 12TH MARCH, 2020
______________________________________________________________________________

SUBJECT: Dragon’s breath tavern regains its sanctuary status
   DATE: Thu 12 Mar 23:42:22 GMT 2020

This week a very productive WolfMUD Wednesday and Thursday — I have an update
to the public dev branch to prove it :)

As the title of this post says the dragon’s breath tavern has regained it’s
status as a sanctuary for players. This means no hitting other players, or
fighting in general, in the tavern. There are also two peaceful, sheltered
areas in the garden that are also sanctuaries. In addition, the city guards
will prevent fighting if they are lurking around.

This is possible because the HIT command can now be vetoed by a location or
anything at the location. There is a new pseudo command COMBAT which the HIT
command also checks for. This will allow for a more general way of preventing
fighting instead of having to check for specific commands like HIT, ATTACK,
KILL etc. However, vetoing COMBAT will not prevent all of the different ways a
player could harm another player in the future ;)

I’ve also been fixing some of the glitches.

Players can no longer hang around in the main menu to regenerate health. I’ve
also fixed a bug where players did not have at least one point of health when
re-entering the game world after being killed.

The code for putting the health statistics into the player’s prompt has been
overhauled. By popular demand the ‘short’ prompt now only displays the current
health and not the maximum health as well. The current health in ‘short’ or
‘long’ mode is also colour coded: Green if over 75%, Yellow if over 25% and
red if below 25%.

The data/zones/zinara.wrj file has been updated for the changes to the tavern,
garden and city guards. If you have your own zone files please see the file
docs/upgrading.txt for some help.

At some point I really should clean up the zone files and remove test items
and such.

All of the above changes are now available on the public dev branch.

What’s next? Hrm… I’m thinking maybe being able to hold, wear and wield items.
This will involve adding bodies for players and mobiles so we know what slots
are available. The Java version had a very versatile body system which people
liked a lot. For example, a typical humanoid would have: HEAD, SHOULDERS,
CHEST, UPPER ARM, LOWER ARM, HAND, FINGER, UPPER ARM, LOWER ARM, HAND, FINGER,
WAIST, UPPER LEG, LOWER LEG, FOOT, UPPER LEG, LOWER LEG, FOOT. If you wanted
more detail you could also add EYE, EAR, NOSE etc. You could also add small
and giant versions of each. For example, so a dwarf could not wear a giant’s
armour. Not to be forgotten creatures could also have CLAWS, TAIL, TENTACLE,
SNOUT, etc.

So, if you had a breast plate that required SHOULDERS and CHEST and the slots
are free you can wear it. This also means that if a bow required HAND and HAND
and you had a living statue with four arms it would automatically be able to
use two bows. If a player was to get into a fight it was possible to lose a
hand — so no more bows for them, crossbows however…

--
Diddymus


  Up to Main Index                             Up to Journal for March, 2020