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:

04/30/14 Updates

I had been meaning to write up this post a few weeks ago but I was too busy making text. The most recent addition to our motley crew is Vega, who has actually made working text without crashing the MOO.

The majority of changes since the last post are as follows:

- Several new hackable 'secure' container types for randomly spawning in pirate encounter rooms.
- Gauss rifles are now far easier to make, and gauss pistols can be made too now.
- Some spooky action involving stat boosting gadgets was fixed.
- Armor no longer erroneously displays a weight carrying bonus of 0.0kg.
- Pirate scouts and ultralites have been fixed and no longer have their pilots go mysteriously missing.
- Pirate fighters now spawn in solar systems.
- Fighter, ultralight and scout class ships can now be produced on the experimental starship workstation.
- Some odd behavior regarding starship debris in space was fixed, sparse starship debris can now be collected with an asteroid mining module and is cleaned up with other junk in space after three or so hours.
- Junk in space is now more intelligently cleaned up on the three-hourly schedule, 'unstable fix' items can now be shot at in space but at any distance (this is a temporary workaround).
- Some new critters to meet and get your face torn off by.
- Adjustments and improvements to shield modules and shield terminals, now better shields will require more power, charge more stability per tick and have more max stability.
- Some organic materials are now edible and can be eaten raw, such as native berries or native fungus. These might give you a disease or a stomach upset rarely.
- Some new 'invisble' (no terrain messages to spam up the map) resources including native (and exotic) spices and herbs, exotic fungus and native tubers.
- A bunch of new food items, a few of which require the new scavengeable organic materials, some which can only be bought and some which even can only be crafted from certain fish. You want depth, we got depth.
- The maker block has been readjusted to make food, drink and other useful items rather than ice cream and assorted tacky junk you'd find in some 99 cent store (it still makes ice cream though).
- Injector logic was adjusted so it is no longer relying on one massive insane if statement to work out what you want to inject. You can now inject anyone following you, in your party or in your corp. Wild animals and robots cannot be injected regardless of the previous cases.
- Pirate kings in moon dungeons have been replaced by moon pirate officers, I plan to make pirate kings the big bads which only spawn on rare occasions or as a result of quest/mission activity.
- A new layer of world generation which produces volcanoes on the surface of a planet depending on the level of tectonic activity present.
- Underground Points of Interest now exist, these will act as large mineral veins, caverns or some other goodie, buried horror or event which will make digging interesting beyond finding a bunch of inert metal every tile. These will be expended and replaced on a daily basis.
- Fixed some odd behavior regarding linking robot handpads when they have no assigned robots, and old hand-e droids not actually being a claimable object.
- Code-locked doors which require you to enter a number between 1111 and 9999 to open the door, these will be accompanied by a mainframe/datapad/chip you have to hack or a pirate you have to steal a note from for the code.
- Kodak flashers (an object dating back to the really early days) now correctly emit messages to the room the user is in.
- Containers now have a dump command which can be used to dump the contents of one container into another, or just to dump the contents onto the floor.
- The player corpnet got a 'history' and 'who command, as well as the ability to be turned on and off.
- Buildings which utilise the On-Demand System to re-use their indoor rooms that can have vehicles loaded into them such as the Large Warehouse can now correctly have vehicles loaded into them.
- Colonist-driven automated harvesting/refining/production is in the works, you can see the work-in-progress input command in the governors office in a sector center.
- There is now a job board in the administrative lobby in central complex which shows all the jobs you can possibly perform and earn rewards for (and those you can't).
- Layer-based dungeons are in the works, these will involve making a 'layer-cake' dungeon formed of a set of floors which are one of multiple different variants of the floor, and can be rotated by 90, 180 or 270 degrees. Along with the new randomised encounter contents, this provides more depth and a novel challenge for players used to the static pirate dungeons.
- 8-pound shells and the 8-pounder main cannon are now 96mm shells and the 96mm main cannon now, the weight reference in the name was somewhat odd.
- Even more prefixes and descriptions for stat relics.
- Random material armor can now be passed a set of arguments during population which dictates the material, quality and thickness so now a full matching set of material armor can be populated at the same time. The stat bonuses and module capacity/modules will still be random though.
- Some refinements to the 'put' command which prevents you from putting your worn equipment and wielded weapons in a container.
- Refinements to the robot 'sell' command to consolidate all the selling into one action rather than queuing dozens of actions.

We've recently had a large spike in the number of players regularly on the game, nothing beats seeing a whole bunch of new dudes playing your game and sticking around and the added input from bug reports and suggestions is also speeding development along.
In other news, we had an outage today whilst our server was reportedly moved to a new datacenter.

Keep posted folks, there'll always be new changes to report.

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.

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 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:

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

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:

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!

Update update for 7/23/12

Most of these updates are courtesy of Aphtonites - here are the two I've been working on when I catch a break from real work and going under the dentist's knife.  In addition Adminski has done some excellent work on immersive descriptions and even a little sane community building 8)

* new server configured

* some progress on implementing CheechLizard's much cooler website design

Aphtonites updates:

* New discoverables, including tier 1.5 materials

* A slew of new weapons and armor

* New starships, starship weapons, and tanks (~!)

* vehicle dealers!

* salvaging!

* upgrades to attacks, landings, and various space actions
* NPC factions that build and expand on their own
* Space upgrades of all kinds

* Massive upgrades to the economy, full trade system, fully operational bulk buy/sell options:

* Sniping!

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:

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

Updates 5/21/12

* comedynet, com*edy added, for real time jokes and japes
* mailing list for japes etc
* buildings can be dismantled by their owners
* vehicles can be sold to the planetary markets
* added racetrack interior skeleton
* added alcohol 8)
* added several new items for use in improvisation
* Improvisation implemented for survival items (this will most likely phase out the campfire and some basic tool recipes).  This also makes the base crafting skill useful for non crafters:

Updates 4/25/12

* various bug fixes detailed on *clp
* unstable containment artifact added
* medical bay artifact added
* shrike spear artifact added, and weapon/attack

How to write a useable item in Hellcore/Wayfar

Step 1: create the item from an appropriate parent.

Step 2: add a verb on the item for the player to kick off the action, it should look like this:

@verb #itemid:use this none none
1: if(this.location != player)
2: return player:tell("You have to be holding this to use it!");
3: else
4: player:queue_action($actions.use, {this, #-1}, 1, "use "+this:name());
5: endif

Step 3: Write two new verbs on the item to handle the use action:

do_use_start(OBJ who, OBJ on)
do_use_finish(OBJ who, OBJ on)

In our example we are just using the item, we aren't using it on anything.  This would need a more complex verb on the item in the form of:
@verb #itemid use this on any

And then you'd need to match the any against and item or person.

Updates 4/17/12

* added the first working artifact, a faulty auspex that scans for hidden items nearby.  It can be researched from a discoverable green orb found in forest biomes.
* TV and camera system implemented by Tigwyk:

* a multitude of bug fixes

Updates 4/3/12 - Solar Space

I now consider Wayfar 1444 to be alpha complete, online, and open to the public.  Given the scope of the project, my hobbyist commitment, and the lack of even barely awesome space MUDs, I see no reason that it shouldn't be open now.

* fixed a bug with hazard materials
* rick from hellmoo made a sweet chart of the skills:

Wayfar playlist (WIP):

E.T. (Katy Perry)
Alma (Teddy Bears)

Updates 3/22/12

Readout/building tool for underground caverns

• Added the first race of aliens after killing an old wolf spider that came out in the light to die.  They are spider aliens and will start by occupying a moon dungeon.
• Updated recall help file all empty help files.
• Explore now notifies player of newly revealed items.
• Fixed a nest loot bug.
• Added a new building tool for underground caverns