MUSHing, Softcoding, and (not) blogging...

I'm not really much of a blogger (in fact, every time my friends have convinced me to create one somewhere I've become notorious for never posting on it), but I've been pondering mentioning my small softcode archive on here since I posted about it on M*U*S*H, and Javelin's recent post has inspired me to write something up here.

I've been MUSHing for almost 6 years now, mostly on ElendorMUSH and, more recently, on another RP game (which I won't name) and on M*U*S*H. I've probably been softcoding for around 5 1/2 years. After getting burned out on Elendor and having some pretty bad experiences with twinks (at the player and staff level) on the other game I was playing on, I've pretty much stopped RPing now, and mostly spend my time online idling on Ele, chatting to folks on M*U*S*H and coding.

Mostly I softcode globals, though I don't actually admin on any MUSHes any more (I just code for the fun of it), and generally the things I code just end up sitting in a text file on my computer somewhere.

So, recently I've been trying to find the latest copies of things I've written (there are at least half a dozen chat systems dotted around my harddrive), working on tidying them up and writing help-files, and releasing them in case others want to use them. I have most of my code up now, aside from a few assorted globals; you can find it at all at www.talvo.com/pennmush.php. Right now, there's...

• My +mail and BB system. There are some extra bugfixes for this which I haven't released yet, but I'm trying to add some support for postgre before I do. That's my next project
• A +com system with similar features to Penn's @channel system, but a different interface
• An econ/resources system that allows for different denominations of money and unlimited different resources. I have plans to modify this to allow additional currencies as well, soon.
• An Alts system for tracking alternative characters played by the same person
• A wardrobe/desc-changer system using MySQL for storage, to allow players to have lots of different descriptions and switch between them easily
• +inspect/views, for adding extra details to rooms and objects without cramming everything into the desc

There are help-files for all the code, too (some very complete, and some extremely basic). After I've done the updates mentioned above, and gotten my assortment of minor globals (+who, ooc chat, +where, etc) tidied up and posted, I'm thinking of writing a basic language system, as it's one of the few common global systems I've never written (along with a combat system).

The code is all up there, though, and it would be a shame if it all went to waste, so if you want to use it on your game, please feel free. It's all completely free, and you can modify it as you like. All I ask is that you don't take credit for my code. It'd be nice if you sent me any improvements you make (though it's not required) so I could include them with the code and credit you for them.

Anyway, if my previous online blogs/journals are anything to go by, this'll likely be the only post I ever make on here ;) If anyone has any questions, comments, etc, about the code, though, please feel free to leave me a message (a comment here, @mail on M*U*S*H to Mike or email to talvo@talvo.com will all reach me).

Cheers!
Mike (Talvo)