Jmurph's BYOND Realms

I haven't been active with BYOND in a while thanks to job obligations and a new girlfriend. However, a friend of mine was recently asking about MYTH and my MUD work, which prompted me to look back into it. I decided the wound system was too complicated, and have shifted the combat system over to an HP model that players are more likely to understand. Health is tentatively fixed at 100 (Resilience will increase rate of recovery, not raw health). In line with this, attributes have been revamped to work on a more intuitive 1-100 scale. This meshes well with the skill based approach I am taking. I also cleaned up some issues with output problems and prompt issues. Finally, a training area, designed to help new players get familiar with the MUD, is nearing completion.

For those of you who enjoy zombie horror, Valve's FPS Left 4 Dead is worth checking out. Basically, you control one of four survivors trying to make it out of a zombie ridden area. In addition to 28 Days Later style "infected", there are "special infected"- mutant zombies with unusual abilities such as the pouncing Hunter and the zombie attracting bile spewing Boomer. It uses the Source engine, so nothing revolutionary, but adds some cool cinematic effects like film graining and color scaling (IE most colors look a bit washed out but red is quite bright) that do a good job of capturing the mood. The sound is very well done, and has a dynamically generated score that reflects what is going on in the game. So if you hear the music ramp up to a crescendo, for example, you know the Horde (a huge mass of zombies) is coming. And each zombie emits appropriate groans, snarls, gurgles and screams. Which can be quite disconcerting when you hear them before seeing them! The game also has an interesting scaling difficulty system based on the AI director. Essentially the director monitors character stress levels and adjusts enemy rations, item placement, etc. to fit the selected difficulty. So if you are getting savagely beaten on Easy, it will cut it back. But if you are cruising through Expert, it's going to ramp it up until you don't feel like such a tough guy.

Multiplayer offers two modes. Cooperative, where each person controls a survivor (AI controls any extras), and Versus, where players are assigned to the Survivors or Infected. Infected try to stop Survivors from making it to the Safe Room. Cooperative with friends is much more fun than using the AI, as you can coordinate much more effectively and actually employ something resembling tactics. Versus is a heck of alot of fun, but I found that I greatly prefer playing as Infected for the different playstyle (though a good Survivor team is hard to stop- given equal skill, Survivors should finish the round). Since the Survivors do seem to be much stronger, it is extremely satisfying to finish them off!

All around, a very fun game and has actually distracted me a bit from my reigning favorite, Company of Heroes. At least until Tales of Valor is released.

Or best?

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2008/11/29/ obama-nominate-clinton-secretary-state-monday/

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2008/12/01/ obama-unveils-national-security-team/

Especially those who said how bad Obama was trashing Clinton and voted for McCain. Heck, from what I have seen, Obama has even been in talks with McCain to keep him involved. And McCain seems pretty happy with Obama, especially the Napolitano pick. Lindsey Graham commended the HRC pick. Everyone seems to be playing nice now. I wonder how long it will last....

So, there are a few BYOND roguelikes and a few non-BYOND multi-player roguelikes, bit no multi-player BYOND roguelikes that I am aware of. With that in mind, I decided to try to put one together. I decided to forgo the turn based RL structure in favor of real time. I think it makes the multiplayer much more manageable. It does change the play a bit from traditional RLs as you must now make some faster decisions.

Some issues currently bother me concerning dungeon generation. One is whether or not the entire dungeon should be generated at runtime. The idea is that it can then be saved and then allow levels to be loaded and unloaded as necessary via SwapMaps. However, I am not sure how the number of players should interact with this generation. There should probably be more gear and monsters the more players. But how do I factor this in creation? And what if a player leaves or joins after generation? I imagine I will handle logout by keeping a player's mob ingame for a while if they don't logout in a safe place (IE town, a cleared area, etc.) with a message to the player letting them know if it is safe to rest (logout) or not.

Also, how to handle death. Usually in a RL death is the end of the game. But with multiple players, it is conceivable that another player could resurrect you through a spell, wand, scroll, etc. I am leaning toward allowing players to wait a revive until their corpse rots. Then they are gone.

I am also unsure on how to handle the base dungeon structure. My initial thought is that any host will have just 1 dungeon, but once completed (or the host decides) a new one may be generated to replace it. Another approach may be to do like Darke Dungeon and allow descending into instanced dungeons.