Travel redesign!

You can now travel directly to planetary co-ordinates.  In addition, using the TRAVEL command with no argument will bring up a handy screen like this, with nearby shops, centers, and points of interest:

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:

Revamped character creation preview (updated 9/29/15)

All players start by setting their identification and receiving a fancy ASCII ID card:

Next, based on your passenger class you enter the ship in a varying area (for instance passengers are in a cabin, unticketed lowlives are in a vent):

To get where you're going, you'll need to avoid danger or solve a problem:

Right before plunging to the planetary surface, you'll get a choice of starting goal and landing spot:

Once you've made a choice of starting background, it's off to the races!  Did I say races?  I meant dropping to the surface in a cramped emergency pod:

A variety of other players, items, vehicles, and potentially hungry wildlife will be happy to welcome you to your new planet.  Thank you for signing both your colonial agreement, and the non disclosure form provided at the beginning of your voyage.

Best regards,
The Central Administrative Complex

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:

Wayfar 1444 is seeking player reviews!

Wayfar is seeking reviews, on your favorite MUD site.  The content of your review is up to you -  anyone who submits a review that is approved during the month of September will receive a custom in game reward!  Negative, positive - however you like the game, if you submit a review you can claim your prize by @send Hawgpadre with a link to the  published version.

Details:

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

03/06/13 Updates

Aphteroid here, some pretty important development has been going on recently and some of the things produced have opened up large areas of possibility for the game. If you think the game has already got a lot of depth, think again- we're only just getting started.

Here come the updates:
- Major restructuring of how planets and npcs are hibernated, planets are now hibernated per-sector which allows for just small areas on each planet to be active at one time which cuts down on unnecessary simulation. $heart was also modified to reduce unnecessary calls to :creature_heartbeat, both of these changes have resulted in massive improvements of CPU usage and we now run less than 10 $heart queues rather than the 80+ we were running previously, I doubt more than 20% of all NPCs will be active at any one time between each 15-minute hibernation run. Kudos to ASM for these changes, I wouldn't have been able to sort out the mess of hibernation I'd made.

- Experimental pirate pilot AI has been developed, a fitting mechanism to spawn pirates has yet to be formulated but the relatively simple AI module has displayed capability of finding, chasing and then attacking a target in space using their ship. Given the way the module works, it could easily allow a robot to perform these tasks in future.
- Starships that explode in space now leave debris that can be collected with an asteroid miner, they contain various materials including minor components of the former starship.
- Asteroid mining has received an update which allows for resources which aren't raw materials to be mined, and the quality of said items is based off the random quality range of the constituent materials weighted towards the percentage of complexity they provide.
- A new building decay/abandonment mechanic is now in place which abandons your buildings if you haven't connected for over a year, this is to clean up unused objects. Players will receive in-game mail to warn them if their stuff is going to be abandoned soon to give them time to respond.
- Maximum health is now determined via a :health_max verb on players to stop problems arising from changing the player's .health_max property such as permanent modification of maximum health.
 - The status and gear readouts have both had work done on them to make them more informative and provide clearer information.
- Item drops can now be formatted as a set of mutually exclusive items (such as a scavenger rat dropping either a wild hide OR a fur hide) dropped in the same roll, pirates have now had their drops condensed into many of such sets and have had their inventory drop chances nerfed.
- Travelling traders now respect the true value of items they sell, this includes respecting the value of contents inside any containers they are selling.
- Civilians will now wear any gadgets you give them and judge new equipment you give them more intelligently (they still need a longer and more precise routine to compare and decide between two pieces of armor though).

- NPC factions no longer build sector centers and thusly no longer have civilians as members of their faction, this is partially due to hatred cascades where the civilians would end up fighting (and losing to) the faction units for some reason. This also reduces the number of (perhaps unnecessary) civilians chewing up CPU.
- Weapon modules are now available on blueprint chips, these provide fixed bonuses to the weapon they are installed to and all of them have had descriptions set before release (thanks to Endre for the descriptions). It is likely crafted weapon modules will increase in usefulness with higher quality later.
- Tractor beams can now manipulate virtually any ship, and will take differing numbers of stages depending on the size of the ship involved.
- Robots now have a remote inventory command which will tell you what they are carrying.
- Many new implants are now available from black market stores, some are bonus implants and others dispense a useful drug.
- Radiation sickness and rad-shield drugs in the works to make radiation more interesting. (Finished as of 03/07/13).
- You can now load starships into a solar carrier whilst it is landed, useful for scooping up stolen asteroid miners for chopping.
- Datapads for recording notes are now much more stable, you can write, read, list and delete notes on it to your leisure.
- Updates to fuel cells to make them keep any charges left over if the starship is full of fuel when they are used.

Development is continuing at a steady pace, I imagine there's some good things in store for the next few months. Keep tuned folks.

Updates 10/22/13

* several bug fixes
* blueprint items now display valid module install targets and other detailed information when viewed from a crafting tool
* official mascot of the central complex mr jingles has been retired.  Replacement: Catbug
* Official HellMOO crossover extravaganza!:

* Midnight CST:

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.

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.

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 10/9/12

* web integration fixed!
* regen chamber for vehicles and starships, allowing players to register for their next respawn at the chamber's location:

* Snap shot as biomes continue to develop:

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:

Updates 8/24/12

• New robot voice command:
  
  
• You can now give orders directly to robots when you are in the same location:
  
  
  
  
  
• Bug hunt/housekeeping/idea implementing:
  
  
  
  
  
• Added pinch command to clear out offline players from the central complex
• Tools now display any unlocked blueprints from look_self
• Mobile painting rig for styling up houses and vehicles:
  
  
• Decal etching for vehicles, flyers, and starships - works in tandem with painting:
  
  
• Quick list for qualities and status of your container items:
  
  
• Desert life snapshot:
  
  
• Ice planet snapshot:
  
  
  
  

Changelog 8/15/12

* Ignore command added
* Demolition charges are available on the engineering tool.  These explosives are capable of destroying enemy buildings.  They must be claimed and armed first, then remain armed for a 12 hour (real time) period before exploding.
* WHO revamp
* implemented the second medigun, which heals the assist target, as well as nearby party members
* @play now has access to combat and the kill, scan, examine, and tactical commands
* new reactive healing gadgets:

* robot guard command implemented - robots, when on guard duty, will defend their controller and their controller's stuff (including the robot itself of course)