Crafting/housing

[mar...@openstream.ch]

Hi there.

I'm plenty new to Guncho and was thus wondering whether it was possible to implement housing and player crafting (I'm particularly interested in players writing their own books and adding them to an ingame library.

Has this been done before? Is it within the limits of Guncho or would this require considerable modification to the source?

[Jesse McGrew]

This can be done with some effort. The first part is just implementing it in Inform 7: see the example "The Fourth Body" in the I7 manual for how to let players write in books. Constructing new rooms and objects is trickier; typically for something like a vending machine, you create a number of "blank" objects and keep them off stage, then dispense a random one when the player asks for it.

The second part is how to persist the players' changes. Normally your realm will reset back to its initial state when it restarts (e.g. when the server reboots), but http://wiki.guncho.com/index.php?title=Storage_slots has an example of using Guncho's storage features to save the locations of objects when the realm shuts down and restore them when it comes back up. You'll probably want to do something similar to save the content of the books.

vw

[mar...@openstream.ch]

Thanks. That's exactly what I was looking for. I'll try to implement this (The Fourth/Fifth Body) inside my MUD.
For the housing, I'll probably either sell the keys myself or install a vending machine.

One last, somewhat unrelated question: Is it possible to implement graphics/sounds in a way similar to offline Inform 7? This would require the client (Mushclient) to run a set of scripts, I assume (similar to how it can be done for other MUDs)?

[Jesse McGrew]

On Wednesday, December 26, 2012 5:18:24 PM UTC-8, mar...@openstream.ch wrote:

Thanks. That's exactly what I was looking for. I'll try to implement this (The Fourth/Fifth Body) inside my MUD.
For the housing, I'll probably either sell the keys myself or install a vending machine.

One last, somewhat unrelated question: Is it possible to implement graphics/sounds in a way similar to offline Inform 7? This would require the client (Mushclient) to run a set of scripts, I assume (similar to how it can be done for other MUDs)?

 

I'm not familiar with how graphics and sounds are implemented on other MUDs, so I can't give a complete answer. I assume there's some kind of embedded text markup that identifies a sound by its URL?

One problem with supporting the same syntax used by offline I7 is that when you declare a resource like:

    Sound of rustling leaves is the file "Rustling leaves.ogg".

 

...only the name "Sound of rustling leaves" is copied to the story file, and assigned to a new numeric ID. The file name goes into the .blurb file, which for offline games is used to bundle the resources into a Blorb, but which Guncho ignores. So you'd probably need to have a table in source code that maps sound/figure names to URLs.

Expanding Guncho's multimedia capabilities is a possibility for the future. The next version (slooooowly being developed) has a concept of resource files, so potentially it could let you upload the graphics and sound files, then parse the .blurb I7 generates, host the necessary resources at public URLs, and make those URLs available for the game to generate markup with.

vw