Make one?

You could always collaborate with the remnants of Atonement to figure out a new project. They're using a lot of Kithrater's work IIRC to do something new. I think that would be a lot easier and more feasible than starting from scratch.

my old Darksun code is up on sourceforge if you want it. I'm sure it could be restarted by someone with the motivation to do it. I'd come back to build or code but that's about it.

Yeah I have aim.

I actually have a good bit of experience with coffeemud. I dropped a coffeemud project to join staff a few years ago, though my experience is more on the order of building than coding. I like the robustness of the codebase and that it's in a pretty simple/common language.

I've considered making my own on and off. I think you need to make a few decisions before settling on a codebase. Here are a few questions and thoughts.


1) How will players make their own activity? I'm guessing if you're here you don't like how Arm does things.


2) How will you handle PKing?


3) What will your forum rules be (abstract)? You have to have a forum. I know game forums are often shitty but if you don't make one for your game someone else will.


4) Consider your game world. Do you want a game with civilizations and wilderness? Or a single civilization and surroundings? I refer to the actual, not the virtual. This is actually a big deal. It had a sociological impact that spans IC and OOC.

Use Arm as an example. Arm uses the first model. But it tries to be too much for too many potential players with too few actual players. It's simply too damn option-heavy. The result? Players attempt to form their own little communities to give meaning to their activity. PC leaders who actively pursue their own plans tend to get a following. If they're in a clan and they're not meeting staff resistance, the clan tends to snowball.

If Arm wasn't fucking up it would have a small number of clans in two cities. These clans would be player-driven. they would be able to pursue their own goals for/against each other. Since Arm's staff is lazy, we'd have to make one change for Arm's model. No available clan would be important enough that a bad decision would change the game. The only imm interference would be reduced to keeping the skilled PC leader players spread out. Your IC meta shit should reflect the idea of loyalty, membership, sacrifice, and excellence.

Now. There's the other route I mentioned. You have one civ surrounded by non-civilization. If you have a giant, mostly empty city it doesn't count. I mean you have to have a small, active area where everyone runs into each other. Everything else is dangerous, virtual, or uninhabitable nothing. You force people via geography to either constantly run into each other or be wandering around in deadly wilderness/whatever. That is a good setting for complex political/social things. Your IC meta stuff should reflect tension, suspicion, being on the verge of snapping, or something to that effect.

Not sure about it? Think of the stuff that doesn't work at all in Tuluk. the complicated culture, the suspicion, the police state, etc. Then remove Nyr and the ability to leave Tuluk for more than a couple hours. Make sense now? That'd be one way of playing out the single-civ route.


5) How do you plan to curtail griefing?

6) What is cheating to you?

Honestly, I dont consider those to be things that would be precursors to he codebase. I'm a programmer by education / trade, so the code interests me easily as much as the culture.

When I've thought about doing this, I usually think about making it a Dark Sun MUD. Someone (probably Delerak) mentioned here that Armageddon basically just has the Dark Sun thing going for it, and that sounds like an accurate statement to me. Personally, I'm not at all interested in writing a whole new world with new races and what-not. A lot of fantasy MUDs seem like a big ball of shit to me because they offer just a crazy grab-bag of non-cohesive races. Dark Sun is simple, relatively concise, and gritty.

I'm also not worried about planning that far ahead because there's a LOT of work to even get to the point where you have enough players to make some of those questions relevant. I think for starters I would make a single city and enough surrounding wilderness to keep players busy while the actual game system was refined (balancing everything, working out tweaks and bugs, etc). As the playerbase expands and there are fewer code tweaks to be made, we could expand to more areas. Maybe someday a second and/or third city. But, as you mentioned, keeping players together is necessary.

In terms of system, I would want to make it as faithful to Dark Sun and D&D as possible. I would want to obscure away the underlying "points" as many RPIs do, and as such D20 would be a fairly impractical system. It would be hard to have steady skill progression over time with a 20 point skill cap... However, I'd want to keep things proportionately the same. Classes would have as many of the same skills as we could usefully/realistically implement. Things like base-attack would be distributed proportionally the same...


This generally what I've thought about it. And, at that point, perhaps a good course of action would simply be to pick up where Delerak left off... But we'll see if I even find time first...