6 month review

Aardwolf MUD V3 – 6 month review

It has been 6 months since V3 of Aardwolf went live. Hard to believe that so much time has passed already. One of the most surprising things about V3 has been the general stability and lack of any major issues.

Anyone with MUD coding experience can imagine the potential nightmare of going live on a rewritten codebase with hundreds of active players. We have come out of it in great shape and the credit for that goes to the detailed and endless V3 testing process. The folks who helped with that know who they are, and we all owe you a big thank-you!

Looking at other progress in the past 6 months, the major updates to the mud since v3 are:

Lua / Mobprogs:

The integration of Lua with the MUD and the conversion of close to 4,000 old mobprogs to Lua is easily the biggest single project. Many players helped with converting the mobprogs to Lua and overall, the project has been a huge success. Lua itself is extremely lightweight, greatly extends the capabilities of the scripting system and is very stable. It is the first time ever I have not regretted not building Aardwolf with LPC from day one.

Goals:

The goal system originally came about because I needed to rewrite the mud school and wanted it to be more interactive with player progress tracked at each stage.

While developing the framework to track progress through the Academy I found myself thinking “It would be great if all area quests could use this”. Eventually, it turned into the goal system we have today.

The task hints came later, which was the last major feature to goals and made a huge difference in how goals are played.

At the time of writing we now have 41 goals live and plenty more to come. Not everyone sees the value in them, but overall they have been an extremely popular feature.

The Academy:

The academy itself has been very well received. Some players don’t like the fact that it takes so long to go through, but there’s a lot to cover.

We have also receive a lot of compliments from other mud admins on the depth of the academy. It is worth noting that with the framework now built into the mud, the academy itself is 100% Lua. In theory, any builder could create a new “academy” in their area.

Mushclient:

Mushclient was another “not planned” project, or at least not to the level we took it. I contacted Nick Gammon to see if he would mind me releasing an “Aardwolf version” of Mushclient which would basically be mushclient+some plugs pre-installed to help new users play the MUD.

Nick got interested in the project himself and made many changes to Mushclient and actually even wrote most of the plugins. The telnet options and tags systems also came out of this project.

Since the first release of the Aardwolf version, Mushclient itself has had some fantastic upgrades including the addition of many image handling and processing commands, clickable hotspots and hovering windows. The second release of the Aardwolf version will be some time away, but will be worth the wait.

Blog:

Creation of this blog. I’m still not convinced it is worth it in terms of time spent updating it that could be spent on the mud itself, but will give it at least 6 months. Readership is very low and feedback is non-existent.

Areas:

Several new areas and stock area replacements were added: Onyx Bazaar, Rosewood Castle, Cloud city of Gnomalin, Adaldar. Many other areas were significantly tidied up or remodeled for their goals.

Subclasses:

At the time of writing this, 20 new subclass skills/spells have been added, which means we’re only just beginning the full implementation – subclasses will be the main focus of the next 6 months. Many of these are so much more than ‘just a new skill’. For example, the chaos portal changes were a full rewrite of the chaos portal system. Ambush is a whole new type of affect. Navigate and Pathfind use pathfinding code that was new in v3.

Server Move:

Although the impact on the player base is (hopefully) minimal, moving servers is always a huge task. It always sounds like something that shouldn’t be, but it is.

Moving the mud itself is the least complicated part other than the volume of data. The website, clients, pictures pages, etc etc are all very time consuming. Getting the servers out of Orlando into a more stable environment was worth it though.

Everything else:

The sections above are just the bigger single changes. There has been so much more, some of the highlights include: runto/runprefix, identify wish, ice ages + auto-qreset, many updates to support room and object scripts in lua, autopk toggle, ignore on channels, the gold/other values for > 2 billion, glance, rawcolors and hundreds of minor fixes. (Side note, my own personal favorite as a player is ‘runto’).

Challenges/Disappointments

It is great to list the things we’ve been able to do, but also worth a look at the things that didn’t work out so well.

Player base:

Almost all MUDs have had a tough year in terms of reducing player base. I’m not sure why this year in particular as most of the big popular MMOs have been out for a while now. Players leave a MUD for many reasons, and those reasons often have nothing to do with the MUD itself – family, work, other hobbies, etc. The idea of playing a text game is so alien to the average teenager today that we just don’t get the backfill of new users as older players naturally move on.

I do strongly believe MUDs have a lot to offer, if I didn’t I’d put up a 404 page and be done. The MUD is still very actively developed and we have so much more to come. We need to figure out how to reach others who might be interested in MUDs. Word of mouth is still the best advertisement there is – so tell your friends!

None of this is to discount the fact that some players do leave MUDs for reasons to do with the MUD itself. Their tastes change, there are changes in the MUD they don’t like, or they don’t think progress is being made quickly enough. This last one I’m sure is quite common with some of the folks who left Aardwolf over the last year. Unfortunately, it was a necessary evil while V3 was developed. But it is done and we’re past it now.

Participation:

There was a time when almost everyone built the MUD, it was a community effort. That seems to be shifting more and more towards “entertain me!”. That isn’t necessarily a problem in itself, but we’ve had a hard time engaging people in building, helping test new features, creating graphics, writing guides and whatever else needs to be done. If you’re a player of Aardwolf and interested in helping with any of these things, please contact Lasher on the personal board.

Subclasses:

While a good start has been made on subclasses and it is moving now, I wish we were further ahead. This has taken way too long. 6 months from now I hope to be able to say we’re close to done .

Client:

The client itself is a great start for new users. The challenge here is having to prioritize (and subclasses win) … it is going to be a while before we get to fully convert the plug ins in the original version of the client to take advantage of the mini-windows and other features recently added to Mushclient.

Looking Ahead:

As already mentioned, subclasses are the main focus for the next 6 months. The rest of this is a list of “things we’d like to do”. In no specific order and with no guarantees:

• More PK games / action. Subclass abilities themselves will go a long way towards this.
• More “end game” activities. This is vague. It’s hard to come up with features that will last indefinitely (such as campaigns) vs a one-time event that eventually everyone has done and you’re back to square one just a year later.
• Further work on the client.
• Integrate the forums with the web.
• Experiment with some graphical maps overlayed in the Mushclient mini-windows.
• Build out races – v3 has a lot of potential for races that is not currently being used.
• Find new ways to promote and attract people to Aardwolf.

Would love to hear your feedback on this post in particular. What have we missed on the achievements/disappointments lists? What are some of the high and low points for you on Aardwolf in the past 6 months? What would you have liked to see mentioned that isn’t?