Aardwolf MUD Update – Jan 16th 2009

New Area and Goal – The Fire Swamp:

Through a deadly valley pass between two cliffs lies the even deadlier Fire Swamp. The swamp itself is home to amazing creatures as well as many perils. How the swamp got its name is not so surprising, but the everlasting war between the fire and water of the swamp continues on. Currently, the river holds sway over the land, but the fire lizards that call this place home want to turn it over to their namesake. If you wish to help the fire lizards, seek out the will-o’-the-wisp.

New Goal – The Fables City of Stone:

The fabled city of stone is under siege. You must choose if your destiny will be one of good or evil. Choose wisely which side you will aid in the coming battle. Spies run rampant, and turncoats are around every corner. So which will you choose.

Spellup and Forgetskill Commands:

The code for the built in ‘spellup’ command has been made a little smarter:

• Skills can be considered ‘same as’, so it will only attempt to cast one of them (default order is by skill#). For example, on this port sanctuary and biofeedback are considered the same. I’m sure some spells that should be flagged were missed in this, so please post as necessary on bugs.
• Skills/spells can be flagged as setting an affect and will not be cast by ‘spellup’ if you already have that affect. Sanctuary is a good example of this.
• It will now handle skills. I have to set the command name on those skills where the command does not exactly match the name, otherwise they should be good to go.

There is a new command calls ‘forgetskill’ (forgetspell) also works. You can use this to add/remove a list of up to 30 skills and spells that will be considered ‘forgotten’. A ‘forgotten’ skill:

• Will not be auto-cast by the spellup command.
• Will not appear in ‘practice’ – does still show in ‘learned’.
• Will not show in the ‘skills’ and ‘spells’ command unless ‘all’ option is used.
• When they DO show in skills/spells, will show in blue.

One way to use this, for example if you have protection good and evil and want your spellup command always to use prot good, simply put protection evil on the list. This isn’t necessary in reverse because they are already flagged mutually exclusive for ‘spellup’ and it defaults to protection evil first.

Other MUD changes this reboot – December 22nd 2008:

• The Tree of Life area has an extension that will be particularly interesting to Necromancers.
• The max trains you can get while gaining a level (ie, not a powerup) has been increased. On average, going from 1 to 201 will yield around 20% more trains.
• Land of the Fire Newts has been removed – it was a stock area.
• When testing for ‘saves’ versus a spell, the affect of STR on the part of the caster and the affect of CON on the victim has been reduced. This will make int/wis more important in whether or not a spell is saved while Con (target) and Str (attacker) now have about the same affect as luck. Level difference also now counts for less which is either good or bad depending what you’re attacking.
• Whenever a spell is cast on you, there is a strength of the spell associated with it which factors into how hard it is to cancel/cure. Whenever you try to cure one of these spells and fail, the strength of the spell is reduced, so eventually you will succeed. This is just some background info. The change is that the amount of reduction on each failed cast has been doubled. Unlike the curative change, this one DOES apply to dispels – so each time someone fails to dispel you the amount the spells are weakened is higher. Overall effect is that this change has no affect on the first time you try to cancel/cure/dispel, but will make subsequent attempts increasingly easier.
• Casting curative spells on yourself such as dissolve will be harder to succeed while in combat. No change out of combat.
• Made a couple of changes to the ‘owned’ command:
  • If an item is in a container, and you are carrying it, owned will show the container rather than the area.
  • If an item you’re carrying is not in a container, nothing is shown you (hopefully) already know the area you’re in.
  • If an item is on the floor, the room name is shown in red.
• Note numbers will now wrap at 999,999 instead of 99,999. Not a big deal, more preparation for a bigger change. The number of lines in a note is now shown in note list as it used to be in V2.
• When an item has the magic flag, it cannot be created with major/minor creation. Sometimes items get into the game without the magic flag that should have it, and when the base item is fixed, existing copies of the item already in the game are not always caught. Major/Minor creation will now check if the base item as well as the instance of an item you are carrying has the magic flag.
• Reduced the lag on the ‘heal’ command a little.

Feedback always welcome, not sure if anyone is even still reading this.