Players do have alot to ask for, and they're right to do so.
Maybe this list is a good forum for that line of inquiry. After all, many
of us do run muds, and what was said probably mirrors some of the surface
thoughts of most of our players.
On the other hand, this is something that individuals who run
their muds have to solve individually - in their own way. I'm more
interested in what we can do to solve the problems that we all face.
Er. We all = coders, builders, and admin.
I've got parts of my list ready;
an actually useful statistics gathering system, on every possible event,
from individual skill use, to average population of a zone, to popular
monsters being killed, even to static things, like average experience
point value gain per level of mob being killed, or the sort.
Something producing this level of data though, should be
toggleable. Heck. I don't care if it's just log messages parsed with a
perl script.
Mostly though, I want everything easy to do. I don't want to have
to go to a file to change the motd, or have to depend on long and easy to
mistype commands for setting player stats. I don't want to have to run a
script each day to clear out old rent files, or clean the player file, or
purge deleted characters from the house control file.
Then I also want more player interaction with my game - I want
player buildings - made by players, not some immortal in charge of houses.
I want clan wars, and boats that take 3 or more people to operate. I want
seige engines that have a purpose, and the ability to lead an army, or a
way to organize the villagers to take up arms against the enroaching mob
tribe to the north, that doesn't involve many castings of the 'charm'
spell.
a (slightly) more robust internal code base. Circle is great, but there
are still alot of tricks that need to be performed for relatively common
events, like extracting a character (try extracting a char from a
spec_proc, or in the middle of a fight), or a main-distribution-level
scripting language (not that dg scripts is bad, just that it's still very
much an add-on...look at LPC though.. You write your whole game in that).
Aside from taht, I want a common way to look at all objects - i want my
rooms to talk, my objects to walk and fight, and my mobs to unlock chests
and be worn on my head. I want to be able to wield a mug of beer, even
though it's a drink. Then I'll wear it on my head too (or 'about body').
I also want a reasonable way to keep track of bugs, and advertise
new features - to builders, players, admin and coders.
as a builder, I want to see more tools; I want to have my building be
easy. One click automatic mob/obj/room settings (maybe based on level,
etc). I want to know what all mobs around level 33 average for hitpoints,
or that if I have some fiendishly complex setup (bags in bags in backpacks
worn, with multiple depends, and a % chance for any item to load) that it
will work...
Heck, I want a drag and drop interface to equipping mobs - I've
heard of a mud where you actually put a room in zcmd mode, put it like you
want it (ie, load the mob, force him to wear eq, etc) and then later do a
bit of scripting to determine some of the possiblities. Then you release
it, and that's what you see..what you get.
I also want more options, ways to differentate my zones from
everyone elses that doesn't revolve around bigger, better, badder. I want
mazes, and traps, and secret doors, and altering descriptions, and mobs
that have combat styles, magic weapons that are actually more than
weapons with +1/+1 hit'n'dam and set "detect invis" .... anything that
makes a player say "wow. i didn't know you could do that."
I want mob races, and other ways to make mobs identical to
players, so they'll be a challenge. I want to be able to make towns of
people, not towns with 3 people and 12 shop keepers, and no sense of
'town'. Hell, even nintendo games had random, non-plot related people
wandering around their final fantasy (one)-style towns. I want a sense of
world, not a desert that takes the same number of steps to cross as the
run from temple to your guild. I want weather that does something, I want
the world itself to be useful, from minerals and plants, to unexpected
useless things, like planting a tree, and coming back after a year of real
time and find it's grown (after about 30-40+ game years), and some couple
has carved their initials in it.
I want trade and commerce between NPC's, not just PC's. I want
NPC's that act like pc's to go around and clear out dungeons, or die, or
offer to join the group for a while, but act on their own..
No, most of these are not viable. It's a pick and choose sort of
thing. Many of them would be unique additions that would never be able to
make it to a point where the CircleMUD codebase as a whole could even
potenitally include it.
But some of them are. These are just brainstorming ideas. Maybe
i'm just looking for constructive critism.
PjD
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