Things Coded in Firan
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@Tinuviel said in Things Coded in Firan:
@HelloProject To answer your question in the most... generalised way possible: A domain system is any feature set that manipulates territory to acquire resources. Be that actual mining and the like, or influence, blood/essence/whatever. How you'd go about making it would depend on what exactly you want the territory to look like, who you'd want to have access to it, and what resources are worth the investment in aquiring.
Hmm, that's pretty useful. Gives me a lot of useful ideas.
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@HelloProject The most important part, in my player-side view, of any system is that players need to want to engage with it. If 99.99% of the playerbase can get by without it, they will if it means avoiding learning something new.
He/Him
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@Tinuviel I see a lot of things as, would be a cool optional thing that would be fun, but also don't wanna force a particular playstyle down anyone's throats.
A lot of this is, I want to make the game I'd want to play but also that means not forcing a ton of shit on people, since I'd also not want that.
That and my core design philosophy is that anything that requires like 20 pages of explanation to work is probably not fun.
This MUSH is kind of like a bonsai tree, where I'm adding a lot of things and am not super worried about anything being wasted and such. Like, okay, you don't play the fishing or the ping pong mini game, I won't lose sleep or anything.
I think Alynna's Pokemorph games probably did this better than anyone, not counting MUDs. They were so feature rich, simple to play, and you only got as much depth as you wanted out of it, which could be a whole fucking lot.
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@HelloProject said in Things Coded in Firan:
I see a lot of things as, would be a cool optional thing that would be fun, but also don't wanna force a particular playstyle down anyone's throats.
The... 'problem' with many of those ideas is that if a person gains an advantage through such a system, it ceases to be optional. It becomes mandatory for everyone, not just those that find it fun.
He/Him
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@Tinuviel Well, entirely depending on the nature of the game and the roles within that game, at least.
Also one's perception of advantage, the context of systems in relation to how and by whom those systems are being used, and really a lot of variables that may or may not matter entirely depending on the game.
At the end of the day, in MUSHes, the typical mindset is "number get bigger" and basically every aspect of a game revolves around very specific numbers getting bigger. So it's not a thing I'm too worried about, mostly because there's just more interesting things than "number get bigger" when it comes to stuff like this, though "number get bigger" isn't entirely absent or useless either. I just don't perceive a lot of stuff as the typical thing that people would think of as a material advantage. Rewards and advantages don't necessarily have to be the same on a conceptual level, though obviously sometimes they can and should be.
For me, a lot of this game is testing out my theories about MUSH design and also fulfilling some things I've wanted to fulfill for over a decade, then if it succeeds I'll write a paper about it for my fellow MUSHers to pick apart.and entirely open source the code once I feel like it's all "complete" after years. So there's a lot of things where, like, I have to trust my gut, due to how untested and unproven a lot of these concepts are in a singular place. Which could succeed or fail, but the important thing is trying.
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@HelloProject said in Things Coded in Firan:
mostly because there's just more interesting things than "number get bigger" when it comes to stuff like this
Only if the game is made that way. There's a reason we constantly have back and forth arguments about dinosaurs and such.
He/Him
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@Tinuviel I think a part of it is that I'm trying to look outside of MUSHes, and Firan certainly seemed like it didn't take its inspiration purely from other MUSHes. There's so much inspiration out there to use. I think people care about and can be fulfilled by code things other than their numbers going up, if we look at things like MUDs or even regular video games!
Now, if I can actually execute this properly, that's something ultimately to be seen. I'm trying to apply the standards of Miyamoto's Mario jump test. If the most basic aspect of the game isn't fun, scrap that and start over and don't move forward until it's actually fun.
Even though I would never actually just, like, make Firan, or hell even an L&L game, I think there's a lot of lessons about fun to be had from certain aspects of it, in relation to taking bits of RPI MUDs and applying them to MUSHes.
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There was a domain system in place where the Ministers of each clan would roll their related stats and skills and if they failed the roll a crisis would happen for that clan. The agriculture minister failed? There is a sudden famine that the clan has to come up with a solution for. Health Minister failed? Suddenly the mortality rate increased, fix it.
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Pregnancy code with emits and a chance of dying in childbirth at the end.
Surveying land for what it was good for
Mining code where you just dig and hope for gems
Genetics code for breeding your dogs/horses/yourselves etc
Birthday code. If you rolled well you got to up a stat. Think I recall as you got older you started losing stats to reflect age, can't remember how it worked though. -
There was very detailed crafting and variety of items - armor alone, IIRC, was like 12 pieces in the early days. Two greaves, two gloves, etc. You had to buy the materials, light the forge to enough heat, for which you had to have flint and materials to burn, and all that. I may have Ishani's old guide still someplace.
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@Rowan said in Things Coded in Firan:
Genetics code for breeding your dogs/horses/yourselves etc
Were there actual genetics? I thought that, when a kid bit was made, they would get randomized traits from the grandparents to determine what the kid looked like.
Birthday code. If you rolled well you got to up a stat. Think I recall as you got older you started losing stats to reflect age, can't remember how it worked though.
The character's age determined which stats could be raised. I remember you had to raise Perception before age 15, because the age 14 age-up was the last chance to get it. And, yes, after a certain age, you had the chance of a random stat getting lowered by a point.
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pretty sure for animal breeding there was some attempt at genetics coding.
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I never played Firan, but I know there was horse breeding genetics code because one of of the wizzes from a game I played (Second Pass) was the one who coded it.
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It's been a million years since I played Firan, but I will weigh in on a couple of things here and add a few more things I remember, if they are useful.
There was genetic code. Back when I was there, it had nothing to do with grandparents (or at least I don't think it did). Rather, it selected at random a trait from either parent for hair, skin, eyes. So a red-haired, fair-skinned, green-eyed mother and a black haired, tan-skinned, brown-eyed father could produce a child who was red-haired, tan-skinned, and green-eyed (etc.)
Craftable food had an energy value that would add to your total when eaten, up to your maximum allowed daily. The higher the quality (in general) the more the energy bonus. I think for most people the max was 25 with food providing anywhere from 5 - 25 per consumed. Then, if you used the sleep command, a percentage of that energy (say, 2/3rds) would go toward your stored total. Any time you did something like harvest a field (which would ICly take more than one person could do in a day (25), the remainder would be taken from stored ERP to represent multiple days work. People could also transfer and sell stored energy to others (as if they were working for them, or providing peasant labor, etc.)
One of the cool things in Firan was that headstaff had decided what each clan needed in terms of raw resources, and what each clan had to provide in terms of trade. A big part of each season was for trade ministers to meet with one another and work out trade agreements to ensure that their clan needs were met. If not (as mentioned above) crisis.
A couple of other things:
Pray success determined whether or not a god heard your prayer (though I think it was still up to the god whether or not to act).
Fashion checks. In big scenes, you could run a fashion check and the code would check the quality of make and materials of what everyone in the room was wearing. Those wearing well made clothes of high quality materials received social points (essentially coded clout that was used to measure status), while those in poorly made clothes of poor materials lost points (an attempt to ensure that there was always a social point class distinction).
Animal breeding. I think it a version of the same code for the @eesha command, just for animals, with the goal to breed the best horse, cow, etc.
If I think of more I'll drop it in here. Enjoy!
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@Brunocerous said in Things Coded in Firan:
Pray success determined whether or not a god heard your prayer
By "heard your prayer" they literally mean an @mail to the character of the gods, not just a job open to staff. The gods did, in fact, wander about being dicks sometimes.
He/Him
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Sometimes? I'm pretty sure that was their full-time job.
Ceterum autem censeo Carthaginem esse delendam
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@Ominous said in Things Coded in Firan:
Sometimes? I'm pretty sure that was their full-time job.
Sometimes because I rarely saw it ever actually happen.
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The only things I remember from Firan is the pee code.
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There wasn't pee code. There was a pregnancy related ambience emit that talked about wanting to pee.
Other things people haven't seemingly mentioned:
- priests (and Ojitar) being able to buff stats
- The map in general, with its large coordinate grid system including a z axis for griffons.
- Other environmental features like a river current (that could fucking drown you pretty easily), and coded damage rooms in some areas
- Searching for hidden exits in rooms
- a crop/farming system, that was pretty underused
- a land income system based on noble ownership of actual grid squares on the above coordinate system
- the @Clan system, which is the closest thing to a discussed 'Domain system', and which handled large scale agricultural and industrial (such as it was) production for your clan's NPC population, including those in cities outside the main one. It also allowed for trading, and created a mini game where once a year or two we'd all go mad looking at spreadsheets and meeting in bars to trade dead birds for baskets, or occasionally go out and personally genocide the entire moose population of a grid square to manually fill food needs (hi)
- Speaking of that, hunting, which was basically the only place you had 'aggro' mobs in the game under normal circumstances
- Fishing, with poles or nets. My little Zin-rat commoner child made some sweet cash selling lobsters to a princess (lobster bisque was a favorite high-quality energy meal)
- messengers/mail delivery, including of objects, including objects that are technically creatures, like sending people a swarm of bees in the mail (same character)
There doesn't seem much mention of it but obviously there were also the big trademark things like crafting and combat. As a subset of this, staff could custom code magic equipment, and there were various magical weapons, divine trinkets, and so on floating around the playerbase. They could impart stat bonuses or do other things. Famously, there were also case-by-case coded powers for the demigod/Lanesh folks. These included everything from invisbility to summoning objects, spy code of different sorts, and combat powers that did damage or changed stats.
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I remember hearing here about some WoD sounding place that was coded even more than Firan and Arx. With like clothing that would go transparent if the PC was drenched in water and also some code about how attractive the female pc was based on their coded cycle and also somehow this was also affected by how much you codedly ate and how fast?
While also creepy, I found that level of coding on PCs to be fascinating. I think Firan and Arx are about the max level of coding like that I can cognitively keep up with (and not very successfully) and it's bothering me i can't remember the name of that other place.
