Kooneiform

Rather than revising the last post with mechanics revisions and updates I’ll put them in new posts.

Goal: An achievement the character strives for. Example: assassinate the mayor of Seattle.

Goal: An achievement the player strives for. Example: my character will die a spectacular death.

The mush is consent-based, but in the event that players want to judge a conflict with dice, players do this:

1. roll a d10.

2. add bonuses. Ability ratings give: good +1, elite +2, legendary +3. Prop give: special +2, rare +4, unique +6.

2. add bonuses. Ability ratings give: good +1, elite +3, legendary +6

I realized that the original bonus spread did not work well with how much it actually costs to buy good, elite, and legendary abilities.

Here is the foundation of many of the posts that will follow; I need it here to refer to later.

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Alan Schwartz, AKA Javelin of PennMUSH, just released the first in I hope a long series of quality podcasts about mushes. Check it out:

http://community.pennmush.org/node/397

Raph Koster threw down a pretty good post today. In the light of developing this RP mush (if you don’t know a RP (roleplay) mush is a mud with less emphasis on coded systems and more emphasis on player collaboration, storytelling, etc.) I’m thinking about these very concepts:

• space
• persistence
• users

Space is at the top of the list and the top of my mind lately. Historically space in a mush game has gone through some twists and turns, from the free-for-all anything goes topologies of early social mushes, to strictly laid out game grids, to dynamic space creating and destroying rooms to save on DB space while simulating a huge world, to RP ’stages’ and philosophies that decried large grids as a RP killer.

While I agree in principal with the idea of RP stages, I don’t think it takes advantage of the space that you can represent in a mush game. However some mush players are not interested in typical mud areas, zork-like adventures, or anything so rigidly defined. So the idea would be to take advantage of the mush space without really representing the game world as either a straight-up grid or a series of interconnected stages (which, when you get down to it, is just a game grid anyway).

To go off on a tangent: forgetting about the virtual physical space for a second, take a look at Raph Koster’s list of what we talk about when we talk about space:

* distance
* vectors
* relationships
* sizes
* eyelines

How could you transform these concepts to suit the strengths of a mush game?

One word: Shock.

Shock: Social Science Fiction is a fiction game of culture and future shock. Based on the works of Bruce Sterling, Kim Stanley Robinson, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Philip K. Dick, the game pushes the players to make stories that matter to them — stories about politics, philosophy, love, and death.

I’m kind of….uh, amazed that this theme describes the mush I have in mind pretty well. The Shock system even uses some of the same mechanic concepts I’ve come up with so far.

I’ve yet to get my copy of the game, but one thing that leapt out at me from reading the reviews is the description of the Grid, a table of issues (e.g. morality) across the top row and shocks (e.g. religious domination, basically an aspect of the future world) down the left column. Players occupy the intersections of issues and shocks, and each player has narrative control over some issue and/or shock. So basically you have a web of players on this grid; you can define relationships, vectors, distances.

This system looks really good — there are a lot of things that could suit a mush. I’ll have to give a detailed review later.

So I’m thinking about making a mush. What do you need to build the basic infrastructure?

Of course my need ain’t your need, but that’s a given, right. So, what do you need?

• A box to put it in

As I wrote before I’ve set up Ubuntu on an extra 500 MHZ, 256 MB PII Thinkpad 600x. This should be adequate for development work.

• A game server

Your main options are Rhost, Tiny, Penn and MUX; some others are Pern and Cobra (?). Penn and Mux are pretty similar and what I’m most familiar with, and I like MUX a little better for the way it’s chat and mail systems are set up. Penn has a nice community site at community.pennmush.org. There are other more fundamental differences but I believe for my purposes they aren’t deal-breakers either way. I think I would go with MUX.

• Backup and recovery plan

Definitely daily backups on the box. Once a week to something offbox — once a month to something off-site?

• Version control

Which I know next to nothing about (this will become a common refrain). I’ll make it easy on myself and say my choice is between CVS and Subversion, though I’ve heard good things about Perforce as well (free for up to two users). Let’s say I go with Subversion. There are a few clients out there to use as well, for example pysvn. Check out a big list at the Subversion site. And oh yeah, the MUX team uses google.code, hence subversion. I expect I’ll be using version control much more for mushcode than the MUX server files themselves, which leads me to…

• Mushcode unformatter

This is mushcode:

&COMMAND_WHO+Commands_Executioner=$who:@pemit%#=%r[ansi(r,[repeat(*,77)])]%r[ansi(hw,[center([mudname()],77,%b)])]%r[ansi(r,[repeat(*,77)])]%r%b[ansi(hw,On For:[ansi(g,|)][ansi(hw,[center(Name,17)])][ansi(g,|)][ansi(hw,Status)][ansi(g,|)][ansi(hw,%b%bFaction%b%b)][ansi(g,|)][ansi(hw,%b%b%bSpecies%b%b%b)][ansi(g,|)][ansi(hw,OC**FC)][ansi(g,|)][ansi(hw,%b%b%bIdle%b%b)])]%r[ansi(g,[repeat(-,8)]+[repeat(-,17)]+[repeat(-,6)]+[repeat(-,11)]+[repeat(-,13)]+[repeat(-,6)]+[repeat(-,10)])][iter(u(fn_who_list,%#),[u(code_who,##)])]%r[ansi(r,[repeat(*,77)])][ansi(hw,)]%r[ansi(r,*)][mid(ljust(get_eval(#24/who_msg),75),0,75)][ansi(r,*)]%r[ansi(r,[repeat(*,77)])][ansi(hw,)]>
A mushcode unformatter lets you write that code so your eyes don’t bleed, and then turn it into the glob above to quote into your mush — your mush doesn’t want to see formatted code.

There are a couple of unformatters available. Adam Dray wrote Formatted Softcode at Electric Soup a couple of years ago, and some of the links to the unformatter scripts still work (except his own script, which now resides at http://adam.legendary.org/index.php/Unformat).

• MySQL

I’m finally convinced that a mux should use MySQL (the only relational DB I have any familiarity with, there must be others, right? But I’ll just say, use MySQL). Not necessarily to run the game, but definitely as a back end you can periodically dump files into. The nice thing here is when you build your website, you can use…

• MediaWiki

The advantage of MediaWiki is it’s a great place to put all your help files, bulletin board info, really whatever information you have in the game server, and let’s you easily create user permissions so your players can build pages for their characters, post logs, right in the same place. I know that I like to have a website where I can read up on the game. Navigating a lot of help files on a MUX server kind of blows. Another alternative would be something like the Postnuke CMS. Both can pull files from the MySQL DB.

Currently if you send a MySQL request to the MUX server, it blocks other commands until the DB responds. This could be a problem — though several games using this setup so far are doing OK by all reports. However one alternative would be to run a job once a night to refresh the DB for the website, so your website would update daily. Good enough in my book and avoids the single thread problem. MUX is looking to add some alternatives in the future, so it seems like setting up with MySQL and MediaWiki would be a wise long-term investment.

• Backbone code

Any mush should have certain systems in place before you start to do anything. By systems I mean mushcode or hardcode systems (i.e., written in the server language C and C++ and compiled). Here is what you want:

• @mail
• +jobs, a job tracking system in the game
• a bulletin board
• a +help system — +help covers your game, help covers the MUX server help

You may want a web-based set of forums as well for development, but I think for now you can get away with an on-game bb — especially because you’re the only one who’ll be working on it. At some point this post has devolved to me talking to myself. Perhaps this should be expected.

• Oh wait, I forgot about the game

Yeah, the whole point is to make a mush game, right? So I need two things: a design document with two parts, theme and mechanics (in other words the setting and the system), and a style guide, that includes topics like code conventions and typography standards that I can use as a game bible. Accompanying these docs is a graph of…

• Milestones

Schedule, roadmap, targets, whatever — you want to know when you have to hit the ground with what to keep the train rolling.

Did I miss anything? Man, that’s a lot of work.

Edit:

Adam Dray added some things over at Electric Soup

* A player request system.
* An email registration system.
* An ic/ooc system.
* Tools for organizing the Master Room.
* Tools for organizing parent objects.
* “Old standard” globals: +who, +where, +finger.

Picked up my copy of Second Person today. It looks really good!

And to top it all off, I got the Ubuntu book Ubuntu Linux for non-geeks. Maybe I’ll print myself a ‘non-geek’ sticker. The upshot of the story is that I’m writing this post from my new Ubuntu gnome desktop! Ubuntu 6.06 installed flawlessly on my (1999) 600x. Everything works. My wireless card even works better than it did under Windows 2000. Go figure.

Anyway, I’m not planning at the moment to use this system for IF, but I do have a notion to get a mush server running….the thrills never stop.

Can I say that IFMapper knows how to zoom in? Brill.

http://ifmapper.rubyforge.org/start.html#What%20is%20IFMapper

In the process of building for Karinth I am remembering two things:

1. I love graph paper
2. There’s got to be a program that can do this.

Seriously, I love graph paper, and it’s an excellent break from sitting at the keyboard to go sit in my rocking chair (yes, I am 80 years old) with my folder and write (in pencil) in my area map pages.

However to give you an idea of why I wonder about (2) above let me tell you about how I go about building the area. First of course I think of about ten ideas and run it by the imps on the mud. We choose one and I send them a short proposal on that. When I get the go ahead I draw a rough (non-graphy) map and get an idea of exactly how many rooms. Then I ask for enough vnums (number of vnums = number of possible rooms) plus a little wiggle room.

Now I draw the map precisely on graph paper, usually drawing each room 2×2 on 4 sqs/inch (4 sqs/2.5cm) with connecting exits. I map the area on the mud and write in the vnums of each room on my graph.

But the mapping isn’t done yet. On any size area this 2×2/room map is fairly small. So I divide the map into reasonable sections and re-map at a larger scale (or smaller scale to be precise). For example, on my current area I have six pages of graph maps, including the overall 2×2sq/room map. On the section maps I add room names, special notes, mob repops, anything I would want to remember, or any idea that strikes me that I want to write down immediately.

As you can imagine this method, despite being fun for getting down into the physical artifacts of pencil and paper, has serious drawbacks and wastes some time over using a program that could zoom in, hold notes in a transferable form, etcetera. So I ask myself, where is this program?

It must be out there, if not as a mudding or RPG tool then as a general graphing or organizational application. I should take another look at the ascii map programs for muds, but I don’t remember them having the ability to zoom in a map to see all the fine detail at once — that’s what I really like about the method I use.

Sometimes muds and IF advance like phases of different moons, at one point I’m ruled by one or the other. After playing Karinth for a while (why don’t I check — 75 hours, to be precise), I applied for a builder bit and so right now I’m deep into area design.

This means my IF game is on the back burner for the moment. If everything goes as planned I should be back on it next month. It does mean I’ll miss Spring Thing though — such is life — but Greg Boettcher did just announce that the deadline for Spring Thing has been extended, so why not give it a go if you can?

But I’m really getting into the area I’m building for Karinth. I have a few ideas about level flow and layout I want to try, see what happens. Also it’s always fun to push mob progs as far as they’ll go. It’s times like these I wish there was a fun ROM-like mud coupled with a full on IF language like TADS 3. Or why not I7? That would be a trick.

OK. For the last couple of months I wasn’t playing any muds. In fact I went so far as to delete all my mud bookmarks and shortcuts. I had reached some point where boredom and the realization I was wasting a lot of time staring at mud forums combined itself into an anti-mud brew I pretty much forced down for my own good.

Well for better or worse I’ve pretty much coughed up the last of that potion. Despite the fact that I think I know better, I’m still fascinated by text games. This fascination was thrown in high relief recently when a neighbor loaned us his Playstation and I put in some heavy time on Tony Hawk and Splinter Cell. These were the first console games I had played in probably a decade. Since I don’t play many PC games either I had suspected I was in something of a text aficionado bubble. However while these were good games, they in no way left text games in the dust. Though it was fun to customize my skater. I don’t think I’m unusual in that I love to read and write and I like games. I don’t know, maybe if I loved to draw and paint I would be playing WoW. Somehow I doubt it.

Getting back into mud world I wrote a post on TMC looking for a mud to build on. While I haven’t started building yet, as a result of the post I did start playing an excellent ROM, Legends of Karinth. If you’re into DIKU-likes I highly recommend it.

The title of this post sounds like it’s setting up a death match or something though that’s not really the case. But while I’ve been playing Karinth I’ve been thinking about God Wars II. I played GW II for a little while last year. There is no doubt in my mind that GW is an incredible mud. Basically, if you’ve never seen it, GW II is the implementation of many of those ideas you’ve see thrown around on mud design forums in the last few years. Many people talk, few do, but GW II has done it.

However I stopped playing GW II and I’m playing Karinth, a much less innovative game in many ways (though Karinth does have some cool systems). What Karinth has that GW II lacks are the traditional, story-based areas with a lot of color. What I’m hoping is that at some point GW II will add the color and then it will truly be an awesome game. But for now Karinth wins the match.