Alter Aeon 17th Anniversary

As of this weekend, it's been 17 years since I started on Alter Aeon. It all began with:

#include "stdio.h"

void main() {
}

When I started, I remembered so little C that I had to go look up what a structure was and how to use it. The game server code has since then landed me two good jobs and served as my final project for my engineering degree.

We're up to over three hundred thousand lines of source code now, with another twenty or thirty thousand lines of help files, faqs, rules, and other information. It's sometimes helpful to step back and see how far things have come.

This weekend, in celebration, we'll be having one of the rare scripted RP events that I occasionally do. These events are time consuming, with a lot of prep work and hassle trying to manage and keep everything working well, but they are hugely popular with the players. This time we have a storyline with a fairly plausible "end of the world as we know it" theme, and with any luck it'll be as successful as our 15th anniversary was a couple years ago.

Thanks to all the players who have contributed and help make Alter Aeon great over the years. See you all there!

-dentin

Halloween 2011 Events!

If you like vampires, mummies, demons and other things that go bump in the night...

Stock up on supplies and get ready for a fight.

Come see us on October twenty-ninth, it all starts at midnight.

This friday night/saturday morning at midnight, a new area will be opening in the land of Alter Aeon.  This place is known as the nightmare plane - little is known of it as yet, but if the name is any hint it sounds terrifying.

This new high level area, months in the making, consists of nearly 350 rooms, over 150 beasties and a host of new fame and fortunes waiting to be found.  Over a half a dozen new quests lines are available to explore.

All day sunday, we will be running arena and other events every few hours to give everyone a chance to participate and say hello.  We'll have novelty items and prizes for everyone.

On sunday night/monday morning at midnight, an invasion will begin, with incursions all day on Halloween.  There will be prizes for all levels outside of the new player zones.

New this year is a special quest zone to help stop the invasion and get a permanent deed added to your character.  This zone is set up to allow groups to progress at their own pace without interference from other players or groups that may also be trying to stop the invasion.

We hope to see you there!

Christmas Expansion - Update

We finally got everything done and installed, and it went off pretty easy. The biggest hitches were minor display bugs in explorer points, with a few minor typos and what not elsewhere.

One of the things that surprised me was the time breakdown for the various spells and skills. We only added 12 of them this time; here's a rough time estimate for each.

Level 25 mage skill 'melt' - approximately 6 hours. This skill was in multiple pieces, as it can operate on multiple targets. Not much debugging time required.

Level 27 mage skill 'spell lore' - approximately 1 hour. This was a very easy hook into the spellcasting code.

Level 6 cleric spell 'faith shield' - approximately 4 hours, most of it testing and design, trying to figure out how to not break anything.

Level 31 cleric spell 'breath of life' - approximately 5 hours. Required several debug passes to get the math right, largely because I wrote the core of it while I was very tired.

Level 33 cleric spell 'area heal' - approximately 2 hours, because this reused a lot of well-done code from 'area refresh'.

Level 34 cleric spell 'astral bridge' - approximately 16 hours. The spell itself only took about two hours, but before I could implement it I had to completely rework the waypoint code. Refactoring and updating the old code took the bulk of the time, and it broke waypoints for a lot of players.

Level 32 cleric spell 'group waypoint' - approximately 2 hours, because the astral bridge and other waypoint code was already in place.

Level 8 thief skill 'listen' - approximately 4 hours.

Level 29 thief skill 'fast talking' - approximately 3 hours, had to come back and extend its use into other thief skills that didn't have the facility before.

Level 26 warrior skill 'cleave' - approximately 5 hours. Ran into an irritating bug where cleave would cause a death which would cause an autocleave which could cause a death which could cause an autocleave...

Level 32 warrior skill 'whirlwind' - approximately 3 hours. The event handler for this was very straightforward.

Level 8 necromancer spell 'bone blade' - approximately 2 hours.

Explorer points - about 10 hours. This had a lot of hooks for display and interfacing, which usually takes a lot of time. Multiple debug passes.

Various achievements - about ten minutes each when done in groups.

There was also a lot of infrastructure and other work that went on to enable all this; between bug fixes, infrastructure, and design, the times above are perhaps a third of the total.

Alter Aeon Christmas Event

Every year for Christmas (and for a bunch of other holidays), we do something special. Usually this amounts to in-game events to open new areas, or for special prizes, things of that nature. This year, in addition to the usual things, we'll also be adding something else: a bunch of new code.

For each of the five classes, we'll be adding a few new spells and/or skills. A lot of this stuff is high level, but it's also focused more strongly in some classes than others. Cleric is probably the class that benefits the most, but it's also been the class with the least amount of scaling. Necromancer doesn't get much new stuff, but it does get a few critical reworks of existing spells and skills that didn't work out as designed.

Adding new spells and skills like this is always a hassle. Coming up with new stuff is hard, because it has to be useful, interesting, and above all preserve the physics/theme of the game. There's no point in just adding a bunch of lookalike damage spells that are successively more powerful.

There's also the problem of integrating new things into the existing spell and skill trees. One of the major things about this release is that there's been a lot of reworking of the spell and skill trees for the various classes. Thief, warrior, and cleric have all seen pretty significant changes to their skill groups, primarily to make space for the new additions.

There are a few other things I'll mention, such as new achievements, but since we're keeping the actual spells and skills under wraps until Christmas morning, I'll stop here.

Halloween Havoc

I finally got the event report up for Halloween Havoc! You can see the report on the Alter Aeon System Events page.

This event was special for me in that nearly all of it was run by, well, not me. I was present for some of it, but I actually got to log in and play a mortal for a while. For the most dangerous (in terms of administration) part, the pk arena, Morpheus handled it, with some help from the gods Taran and Draak.

This is a very good thing, and it should teach me a lesson: delegate. We have gods that are capable of running, handling, and managing system events. Let them do it.

I like this plan.

There are also plans for thanksgiving and christmas-time events in the near future.

Xmas event log!

I finally got the 'will christmas be saved' event log posted on the web. To see who all participated and in what way, you can find the log here:

Alter Aeon 2008 Christmas System Event

It's also linked to off our Alter Aeon System Events page.

This looks like it was a pretty fun event, as there were a lot of participants. There were even several deaths during the final battle, all of which are recorded for posterity in the event log.

In other news, version 971 of the Alter Aeon Custom Client is available. This version has mostly bug fixes in it, but also moves some of the direction buttons around and in general has a slightly nicer looking interface.

Thanksgiving system event

Today, I ran what I call a 'system event', which is basically a special event put together by a god to entertain players. I've been trying to do one of these a month, but I almost forgot this one completely - I was only reminded of it a few days ago, and had to throw something together quickly. Fortunately, I have an excellent girlfriend who doesn't mud. As a non-mudder, she is unpolluted by ideas of what can and cannot be done.

This clearly needed to be a thanksgiving themed event; but what to do for it? A turkey hunt is a staple part of thanksgiving events in general, but I wanted to add other things too. She started proposing oddball stuff from real life. And I started thinking about how to implement it.

So, for this event, we had a pie throwing contest (using the throw skill), as well as a turkey carving contest (using the butcher skill.) I had to make some minor code changes to get butcher to work properly on non-corpses and to allow me to construct butcherable food, but beyond that pretty much everything worked right out of the gate.

Running the event itself was as usual, hectic. It always takes at least fifteen minutes to get into the groove and get the aliases set up that you'll need to manage things properly. In this case, with three different things going on, it ended up being more work than I expected, but it still went off with only minor hitches.

Anyway, the real reason for this post is to talk about code support for such things. Special events by their very nature are hard to anticipate code for; it's also important not to sacrifice the normal operation of the game by changing the code just for the event. But I do have to say that compared to previous events, this one was pretty easy to run. Simply by running them periodically, I'll both get better at it and I'll feel the need to add commands that make it easier to run them in the future.

Creating a web page for the final event prizes and information is definitely becoming easier, though honestly the content in those pages doesn't exactly require a lot of mental effort to put together. For the list of events I've built web pages for, check out the events page at http://dentinmud.org/events.

Hopefully I can come up with something interesting for Christmas/New Years Eve in the next month.

Miscellaneous Update

I've been lax over the last few days with regard to getting much of anything done. On the plus side, Morpheus ran a system event for Halloween which the players seemed to enjoy. It was hard on him though, as there were some hitches (including a minor problem with teleport not working on the magic pumpkins), but everything worked out in the end. I should have the event log and notices up in the next few days.

In other news, I'm going to start making changes to the strength and dexterity spells. I haven't decided some of the more important implementation details, but hopefully I can come up with something that doesn't generate a lot of fallout. There was a lot of resistance from a handful of the higher level players.

Personally, this kind of resistance makes the game a lot less fun for me. I feel the urge to walk on eggshells all the time, and I further feel like the only changes I can make are those that make players more powerful - anything that involves a minor nerfing of player power, spells, or equipment immediately generates craploads of hatemail. Such is the life of an implementor - balance the needs of the game against the fun of the players, and hopefully manage both.

It's all the worse in that sometimes I find (or more often finally get around to) fixing something that is broken, only to find out that two thirds of the players use it religiously and are willing to raise hell if it's removed (or fixed.) It can really cramp your ability to get anything done if you actually care about the player base.