Thursday, September 5, 2002
Non-Player Characters, Part 1 (I never much liked the term “Non-Player Character” (NPC); it seems too technical and abstract. Well, no matter.) The players are not the only people in this environment; there are also NPCs, which are characters created by and controlled by the system. NPCs can be antagonistic, such as monsters, or friendly, like most merchants (and I just set up a system to define different levels of “friendliness” for NPCs). […]
September 4, 2002
Objects There’s going to be stuff scattered around the world of my IRC-based MUD, and I need a way to represent that stuff. Here’s the system I use: The game has a set of base objects, which the system understands by default. This includes objects like doors, weapons, and containers (chests and bags). These objects each have a few basic attributes, like a description (“It’s a door.”). In addition to the base objects, I have a file that defines a bunch […]
Monday, September 2, 2002
Weather and Time In pursuit of Goal 1 for my IRC-based MUD, “A good toy,” I’ve implemented time, date, and weather systems for the world. The time and date systems are fairly straightforward. The GM simply calculates the time based on the number of seconds since a set time, which is the compressed into game time. Game time is one-sixth real world time, so that two hours in the real world equals a full day in the game […]
September 1, 2002
iTeamwork.com continues to be my current favorite toy. It actually lets me be organized, without pushing a lot of pre-defined structure on me. I can add in a lot of work, and it stays nicely divided out, but I can also see that work from a variety of perspectives. My latest programming project: an IRC-based MUD. I want to make, well, three things: A good toy. It’ll hopefully be interesting and entertaining, but at the end […]