playerkill

Wikipedia has an article about Online creation which has my name in it. It also has a bit of inaccuracy about the derivation of my code from way back when. I corrected a bit of it, but I’m not sure I really want to wade in and change more - it’s ancient history at this point. Still, you can judge for yourself: here’s the version of the OLC that was in the CircleMUD version of Ultraviolence, circa 1998 or so, directly descended from the CircleMUD patch I released: iedit.h, iedit.c, redit.h, redit.c, and the never before released (by me) medit.h and medit.c. This code is definitely not pluggable into a standard CircleMUD distribution, since it obviously depends on a whole lot of custom crap from the original Ultraviolence (which includes.. guns and ammo, if you look at iedit.c. How prophetic). OasisOLC’s medit doesn’t derive from this either.

I ported over some descriptor code from Suave today. For those actually following along, “Suave” actually is the “Son of UltrAViolencE”; it’s my cute term referring to the sword & sorcery mud codebase that I’ve been kicking round for well over a decade now. “Lemud” is the codebase that branched off from Suave early on and became the Ground Zero knockoff that is running here.

Some time ago in the Suave codebase, I had upgraded the connection code to support the Mud Client Compression Protocol. In doing that, I went all out in trying to properly support the odds and ends of the telnet protocol, so I actually read RFC 860 and RFC 1184. I really can’t remember the compelling reasons for doing this. I may have been trying to deal with the very crufty telnet client that comes with Windows. Was I trying to beat something into line mode? In any event, all that’s now in the Ultraviolence code now
running (MCP isn’t actually compiled in at the moment, but the code is now there). Perhaps someone’s connection will be improved, perhaps not.

Suave also had a very full OLC, and had a simple line based text editor that I brought over to boot. The only exposure here is if you write a message on the board.

Now we have a logo and a suitably somber style sheet. Now we just need some content. I’ll start off with the most irritating bug at the moment: whenever the death count changes - a player kills someone - the player’s health is restored to full health points. This is not a deliberate reward! I’ve changed the core routine for this a bunch of times and have yet to get it right. It really shouldn’t be that hard.

Besides fixing this bug, I have a lot of ideas on where next to start improving things. One of the top on the list is to start moving away from X, Y names for rooms. This makes it too easy to locate some prey, just “where” and the person’s location instantly shows up. Perhaps this should only be possible with some sort of gizmo, i.e. military satellite uplink/GPS doohickey; a preferable method that still preserves game play is to start sectioning the maze into rooms with the same name - “An abandoned warehouse”, “The dockyard”. A player who has been through the whole maze gets a vague idea where that should be, without honing in too closely on the exact location.

I thought Ultraviolence needed a blog, so here it is. It currently looks a lot like my other web site, doesn’t it? I’ll tinker around with the graphics and style sheet in a bit.