Wayfar 1444 Vehicle Design Contest

Wayfar 1444 Vehicle Design Contest

What is is: Wayfar features vehicles, aircraft, and spacecraft. This contest is seeking cool science fiction vehicles and aircraft concepts.

The game:

Server: wayfar1444.com
Port: 7777

Use your favorite client, or the flashclient at http://wayfar1444.com/flashclient

You can see a list of existing vehicles in game on this page here: http://wayfar1444.com/index.php?page...item&item=8864

The Prizes:

Any one that submits a readable design will receive a unique journal reward on Wayfar! The selected winner will have their vehicle implemented in game, AND receive a copy of that vehicle fully loaded with modules, weaponry, and even a custom paint job!

Here is a template of the information that would help us implement your idea:

Name: Pretty obvious

Description: This is the detailed description someone would see when looking at the vehicle. It should be thematic and as far as possible in good english, although we'll be happy to help with that.

Look Place Message: This is the "short description" displayed when seeing the vehicle in a room, hangar, or zipping through the area. It's generally in the format of: "A skyspeeder is idling here.

Layout: Vehicles must have at least one interior room, where the cockpit is. A larger vehicle might have several, and each one may have some purpose or description associated with it. A luxury airbarge might have something like a dining room fully outfitted with tables, chairs, and maybe even robot servitors.

Special functions or abilities: Can this vehicle do tricks? It's a jetbike that can lean sideways at perilous speeds? Describe the abilities, including how the player might activate them and what messages the player and other players present would see. Include interior messages as well - if the pilot of the luxury barge makes a hard turn, the diners in the first class carriage should notice some plates rattling.

Vehicles that are aircraft can also fly, increasing and decreasing altitude (useful for avoiding ground based weapons fire). Vehicles and aircraft can have different speeds and controls for adjust that speed.

Special Messages:

There are many messages a vehicle uses when launching, driving, etc. Provide messages you'd like to see and we can fit them into the game.

Loadout: Vehicles in Wayfar can be equipped with modules, such as locks, weapons, intruder detection systems, etc. Should the vehicle be able to mount a rat-class gatling gun? A medium laser? Several missile racks? Or comfortable sleeping pods? You can refernce existing weapon modules in the game, or describe new ones in as much detail as you see fit.

To submit your creation:

Using the template above, please EMAIL your vehicle idea to admin@wayfar1444.com - you can also submit your idea in game but an email is probably the most effective way to get the information across in a nicely readable format.

You are encouraged to use inspiration from science fiction that doesn't involve any outright copyright violations!

The contest deadline is DECEMBER 12TH! Prizes will be awarded by the first week of January.

Bio-Engineering Preview

THE SOURCE

Life among the stars is strange & different, but most lifeforms are the kind with skin.  Skin or hide color determines the genetic sequence color you receive from a dead lifeform.  Different colors correspond to dice pools, health points, limbs, and general appearance of the creature created with bio-engineering.

Red strands: Increase the aggression dice pool of the engineered creature.
Green strands: Increase the maximum health of the engineered creature.

You can also recover rare strands of genetic material that come with a bonus and a drawback.

Mutagen-13 strand: Increase maximum health points by 10, decrease stamina dice pool by 1.
Radiated red strand: Increase aggression dice pool by 3, decrease maximum health points by 25.
Unlinked Q-Strand:  Dice pools are shuffled every 3 hours.

THE TOOLS

* Bio-Organic Synthesis Tool *

This advanced tool can blend, shred, analyze, and sequence genetic material.  It is used to craft advanced reagents, complex cellular scaffolds, and incubate the final results of bio-engineering.

The synthesis tool includes the SCRAPE command.  Scraping harvests a genetic sequence from a corpse, if one is available and in good condition.

THE PROCESS

To bio-engineer a creature, a player needs both a scaffolding and a set of reagents to manipulate a collection of genetic strands.  To create larger or more complex creatures, a larger scaffolding and extra reagents are required.  The genetic strands are combined with the scaffolding to create the prepared genetic sequence.  A complete genetic sequence can then be incubated via the synthesis tool.

THE RESULTS

The different colors of strands impact not only stats, but the appearance of the creature, such as size and weight, number and configuration of limbs, and maximum dodge and health.  These attributes, especially limbs and size, determine the available attacks the creature can use.

Creatures will follow and assist you until they die or are lost - if lost for too long, the creature will escape into the wild and possibly ruin the nearby ecosystem.

Belated 08/20/13 Updates

Alright boys and gals, it's been a while since anything new's been up on here and as a result the updates have been piling up ready for publishing. Here goes:

- NPC pilot routines are now functional, applications for these routines are in the works.
- Civilians are no longer randomly aggressive towards their colony owner, or any members of the faction that owns their center (if a faction owns it).
- Faction reputation mechanics are now in place, even non-aggressive NPC factions will attack you on sight if you're below a threshold reputation (-1000 across the board right now), and aggressive ones won't attack you unprovoked (and less aggressive ones will be more forgiving) if you're above the upper threshold (1000 across the board.). All faction chapters under each name will handle the same reputations respectively, negative reputation also decays over time.
- Faction reputation tasks are now in place, the delivery task is available at the contract office which should be present next to each NPC faction's sector center. This task requires you to deliver an otherwise useless quest item to a certain member of the faction for rep and cash, if your rep overflows above the upper limit (5000) the overflowed amount is multiplied by five and added to the cash reward.
- Killing an NPC faction's members and destroying their buildings will reduce your reputation and likely make them aggressive towards you.
- Discounts at NPC faction owned shops for people with high positive reputation are in the works.
- The travel command is fully serialized and now relies on coordinates instead of room objects, all the AI processes (a LOT of processes, mind you) I had tied the travel command into have been changed as a result. Some features of travel have been polished to handle invalid or no input better.
- Several new NPC-constructed buildings including pawnbrokers, pharmacies and more.

- Gas giants and fuel scoops to harvest fuel from gas giants are now working, there's no gas giants in the current four systems but when the universe is exploded and reborn there will certainly be some.
- Dust cloud zones containing various materials in the form of coalesced bodies of dust are also working but not currently present.
- Numerous updates to starmaps including new symbols to account for new solar bodies and an updating mechanism which can account for the (relatively) rapid turnover of asteroids and gas/dust clouds, as well as any changes in solar systems.
- Solar system generation routines are much more flexible and allow for hugely variable solar system biomes
- Moon and planet hibernation routines are now more flexible when new planets or moons are introduced.
- Two new moon dungeon types, containing all-new hackable containers and stuff.
- The planet maps on the wayfar1444.com website such as that for FROG-1322 are now much more efficient and will load faster now.

- Several models of pre-made modular starship are in the works.
- A handful of new drugs, including a broad-spectrum vaccine for common alien diseases and three drugs for increasing dice pool and dice regeneration of each type of dice.
- Several new other medical items, including two new medical kits containing previously unused items and a coagulant injector for quickly reducing bleeding.
- A few new robot types.
- A new swimming/drowning mechanic in which you are allowed to spend roughly 180 seconds swimming in an ocean before beginning to drown. You will receive progressively higher damage when drowning for prolonged periods until it outdamages any possible healing. Wearing diving gear will maintain your swimming stamina until the gear is used up.
- Various updates to flavor items.
- Several descriptions of creatures and items amended.
- Trophies and trophy cabinets have been reworked and several new trophies are available.
- Refining processors now announce to their containing room when people add things, mass-add things and when they are finished processing.
- NPC indoor pathfinding is now more refined and NPCs no longer freak out or get stuck (as much).
- Slot machines (the house always wins)!

Oh and I made a tutorial/chargen too.

I didn't even document most of the more trivial bug fixes and changes, and I still need new wrists after writing this.
Keep tuned folks, there's more to come.

23/08/13 Edit: What is this? A moon in front of a spinning WY-1444?

Background stars and zooming function?!

Updates 10/8/12

* Water world with ice poles:

* Elephant planet:

* Improvements to starship detail (power consumption, thrust vs mass, and engineering consoles):

* Hunger and thirst now reset every 3 hours instead of 24 hours

Updates 5/30/12

* harvestor buildings implemented thanks to Aphtonites
* fixed up seating and furniture
* wrote several help files
* crafting buildings (garage, factory, space complex) now come with the appropriate workbenches
* all robot attacks now have messages, and some minor fixes to the machine arenas
* the flash client command reference is no longer in Portuguese! Speaking of, it is a nice client called hMud and you can get it here: http://debomud.org/hmud/ - I tried several others before I found one that printed the ASCII maps correctly.
* A flavor vidja game for the sleazy bucket.  This one is based on Alastor aka Alastor Starkiller's REAL LIFE:

Hellcore release party

The hellcore is the trimmed, fixed version of the utilities and systems used on HellMOO and Wayfar.  It is a world of difference from most of the stock cores available online.  The wizards at hellmoo.org have released this very useful (if you're making a MOO) database for free:

Hellcore Release - HellMOO.org

Hell yeah you say!  Me too, so as a bonus, here is an offer for free MUD hosting: Amazon AWS Free Tier.  What more can I do!

One of the useful hellcore features is $api, which lets you apply certain properties and functions to an item without having a long chain of object parents, even for disparate activities.  When you get settled in with the hellcore, I've posted my MXP $api below.  Nearly painless clickables B)

modular-moocode @ google code