I updated the surface map a bit, adding some swamp, jungle, tundra, and arctic terrain.
Surface Map:
I also created underground levels 1 and 2. The first level is a fairly large map, while the second is a bit closed in.
Underground 1:
Underground 2:
The map zones haven’t been generated yet, I’ve just created the layout so far. The next step is to generate them and start attaching zones.
Here’s another update the the zone editor. Changes are:
Extra Descriptions
* Extra description editing in objects and rooms is working now.
Area Settings
* Added editing of area-wide flags, such as “no dimension door” or “is worldmap”.
* Added height and width to area settings for use with surface/underground map zones.
Walkthrough Mode
* Walkthrough command entry is now working on MacOS and Linux.
* Selected room in the room editing window changes as you walk into another room in walkthrough mode.
Opening Files
* Added drag-and-drop to open a zone file.
* Added opening a zone file via the command line.
Renumbering
* Added renumber menu command to change zone numbering.
Other
* Made edit windows non-maximize-able since it didn’t make sense to do so.
Basternae 1 and 2 had a huge number of total hours played. Lots of players rose to prominence and some became pretty much legendary. With all that adventure
If anyone wants to write up any fairy tales, legends, or lore of the past based on previous incarnations of Basternae and either characters of their own, past immortals, or others they knew of, it might be a fun thing to post on the website as backstory or just general world lore (i.e. something along the lines of ‘St. Daeron and the Dragon’. In fact, if someone feels so inclined to write any sort of back story beyond ‘everyone kills everyone’, they’re certainly welcome (and encouraged) to.
The world of Basternae 3 takes place somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand years in the future after Basternae 2. Among other things, the Flind race has faded out and have been overtaken by their more successful Gnoll cousins and the Githyanki have hunted the Githzerai nearly to extinction. The world has been reformed somewhat, with rising water levels reshaping or destroying many of the land masses of the past (nobody has explained why they rose yet — global warming, superheating from a major war, bombardment by meteors, change in the planet’s orbit, who knows?). The Artifacts have all been destroyed or reclaimed by the gods.
Nobody has really ever said anything about the major religions of the world, the number of moons, what the climate is like. I could probably come up with something, but it would be more fun to have your input.
I posted a page that gives an overview of some of the ideas that are being used to guide design here:
Basternae Game Design Philosophy
It’s entirely possible that I failed to address some concepts, but that’s the general idea of it. Are there any topics I failed to mention?
I’m not really all that sure why I created it, but Basternae now has a Facebook group. Here it is:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=110462168980682
Can’t say I have plans to post much of anything, but go ahead and fan us anyhow. 🙂
I started using the editor to build a hometown for the Grey Elves. This will be the first zone I’ve tried to build from scratch using the new editor. This update is mainly map view improvements and a few important fixes to mob editing.
Map View
* Rooms on map view now show terrain type as a highlight color.
* Added multi-level zone rendering to map view. It mostly works but may have a few kinks to work out. Discontinuous zones still look terrible, but not as bad as they did.
* When closing a zone, the map view clears itself now.
* Map view now updates as exits are changed in room edit screens.
* Map view window now expands and editor controls reposition themselves when dialog is resized.
Walkthrough Mode
* When the “edit room” command is used in walkthrough mode without a room number it brings up the current room in the edit window.
* Added ability to “createedit room <direction>” in walkthrough mode. It automatically links the exits of the current and new rooms.
Mob Editing
* Added keywords to mob edit screen. Pretty dumb to have left that one off in the first place.
* Some extended mage classes (chronomancer, enchanter, and necromancer) showed up in the class list as sorcerer. That’s been fixed.
Here’s a screenshot of the new map view for the Thri-Kreen hometown:
One of the things I plan to have the MUD engine support is AIML. That’s an XML-based file format that defines conversational data for a “chatterbot”. I’m sure most everyone has heard of the Eliza, Julia, or A.L.I.C.E chat bots.
The idea is that you can create personalities that respond to certain phrases, much like quest messages do/did in previous versions of Basternae, but you can take it even further by having compound triggers, matches, variables, and responses to previous inputs.
There’s really no limit to how simple or complex you can make your ‘bot’, from responding to only a single phrase to an encylopedia of knowledge that might almost pass the Turing test.
Here’s a bit of info about the format:
Overview from Dr. Wallace, creator of AIML
And, of course, here’s the obligatory Wikipedia link:
AIML on Wikipedia
One tool I’ve found that I like so far is the GaitoBot AIML Editor, which you can get here:
GaitoBot AIML Editor Homepage
If you know any German, the bot on the Gaito site is kind of fun to banter with. I know just enough to make it think I’m an idiot. 😛
If you want to start building your own bot personalities — grumpy Trolls, arrogant Elves, Dwarves too busy working to deal with your nonsense, or schizophrenic tinker gnomes — then feel to grab the GaitoBot app and start building personalities. The intent is to be able to load AIML files directly into the MUD and associate them with one or more mobs.
All I’ve done so far is generate some C# classes from the AIML schema, but that went smoothly enough. I’m not sure yet whether I’m going to build my own bot engine or use an existing open source one.
Here’s what’s changed:
The object affect editing screen might be a bit ugly, but at least it seems to work well enough.
You can get the new version HERE.
Over the past few days the spell editor has evolved into a useful tool for making changes to spells. Here’s a view of what it looks like now:
I’ve released an editor update today. Changes are:
Object Editing
* Material type list is now sorted alphabetically.
* When editing object values, value labels change based on object type for about half of the object types. This makes it easier to tell what values you’re editing.
Mob Editing
* Race name is now sorted alphabetically and duplicate entries have been removed.
* Class name is now sorted alphabetically and duplicate entries have been removed.
Room Editing
* Terrain types are now sorted alphabetically.
Repop Editing
* Value titles now change as the repop type changes so you know what you’re editing.
Map View
* Rooms not in the current zone are now shown on the map view in green.
You can get it here.
I’ve also added a download for Mac and Linux. The editor mostly works on those OSes, provided you have mono installed. The one known issue is that the color visualization on the editor windows does not work. The executable file is exactly the same, but instead of an installer it has a shell script to run the app. If that doesn’t work, you can always run it via a terminal window (go into the bin directory and run mono BasternaeEditor.exe).
