The return of bat-wing scanjets

Another Hellmoo/Wayfar crossover promo!  Write a review on any MUD site or blog for Wayfar, negative or positive, and receive neat rewards in both games!

This early item has finally been modernized and updated.

New gadget display:

Updates 5/26/13

TV 'n' fish, good times have been had in the last couple of weeks.

- There are now over 20 species of fish to be found in various biomes, a job now exists for fishing up loads of weird alien fish and also there's now four types of fishtank to keep your fish in.
- There's now four more TV channels and existing channels have had their awful daytime tv programming extended to rot your mind even more.
- Various changes to interfaces, with the gear readout having some figures and calculation changed, dice usage now shows the exact number of dice used and your current/max dice for that pool.
- Robots can now be given a line of direct input using the 'direct' command on the robot's control handpad.
- Weapon modules, hurray.
- A bunch of new trophies have been made for various jobs, making competence cabinets at least a little bit useful.
- A TV channel that's full of star trek cast markov bots.

Updates 5/15/13

- New citizen type added to sector centers (Maintenance  technician, this and the engineer citizen type will repair buildings and vehicles in the nearby future)
- Crew commands! You can now hire up to three civilians (this may be increased in future by skills or reroll bonuses) and use 'crewhire' and 'crewfire' to manage which civilians you have in your crew. You can give orders to your crew such as converging on your position, holding ground/guarding, looting corpses and attacking. They also respond to standard civilian commands such as 'guard' and 'follow'.
- Cargo droids now have three more commands: 'pickup', 'dump' and 'inventory'. The function of these is fairly straightforward.
- Biome web interface has been neatened up, resource spawn rates are now quoted as verbal figures rather than numerical, all current weather types are now described.
- Creature web interfaces have been neatened with blank lists being replaced by 'does not drop any items' or 'does not spawn with equipment' and drop lists have been added with links to the objects.
- Charge rods have been buffed again.
- Requirements on some items have been fixed or modified.
- Some items and creatures have been given descriptions.
- Many locked treasure containers have now been given descriptions.
- Some new helpfile entries have been made.

So far, not bad considering I only got awakened from my text slumber three days ago.

Updates 5/13/13

* New command for refinery processors called 'mass-add' which also responds to 'massadd' and 'madd'
* Four new creatures in forest and desert biomes
* New citizen type added to sector centers (game hunter)
* Planetary surface exploration rate doubled
* Charge rods now recharge more weapon power per tick
* Various descriptions and bug fixes
* New skill command for Situational Awareness that trades stamina for clarity and aggression

Screenshots:

stuff 3: revenge of the stuff

What would appear to be inactivity is actually just developers being very quiet, we've stil been working on the game and have made a bunch of improvements since the last post here.

For starters, we've got a shiny new Central Complex Alpha which is situated inside an actual space station in the local system DSO-12. It's got a bunch of new shops and facilities and now has a hangar floor below, and an administrative floor above the mall and recreation complex floor. Amongst the new facilities are a starship store, rec dome, holotheater, medical bay, a loan terminal, four whole hangars to park your ship in, and three stores which each stock one element of the former central gear stores stock list. All in all, it serves those who visit it better than the original did and can be accessed via starship for pick-up/drop-off of things and people and refuelling.

Moons previous were dungeons which could be docked with, they now have the same randomly generated surfaces as planets (though are mostly boring rocks covered in ice and have no atmosphere) with the existing types of moon dungeon generated within a building somewhere on the moon's surface. The rarer resources are more common on moons and thusly make EVA trips to your planet's local moon a worthwhile activity. As well as this, you might find more than one pirate hideout on a moon.

Likewise, several new items and vehicle weapons have been added to the game and some existing items have had their credit values reduced to allow new players to be able to afford them from the gear stores. Here are some other changes that have been done recently:

- More balancing of crafting requirements on some items.
- You can no longer own more than one pre-fab shelter at once, this makes the retiree background less of a cakewalk.
- Plasma grenades have been added, for giggles.
- A few more starship weapons have been added.
- Vertibird health has been increased by three times, supermarine sillohuette health has been reduced to 300.
-  The starship store in central complex alpha can deliver any starships you buy to a personal hangar or starship complex, if you own one.
- Intelligent creatures (such as pirates) now behave slightly more intelligently towards grenades thrown at them.
- Planets are now centered within their zones, and their moons are spread around in orbits around them.
- Thermonuclear missiles, for extra giggles.
- A whole swathe of objects have been given descriptions.
- Tractor beam modules for solar carriers, so you can collect all those starships people have left in space and chop them up for their delicious parts.
- And a lot more.

All in all, it's been a fairly productive two months and we're looking forwards to pushing into beta (eventually).

2/20/12 update:
- Four new armor sets.
- New armor 'superior' mechanics (which give a bonus to quality, +25 module capacity and a free random module 50% of the time).
- Six new weapons and seven new ammo variations (oh boy 40mm plasma grenades).
- Battlegrounds, a set of maps and scenarios which you can compete in teams against against other players for money, skillpoints and new 'battleground points' which can be spent on goodies.
- Six new armor modules and three new implants.
- Nearly all armor pieces have had weights and values assigned for them.
- A bunch of weapons have had their attacks revamped and given multiple start/miss/hit messages.
- A bunch of new starship weapons.
- Pretty much every armor set has had their resist values changed and all armor pieces should now have the same resist values as their respective torso piece.
- A feature object added to all players to allow them to join/leave a battleground queue anywhere in the game and a command to see the status of the current battleground (it shows the current battleground and queued players if you're not in a battleground otherwise it shows players in assigned teams, team scores, match time left and the match type).
- A mechanic to allow critical success in crafting depending on your crafting skill roll, this increases the produced item's quality by 10-20%.

Fun Changes 12/24/12

Whilst things have been quiet on the home front, things have been busy elsewhere-
We've been doing a lot of detailed changes in order to both balance the game more and expand content available to players, notably that of 'superior' weapons which come with a (!) suffix. These weapons are assigned a number of 'points' during generation and these are randomly spent on various stats on the weapon to improve it over a non-superior weapon of the same type. Note that these 'superior' suffixes are not mutually exclusive with existing weapon prefixes so you could find a 'sawn-off m78a1 plasma rifle (!)' or an 'artillery judge-brand pistol (!)' with crazy-high stats and mad damage output.
Here's a list of a portion of the things that have been done:

- Superior weapons now come in six delicious flavors (levels), ranging through cyan, green, blue, purple, yellow and red. Each of these levels have different improvement levels and higher level superiority is exponentially more difficult to acquire in comparison to a lower level.
- Superior weapons now appear in your inventory and on the ground with their suffix correctly shown.
- Superior weapons now generate with more 'points' to spend depending on how high the quality of the weapon is (higher quality means better stats).
- Attacks will now hit bodyparts rather than ambiguously hitting a target somewhere on their body, if they have a body.
- Hackable treasure containers such as those found in pirate bases will now spawn items within a quality range rather than quality 0 which sucked.
- Respawn matrices such as the Kerkove organic regeneration matrix will now display a fun message whenever you respawn at the matrix, thanking you for your patronage/telling you not to die again/etc.
- Civilians bearing a paramedic AI package will now use any medical supplies they are carrying (such as bandages and medicare health injectors) before they use their standard equipment, so they will use any health injectors and top-tier bandages you give them in order to improve their healing abilities.
- The ammo capacity modification of weapons during superior weapon generation has been changed in order to scale with the weapon's standard ammo capacity (weapons with high ammo capacity will gain more, whereas weapons with small ammo capacity will gain less) and weapons with an ammo capacity of 1 will have their superiority 'points' spent in other stats.
- Civilian building construction now works, if you enable civilian building rights then construction sites will appear in the 3x3 section around your sector center (including the center tile) and these construction sites will slowly be completed and then finish regularly.
- Diseases such as spore cough now pay attention to if you're wearing a gas mask or headgear bearing a rebreather module and do not affect people wearing such things.
- Explosives set off inside vehicles will now damage the containing vehicle (frag grenades and such will do little to harm the vehicle, but a pile of proximity charges will make a royal mess of things).
- Sector centers now bear sensors to warn civilians during attacks from vehicles, warning them to take shelter inside the sector center or to man turrets in order to repel the vehicle threat. The civilians manning turrets may also be able to identify the individual controlling the attacking vehicle and attack them if they leave their vehicle.
- Various new consumables are available to players.
- You can now construct tractor beam modules, which can be installed in solar carriers to drag ships inside the integral hangar.
- You can now use drug injectors on both yourself and other people.
- Bandages and injectors now employ a medical skill roll to reduce the duration of their use (the more medical skills you have, the shorter the average time it takes for you to use a bandage or injector on someone).
- NPC factions have received various updates which allow players to operate under them, allow them to perform ground assaults on locations, man turrets and use them to attack, reload vehicle weapons and perform planet travel to inside-a-building/vehicle travel without fault.

There's a bunch of other stuff I'd like to share, but some of it's secret and the rest I'm just too lazy to report B).

Updates 11/27/12

* bug fixes, ideas implemented, and general cleanup:

* main weapon room for large ships:

Intruders can hack this room to halt or dissipate the main weapon charge.  The main weapon can be recharged by crew or players with the starship engineering skill.  The more engineers present the faster the main gun will recharge.
 * More guides added to the website
 * Cleaned up indoor map display and spruced up the dreadnought interior:

 * ranger background's hunting skill is now useful:

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

Oh dear

Everything went badly.

A productive use of time

Today I decided to do something productive.

Things did not turn out as planned.

Changelog 9/18/12

* Starship hulks!
* Respawn terminals for returning to starships, moons, etc
* Supply Expert skill command - REQ (allows the player to requisition items in the field):

* Quality control skill command - INSPECT (allows the player to view blueprints a material or component is used in):

Updates 8/30/12

* moved to a new server for half the cost with double the RAM
* added airlock doors to some starship interiors, allowing you to vent anything in the airlock into space
* added ship intercoms
* a multitude of spawner improvements, mainly to support & implement a full 3d on demand spawning for digging and climbing.  Which does work at last:

* a variety of other random fixes
* digging in it's most basic form:

* new job for linking solar systems with a warp gate
* added two new solar systems
* security cameras are now available on the electronics processor tool:

* new starship for constructing space deployables:

Belated Aphteroid Updates

I went on vacation for a week and got a bit behind on stuff. One thing I'm pushing towards is getting civilians to do stuff on their own, notably making their own stuff and gearing themselves and their buddies up with gear that's better than the terrible civilian clothing they start with.

This hasn't been going too badly so far, I've got the gathering AI module functioning.

The AI module is supposed to 'guide' the civilian, what it's actually doing is grabbing them and forcing them to do all these things. In short, the civilian decides what resource they are going to gather, see if they've got a backpack and relevant tool (and automagically spawn them if they don't) then attempt to harvest ten units of that resource. They will then stuff all that into their backpack and continue harvesting until their backpack is carrying 20 units of resources, where they will then attempt to find a storehouse (and construct one if one isn't present) and get all the resources from their backpack and put it inside the container inside the storehouse.
They then repeat the whole thing until the storehouse container is full, after which they'll go out of their mind and walk in and out of the storehouse and freak out, or maybe drop their backpacks in there and stop harvesting like they're supposed to.

I have done some other stuff too:
I made some demolition weapons, the 25mm grenade rifle and 40mm grenade launcher and their respective ammunition. The grenade rifle holds five 25mm grenades (convenient, as a box of 25mm grenades contains 25 grenades) and is supposed to be some crazy semi-auto launcher or whatever. The grenade launcher is supposed to be a break-action double-barrelled affair and thus holds two 40mm grenades, (also convenient, the box of 40mm grenades contains 16 grenades).
Both of these weapons deal solely explosive damage, making them useful for fighting against buildings and pretty much everything else. I also made a vehicle weapon that uses the 25mm grenades as ammunition, the Assault-class Rat Gatler which is a pretty nasty piece of kit to be on the receiving end of.

As well as this, a few weather types are now a fair bit more hazardous, moderate thunderstorms now come with a chance of lightning (mostly just resulting in messages, unless you're unlucky), sleet comes with a chance of dealing cold damage to you, ice and hail storms come with a chance of dealing a mixture of cold and blunt damage to you, mostly blunt and ice storms being worse.

More to come folks.

Aphteroid changes 10/08/12

Another truckload of changes in the past few days, mostly revolving around civilians and their role in the colony. Whilst we had planned to make them work at the civic buildings you construct this never actually came to fruition.

Instead, I made them available for the controller of the sector center to use as personal bodyguards, if you control their home sector center then you may ask them to follow you or to stay put as you command, if you give them weapons they will gladly wield them (and automagically reload ranged weapons with ammo produced from their magick pockets) and if given a piece of armor they will either put it on, take off an existing piece of armor in the same slot and replace it with that given to them, or reject the new armor if it's value is lesser than their existing piece.
All this, and you can now construct a militia barracks which will encourage the civilians to perform training exercises to improve their maximum health and maximum dice pools, making them more effective bodyguards and defenders of their colony. I also payed some attention to the sector center itself, changing the description of the governor's office to account for statistics including, but not limited to bonuses from surrounding civic buildings and the maximum population the colony's total civic bonus can support. (Generally five, plus the total civ bonus divided by two).

In short:
- Civilians are available to colony owners as bodyguards
-Civilians now accept equipment from people
- Civilians are able to improve their terrible default health and dice pools (with some help)
- Sector centers now update their maximum civilian allowance every three hours dependant on civic building counts
- Civilian housing buildings are now un-hidden by default, now bear lootables of mediocre value and now have default damage resists
- Civilians sometimes spawn with default equipment such as colonial rifles and machetes
- Civilians sometimes spawn with an AI package to allow them to bandage wounds of them and nearby friendlies

Of course I did do other stuff aside from this things, but I'll keep it short:
- Changed food to actually make it beneficial, making it nearly always give you a status effect which provides a dice/max hp bonus and periodic dice regeneration
- More buildings, and more buildings for NPC factions
- More AI and improvements to existing AI packages to make them do less stupid things and cause fewer potentially hilarious accidents (like a complex two ranger being mysteriously dragged around the circumfrence of WY-1444 after a typo in NPC vehicle support)
- Various bug fixes, including the notorious 'oh my god I just typed get all and now I can't stop picking up things please someone kill me oh goooooood' bug and it's variants.
- please help i'm dissolving in text

Aphteroid Changes 07/08/12

Aphteroid again, a few more noteworthy things I've made amongst the ocean of property setting and verb/action tweaks I've done to push progress on the underground.

Random weapon bonuses/modifiers, weapons looted off NPCs such as pirates may now have a random modifier such as 'light', 'heavy', 'serrated' and 'balanced', amongst others.

These modifiers affect the properties of the weapon, at the moment include:
- A fixed reduction or increment to the damage done by the weapon.
- A fixed reduction or increment in the time taken to perform attacks with the weapon.
- A fixed reduction or increment to the deterioration chance of the weapon.
- A fixed reduction or increment to the weight of the weapon.
- A fixed reduction or increment (usually an increment) to the value of the weapon.
- A fixed reduction or increment to the tohit/accuracy bonus of the weapon.

It was all fairly simple to do, but that's the joy of procedural generation- even a few simple rules can diversify gameplay to a great extent.
I used this new support for bonuses to make a tier 1.5 version of the Colonial Machete named the Bolo Machete, which requires 1 Plastiform Brick, 2 Solid-phase Alloy and 1 Responsive Metal, most of which require some effort and existing infrastructure to acquire.

On top of this, a few new drugs/injectors have been implemented:
- Those who have respawned will be given a bonus to all dice max and max hp for two minutes (approximately)
- Liquid food injectors for those who don't like eating.
- Two new drugs (blast-zone and jerkback) which immediately recover a large amount of dice and give some buffs/debuffs (and will harm you if you go over 5 doses).
- All of this involves the chemistry tool and medical workstation, which are somewhat unloved at the moment.

In other news, I scoured a whole bunch of items which didn't have credit values or correct components and gave them appropriate values respectively, and did a bunch of other things which I forget.
Oh, and I fixed bugs too.

Changes 03/08/12

Aphteroid here. I got my nose to the grindstone for the whole of yesterday and early today and got a pile of stuff done.

- NPC factions now have a great deal more support, and in the nearby future will be populated on-the-fly with the birth of planets or when an existing faction is destroyed. Here is a funky image of the factions database's readout.

- Various bugfixes, tweaks and additions have been made, notably the ability to stop a hacking attempt and the ability to enter 'all' when crafting, this immediately transfers the required number of components from the highest quality components available to the tool.

- Scanning things, it actually gives you details about things in space now! (If you didn't already notice).

- Planets which are not hospitable, for example FA-1116. This little number is small, boring, and every inch of it's flatland-and-desert surface is covered in strong mineral acids and vents that jet the aforementioned acids everywhere. Luckily it didn't quite have the right conditions to generate oceans of mineral acids, but it's still horrid.

-  Claimable machine gun nests with MG-128 heavy machine guns (formerly scout-class 'rat' gatling guns, when mounted on vehicles).

- Vehicle weapons which require ammo.

- Automated crafting workstations, which will pull components from their input hopper, assemble the product specified and put the finished product in the output hopper. This degree of automation should make lengthy processes such as starship construction or the mass-production of processed materials a lot easier.

- Non-sentient wildlife now age a lot faster, dying of old age within (approximately) one or two real life hours. This helps remove wildlife from rooms which should be purged, helping reduce database size and memory footprint further.

- Innate skills and bonus items given by background, the ranger background provides you with a Ranger Duster, an alright piece starter of torso armor for soaking physical damage and the Keen Eye innate skill which provides a +2 ToHit bonus and +5 to your maximum Clarity dice pool.
The Serial Killer background provides you with the Insane in the Membrane innate skill which provides a +1 ToHit bonus, a +1 Dodge bonus and +5 to your maximum Aggression dice pool.
The Lab Tech background provides the Lab Coat, an alright piece of starter torso armor for soaking energy, chemical and toxic damages.

- Moon phases, as 17-EGRET and 7-BLUEJAY both have two moons orbitting them, I decided to have the two moons have phase differences, adding a little flavor to existing moon phase messages displayed by the 'time' command (which I fixed, at some point in the last 2/3 months).

- Intelligent NPCs can now use weapons or armor. Whilst they will not wield weapons given to them, any NPC faction units or pirates will now spawn with weapons or armor with either 100% certainty or a chance of the item spawning. This is due to a spawn equipment support, and attack suggestion update I made a month ago which allows intelligent NPCs to spawn with weapons, armor and gadgets and hook into existing support for wielding the objects they spawn with, they will select weapons they are wielding before they use their standard attacks and will reload any ranged weapons that require ammo.

All in all, a productive month and a half, we're making strides towards our Alpha Stage-2 goals now, having nearly completely finished Stage-1 goals, expect good things in future.

Changelog 7/30/12

* new shot of the on demand status, which has been running quite nicely for the last month or so.  Next up is making it three-D to handle the underground.  Altitude simulation is in as well!

* added vehicle painting customization:

* added the first pvp claimable - a fusion bomb (yes i did get this idea from the dark knight rises).  After a 12 hour delay it scours the land nearby.  A good way to get rid of buildings:

* Aphtonites implemented air support for npc invaders and buffed up SCUDs, among other internal changes.
* Death taunts - now on laffnet!

Changelog 7/2/12

* Aphteroid asked me to post some of his changes in the dev blog too. I was going to, but there were so many it would take too long.  Several dozen fixes and additions: for flyers, new explosives and gas masks, bandages, dropped loot, more.
* Apht fixed cockpit view for instance:

* re-implemented HellMOO $decal objects and added the first decal, which of course is a nice scorch mark from your drop pod
* a whole lot of improvements and bug fixes to the spawner:

* weather revamp:

two cloud fronts with rain in the middle

northern clouds / weather shift after update

clouds to the southwest, rainfall off the coast

forest in the middle of the clouds on FROG-1322

Changelog 6/27/12

* flyers vehicles and most normal things now work perfectly on the new on demand planets
* new look for flyer cockpits:

* Some larger planets, too big for screenshots: CT-732 Planet Map, IT-1067 Planet Map, WY-1444 Planet Map
* a double (21 x 21) sized minimap for running around in the wilderness:

Updates 6/21/12

A whole slew of things will go unmentioned here, but at least here are a few recent updates:

* mostly finalized the "must do" for alpha 2/end of summer
* buffed dice regen a bit
* added a game error handler for printing nice messages in certain situations
* fixed bugs and exploits on the linkup terminal, added colony beacon
* implemented emergency teleporter gadget
* new pirate moon dungeon by Aphteroid (and several other space changes)
* implemented player built planetary shuttle networks for quick movement between prime locations:

* implemented lifesign scanners for vehicles: