Questions about PennMUSH (what it features by default?)
Ok, this topic has a tricky name. I shall explain.
My idea of the game I want to do is a mix of socializing but also I want a little built in snippet of sorts to have at least a battle system so people will win experience from slain certain mobs. I'm afraid that PennMUSH doesn't have a built in battle system of sorts (I'm ignorant of what PennMUSH features by default) but I think PennMUSH is enough flexible to allow some extra coding to make space for a battle system. Correct me if I'm wrong here.
Now my other questions (which I suppose are totally related to my lack of knowledge about what PennMUSH features by default - if you wonder if I ever played a MUSH, I don't, I'm aware that all the MUDs I played were all based on SMAUG, so, I has no clue *shakes head in shame*). First, mi ideas about the characters (which are pre-made and not created by the players themselves - they can create alternative characters but they are meant to control 2 main characters which comes from our RP community and those are predefined by the administrator by default):
About skills:
- -Some characters are able to "fly" or "filter" through walls on a whim (though I hope to restrict this whim with stamina points so they don't use that endlessly and need to rest). Am I able to add "skills" to characters so they can use them while others has other "different named skills" which does the same (for example, one character can "Fly" directly but other character only can fly using a tool, hence the need to change the name of his skill but the effect is similar to the "Fly" of the other dude)?
- -Some characters has what it can be called "Wizard" commands by default, for example, X and Y characters have the skill to teleport everywhere they remember by creating portals which others might want or might not want to cross (unless shoved inside but that is RP wise). These portals aren't temporal and only them can close them forever or reopen them. Is that possible?
- -Regarding "Wizard" commands, X character has the skill of creating "rooms" or dimensions of her liking (she would be able to create them, add descriptions, items and put a "float" flag on them, and link that room or rooms to the "real world" by using the skill of Portals I mentioned previously. Is it possible to enable this "skill" only for this character?
- -More "Wizard-esque" skills. 3 characters are able to create and destroy those items on a whim. I know those items would be totally owned and bound to them, despite they need to be able to give them to other characters (ie. giving a trenchcoat to another character so that this other character can wear it). You think it is possible to enable this?
- -Randomly, 3 characters of ours are able to "make food", and basically, from a list of recipes, they should be able to bake/cook consumable items for themselves and the others around them (if the switch "kitchen/oven" is available). Not all characters are able to cook (and specially one of them cooks very BAD) so, I was wondering if was able to enable this skill only for these three characters.
- -Another "Wizard-esque" skill (I think it is "wizard-esque" but I totally got the idea from the MUDs I played), one of the character is able to "morph" into other NPCs if she knows them (ie. cat, policeman, water elemental, etc). The trick is that she is able to morph into them and win their characteristics and skills by default on those NPCs (for example, if she morphs into a cat, she wins automatically the description of a default cat instead of her customized description, and also wins the skill of the cat, which is CLIMB, if you follow what I mean by that). She is able to unmorph at will (there is no time counter for her morphs), but upon unmorphing, she will lose all the previous gained skills derived from the morphing, so, technically an "undo" command. You think this might be possible?
- -About learning skills... There is a possibility that a character reads a book, for example, about cooking, and thus winning the skill of cooking by just reading that book. This seems to don't be a great problem but I want to add a "MUD feature" to this learning, which basically is the % of success of that character to succeed on cooking. So, he/she might only be only able to bake burnt muffins (who no one wants to eat, yuck) but after reaching 25% of success, voilà, a recent baked appetizing muffin everyone will love to gnaw on. Now I think you see what I mean by pasting some MUD features into the MUSH since this % rating of success comes from several MUDs I played.
Battle System:
*First, I don't know if there is some kind of promp with health and others by default in PennMUSH (hence the name of the topic), but if it lacks of one, I believe we can work one and other things as follows - and I repeat, battle is very secondary on this game, but still a problem more than one character will face while RPing - also because more than one of these characters loves to duel between themselves, so, a duel system is on the order too D:*
- Amongst the characters, only a handful of them (who are the only ones able to wield certain weapon) can kill certain mobs which are too "magical" for regular power-less characters to be able to defeat. That means if a character doesn't wields certain weapons, its rate of success will be always 0 (ie. the mob will be inmune to the attacks of the character). This little "if character Y wields [X] item flagged as [magic], then all attacks hits - else, all attacks fail" idea, do you think it is implementable?
- The idea of characters being able to gain experience from mob slaying (even training dummies) then asks for the mobs and the players to have levels. Apparently the only idea behind gaining exp in this RPG is to reach the next level, thus all the basic STATS (STR, DEF, etc) increases in a pinch (not randomly but after a calculation depending of the character - I'm used to stat calculations and calculators, so, if a character is of the "speed type", DEX and VEL would increase on a bigger % chance than the rest of the stats each level up). This will also be rewarding since quest on areas too dangerous for low levels will be automatically open for the higher dudes to roam freely without fearing the mobs, and also enabling them to wield certain high end weapons, and being able to learn new high level "battle skills" which will be unlockable after reaching certain level. HIT rolls and DAM rolls will be also affected and that stuff, so, technically this looks like to port some SMAUG coding into PennMUSH (unless PennMUSH already has something else different built in - I hope this can be tweaked, correct me if I'm wrong).
- I don't know if this will be accepted, but, can a player pick up an object (ie. a chair from the room) and "smash" it over another player, causing some damage points (depending of the DAM roll) and even being able to incapacitate the other player temporally if the success of the hit is 100%? I never saw this on MUDs but I think that being able to pick up objects from the room and use them for different purposes forms part of the "socializing" (ok, smashing chairs upon the heads of people is not very sociable, but at least I want to give the game some kind of full interactivity which the players will need to explore by themselves). I forgot, the object will be destroyed after being "smashed", and it will respawn upon the departure of the characters (I suppose "if [players] in room = 0 then objects flagged as [smasheable] respawns".
By the moment, I have no more questions. Basically these are some of the ideas I want to implement inside the game by coding it accordingly. I'm already on XNA programming and learning another language will not be a very big problem for me. Still, I feel I'm a total newbie, but I has the patience and the time to learn what I can do with PennMUSH and what will be utterly impossible to make. Then is when advising and tips are very very welcome!
Sorry for the long post. Hope someone can help me to clear out these questions and point me what part of my ideas for the MUSH/MUD thing are OK to code and what of them would be impossible. I'm aware that my idea of my game is very "MUDdish", but SMAUG has too many things implemented on the battle system which needs to be heavily redone from 0 to adjust them to what I need. I only want to "rip" some bits of SMAUG and use them inside PennMUSH (or create an equivalent to them on PennMUSH "language") to customize my game, but, without killing all the features that PennMUSH already has (which then I come full circle here and I ask again: what features are on PennMUSH by default? - and I don't mean the ones which talks about the mail-box, the built in chat and such but about what players are "able" to do and that stuff - I need to remind you that I never played a formal MUSH, so, if some veterans from them can talk to me about their experiences inside MUSHes, I'm all ears).
Best regards. Advice and insight are welcome :)
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The answer is...
The answer to your general question about what PennMUSH has by default is: Very little of what you're looking for.
HOWEVER... this is going to be the same answer for any MUSH server you choose (PennMUSH, RhostMUSH, TinyMUX, etc.).
So, the answer to your OTHER question: Can this be done in PennMUSH? Yes... to nearly ALL of your specific questions. Yes, yes, yes. They can pretty much all be done, but...
you'll have to do most of it yourself (the coding parts), or find someone to do them for you, and it won't happen over night. To manually code (from 0) all of the specific things you've mentioned will likely take hours and hours and hours of coding (likely months).
*sigh* Okay, now that I've quashed your hopes and dreams of finding a short path to success, I'll try to rephrase this more optimistically --
Some of the things you want have already been done.
For example: There are several basic combat systems available right now. And, there is at least one full D20 (ala Advanced Dungeons & Dragons) nearing completion (this one took over a year just to get it working in the most basic manner, and a couple more years to get some polish on it).
If you look on the pennmush ftp site (http://ftp.pennmush.org/) you'll find a growing list of things that have been coded specifically for PennMUSH.
And, finally, if you are planning to code this all from scratch, and you have never used the PennMUSH softcoding language before, then I strongly recommend that you start by reading the following two documents (tutorials).
Since you said in your post that you have some programming experience, You'll probably want to read: Code Basics (a lecture by Trispis). It is available from http://www.mushcode.net (click on Lecture Logs, then select Code Basics from the dropdown picklist). This tutorial/lecture will introduce you to the PennMUSH "help files" (for many experienced programmers this is all they really need, and you mentioned in your post that you fit this category).
Whatever you do, though, read the MUSH Manual, by Amberyl (google for it, there are many sites hosting it). It is a VERY thorough tutorial which covers many, many, many specific tasks you will likely want to learn (from beginner to advanced). This file is an absolute MUST for anyone who wants to run their own game (especially the Wizard Ethics portion).
Most of all, though, have fun!
... and good luck on your journey.
Many thanks :D
Really I needed to know where to look first to fetch the manuals since the only PennMUSH sites to find some tutorial/manuals/guides in my bookmarks are this site and the MUSHclient site but I was having a very hard time searching for the proper files. Thanks for pointing me right to the MUSHcode site - I'm not very good at googling for those kind of sites and really, I appreciate your directions!
And no, no quashing - instead, I am very thrilled and encouraged right now because I hate short paths. I know how time-consuming is to code full triggers and to write them square to prevent the debugger to cry like an animal at the slaughter house *grins*. Though, I need to know what compilers to use... I recall PennMUSH was made on C++, and I guess I has some Borland compiler on my oldest folders (or either I'll download the last version right away).
Thanks again for the answers and the helpful URLs. Now I have a full week to read and delve into this MUSH softcoding ;)
It will be a long journey, but worthy of the time in the end, I'm sure of it.
Given the kind of game you
Given the kind of game you want to run, you might want to look at MudOS (and the Dead Souls mudlib, perhaps) before you finalize your decision on PennMUSH. Yes, we'd love to have you build a MUSH like that, but as sad hack mentions, it'll take some time and learning to implement all that stuff.
If your group of characters are doing primarily roleplaying, and you want their players to be able to code up their own objects, Penn might still be a good choice. If the characters will be facing external monster-type threats, I'd consider MudOS first - especially if you know C++, as the internal coding language for lpmuds is very C++-like.
On the other hand, I keep meaning to work on a monster and battle thing for PennMUSH to do a "nethack" themed area, so who knows...maybe your code will lead to that!
not C++
Unless they recently rewrote the whole thing, Penn is (to my knowledge) written in C (not C++).
Also, if you're planning to run it on a Windows box, there's a precompiled binary (windows only) available from the same ftp server as the source code (the windows binary is maintained by the same guy who maintains mushcode.net - his moniker is "Noltar" and he hangs about here from time to time, too). The windows binary isn't updated as often as the source (for obvious maintenance reasons... the source updates come out way too often), but is always compiled from a relatively stable version and is also pretty much always sufficient for doing initial development -- just make sure you don't use any compression on the database and you'll be able to transfer it to a proper unix/linux server later.
Once again... best of luck!