Introducing a friend to wayfar

I figured I'd show a friend of mine around wayfar - why not hop on a ship and do a little zipping around the universe?

Well first of all we had to get rid of the current captain:

Hey no problem!  Let's head on into civilized space, forgetting that we're driving around a pirate ship:

End result:

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 5/4/15

Updates since the last post:
* added new command to Machine Spirit skill
* Added who <person> to see various connection statistics about a single person
* Self-destruct modules can now be configured with the 'configure self-destruct' command
* Sector center guards are a little more intelligent in deciding when to intervene when they witness an attack on a building
* You can now order your crew to drop everything they're carrying which they're not currently wearing or wielding
* Tool and station quality now affects the quality of products
* Several bugs squashed
* New descriptions for 25 items

Picture of a foggy desert:

Changelog Summary / Devblog Updates for 7/15/14

* bugfixes & ~200 descriptions added.

* Added a starship construction platform station to the Supra solar system.

* Added a mailing list called *typo for reporting spelling & grammar errors - use the syntax: @send *typo to submit reports.

* Colonists can now be assigned to gather resources and will bring them to your warehouse every 12 hours.

* Daily login rewards added.  Referral rewards added.  Holiday events coming soon!

* Dragging re-enabled on most things that should be draggable.

* You can now type MATCH or MATCH <string> to see exactly which objects match to which names in game.

* Added association logs which currently track credit transactions.

* Limited orbital bombardment from dreadnought class ships is now possible.

* Collecting some various images from forums posts:

(warpstorm test)

(current map and status view... status in need of rework)

(programmer assist MXP menu)

* Alien desert concept art: 

* Added new graphical solar maps to the website and a brand new historical event log:

4/2/14 updates changelog

Okama gamespheres are now available in the Central Gear Shop.
Missiles now leave craters.
Exosuits increase maximum weight capacity when worn.
Seeds found during exploration/discovery can be farmed with an agricultural pod (built from the structure tool).
The Theology skill has been upgraded:
* Cost reduced from 500 to 250 - taking 2.5 regular skill spaces.  It is an exclusive social skill and other skills cannot be taken with Theology (such as Musician or Consultant).
* PREACH - new command that can buff other players and creatures in the room.  10 minute cooldown.

* BLESS <robot or product (weapon, armor, building, vehicle, etc)> - restore 20 points of health to the target.  5 minute cooldown.
* Max HP Bonus: 5
* Aggression penalty: 2
* Max clarity bonus: 1
* Max stamina bonus: 1

Job added: preacher man (rolling double the difficulty check when preaching) - 24 hour cooldown.

Freak Background Status - updated 4/1/14

Freak is one the original backgrounds we've been wanting to add to Wayfar for a long time.  We've finally started completing some of the pieces.  As a freak, the player is wanted by law enforcement, and his or her goal is to locate and enter a heavily guarded lab in order to remove their warp powers - before they end up an experiment in the same lab, forever.

Freak powers:
* Warpstorm - 100%
   Unleash your psychic powers in an area around your target.  2 minute cooldown.

* Teleport - 25%
   Zap yourself to another tile on the same planet.  5 minute cooldown.
* Mind Ray - 0%
   Focus your mind on a single target to deal energy damage.  2 minute cooldown.

Freak objective:
Corporate lab - 10%
 * map complete

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.

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).

Oh dear

Everything went badly.

A productive use of time

Today I decided to do something productive.

Things did not turn out as planned.

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.