byCarmine

New smuggling code has been added.. I had started working on this six months ago then another project came up so I never got to finish.

Now, it finally is. Basically it allows a character who dabbles in less lawful activities, to smuggle in goods at a reduced cost. Different goods are available at different seasons/days of the week. And different characters will have access to a variety of different things.

It is based off the smuggling skill, which requires, in turn, hide and steal.

Syntax is smuggle list or smuggle buy and must be used at the docks.

In order to try ‘fix’ the spammer problem, I upgraded the forum to the latest version. Unfortunately this meant a lot of things broke. Not all of them immediately obvious (including the verification image on registration and the galleries). The problem is, the forum relies on an older version s of the things we use on our server so there was very little I could do to fix it.

So I moved the forums to our .com address and updated the link. The gallery isn’t fixed yet, but that’s next.

So for those of you who link directly to the forum, update it to: http://www.dark-isles.com/forums

Okay. Magic code is right on track. Today I managed to get both all the attribute and attribute mods all working in the casting and applying the appropriate affects, for the appropriate amount of time. Have updated the affects command to look a bit better with the new system. And lastly a kha command which shows you how depleted all of your different kha types are.

So. Yay.

Did a fair bit of coding today (and yesterday and the day before), working (again) on the magic system and pleased with the progress so far. At the rate things are going, I might have enough done by the end of the weekend for you guys to have a bit of a play with. We’ve been knocking around a few ideas as staff about how it could work better… and we’ve come up with the following:

1. Orb prospecting
Remains pretty much the same, you search around, and it works like a compass to locate the nearest kha source.

2. Orb harvesting
Remains pretty much the same, you spend a little time and if you’re lucky you get a nice shiny orb.

3. Absorbing the Orbs
This is where the changes start to become apparent. Orbs now deteriorate . Fast. They last, at most, about 10 minutes. They no longer hold spells, but rather simply have kha that can be absorbed. New command: absorb . This will absorb the kha into your body, and the kha types are separate. So you might have 200/350 Fyros kha and 0/350 Aeros kha. How much you absorb is dependent upon your skill at absorbing.

4. Learning Spells
We’re going back a bit old school on this and make them learnable via 3 (possibly more in the future) methods. The first, for the most common spells, via books and library research. The second, will only be available in specific books, allowing guilds to have ‘guild spells’. And lastly, spells will be able to be taught from person to person.

5. Casting
More old school stuff. It’ll likely be the format you’re probably used to on a lot of muds: cast ‘[spell name]‘ [victim] [location] [intensity]. Though victim, location and intensity would be optional.

6. Solidifying Crystals
This will be a very high level skill that will enable a mage to take a kha orb, and solidify it into a crystal that can be stored and absorbed at a later time.

At the moment, steps 1, 2 and 3 are complete and I’m working on step 5. We have a web-based spell addition form so that any staff member can easily add lots of new spells, and they have the ability to highly customisable… right down to making RP only spells with no in game code effect. So a spell could create a flower out of thin air and tuck it behind the ear of the ‘victim’, or you could drain a vek of their blood… there’s a lot of flexibility.

To tie in with all of this, so it can be properly used and tested, we’ll likely be opening up magic a lot more to the players for a time.

There was a bug where if there were two of the same stacked container in a room and you put an item in one, it wiped the entire room. No longer. Safely stack up your crates!

First big change, clothing now wears as you wear it and only whilst being worn. That means the quality does not degrade on the ground, in inventory etc, only when worn.

It goes down slowly over time till it reaches the ‘awful’ stage, but doesn’t actually disappear entirely (unlike food). Awful is now described as ‘tattered’ for clothing, and poor as ‘worn’.

Sneak has been adjusted and a help file added – see help sneak.

Lightfoot has been added as a method of walking quietly through the wilderness areas. See help lightfoot.

A few small changes and a few big ones. It is something that I’ve commented about before, that sometimes it is the small aesthetic changes that yield more of a positive response than the big ones, and this time is no exception.

Inventory and container content display has now been upgraded and is more informative. It’s a little tidier and inventory displays currently how much you are carrying and the max. And containers displays how much they weigh and their max.

On the bigger side of things, I decided to take the plunge, so to speak, and change the quality scale from 1 to 100, to 1 to 10. As can be expected with such things, there was some hiccups in the conversion and a few people that logged in whilst the changeover was happening, had their stuff downgraded to awful. This effected ONLY stuff either in inventory or worn. Not room items and if you let us know, we’ll do our best to fix this up – just be understanding if we can’t do it right away.

What does the scale change mean? All good loaves of rye bread will now stack. Before, a good loaf could have a quality number of 26.. or 30.. or even 41. Now they all have the value ’4′, and as a result, can be saved together (assuming no other variances in values). Should tidy things up a bit.. and another step towards reducing memory usage.

Bug check wise.. a few things have been ironed out with the death code. In theory.. if you die, you shouldn’t die over and over like was going on before.. and the room you died in etc should also be set correctly.. this wasn’t, but now is the case. Help death and help haunt have been updated.

PS. Also new craft skill added.

In order to try avoid the memory issues that plagued us last week, another bit of code has been added.

Basically, there are now limits on how many items will ‘fit’ in a room. This includes all items in side of containers (and in containers in containers, etc) in the room.

The limits are as follows:

Stalls: 25
Shops: 50
Homes: the drop limit of the owner
Donators drop limit: 50 + donation amount
Non Donators drop limit: 50

Hoping that makes sense. Some examples:

Mark is inside someone elses workshop, the owner of the workshop is a donator and has donated $20 and thus the limit on the room is 70.
Mark is not a donator and in a forest, there is no owner, so the limit is 50.
Jack is a donator and has donated $20 and is in a forest, so the limit is 70.

I admit to being more than a little reluctant to put in limits, but at this point, I don’t have much of a choice. At a later point, we may also introduce lockers – but the code for that is a lot more extensive, and I don’t have the time… just yet.

In an effort to try balance things, some adjustments have been made to the quality modifiers and production of quality items.

When crafters produce an item, the quality is not a certain thing anymore. There is a random element that can produce items of higher, or lesser quality than their skill (and tool level). This will hopefully make higher quality items a little rarer and a little more sort after. It will also help make the economy a little more balanced as the superb end of things was fetching way too high a price to be that commonly made.

The second thing that has been changed is the price modifier for quality items. Overall it has been reduced substantially, and this will mean that for buyers, getting a hold of higher quality weapons and tools will be a little easier. But for sellers, you may no longer be making 4x the normal value of the item at superb quality.