Sacred Spork

Stage 5 of Project Sacred Spork has concluded, and thus the project is ready to be unveiled. This is all very exciting to us admins, as we've put a considerable amount of time and effort into clarifying what our vision for this was, discussing how it should all fit into the framework of the exiting game, actually implementing it all, and then testing and re-testing everything. As of our last bout of testing this afternoon, everything is in working order, and this evening I finally attached the last pieces of the code to the rest of the game with which players interface.

We're aiming to unveil the project sometime in the coming ten days or so, with the latest target date being Sunday, June 7. Hopefully everyone finds that it's worth all of this hype.

Did you know?

Now that the introductory stuff is out of the way, I can post some meat.

Soon after becoming an IMP, I posted a change to everyone that in fact was not a change at all. It was entitled "Did you know?" (a name inspired by a series of emails that used to be sent out by a dean of mine) and it contained little features that existed in the game that were underutilized or undocumented. The original change posting is still in the game (change search know), and I think another round of fun insider info is past due. Here goes.

Here are some fun facts:

• The chance to get were is not 5%. Although it has long been stated as such, the truth is that it's been 7% for a long time--longer than I've been an admin. Granted, a 2% difference isn't that big, but all you statisticians who want to recreate for were twice in a row might find this useful to know.
• We have an online who list. It's still in its beta testing stage and will probably always be that way, but it's a good way to see who's on so that you can decide which character to log. A link is also provided on this blog's sidebar there.
• There is no cap for hit, dam, or saves. Hitroll and saves work against other factors, so there is no hard cap on them. For example, having higher hitroll decreases your opponent's ability to parry. At some point of having absurdly high hitroll, your opponent's chance to parry cannot get any lower--sure, that's a cap, but it's different depending on who you're fighting. The same applies to saves. Damroll, on the other hand, never stops being useful. Its effect becomes less apparent the higher it gets because the ranges between the different damage indicators (eg, <<< ERADICATES >>> and <*>_MORTALLY WOUNDS_<*>) widens. That extra +5 dam helps no matter what, but it may not be enough to show up as a change from eradication to mortally wounding.
• Clerics do not get any sort of casting bonus over any other spellcasting class. They may have at some point, but they have not since I started coding.
• Barbarians heal much faster than any other class. This is a relatively recent change, but keep this in mind the next time you consider poisoning your barbarian before going into pk. Sure, you might get maladicted up and put in an exitless room, but you'll also be at full health when you wake up, even if your opponent is quick about it.
• You can get experience while leveling for completing in-game miniquests. Miniquests are being added to the game every day, and completing each one typically rewards you with 1000-5000 experience. The next time you create a new character, check out the sewers area. It has been redone to have quite a number of very cool and very lucrative miniquests.
• Contrary to how it used to be, the %l tag in prompts will now accurately indicate whether or not you're in latelog. If your prompt does not say you are in latelog, you are not in latelog, period.
• You can send notes to... admin, brawler, immortal, imm, any guild, any player, any race, any class, and any brood. You can also send notes to Snitch to submit gossip and it'll get read by someone.
• There is an open bounty on crashing the game. If you can crash the game, you will get a restring token. In the year of 2009, the game has only crashed twice--in both cases, the offending crash bug was identified and fixed in less than ten minutes after the game booted back up.
  

Here are some goofy and dorky things that most people won't care about.

• The mud's source is written in C and compiles readily on GNU/Linux systems and Sun Solaris using both GNU and Sun compilers. This cross-compatibility is necessary due to one of the game's testing platforms being a SPARC-based Sun system. The game which everyone actually connects to runs on a regular PC server and is compiled with GNU.
  
• There is a limit to how much gold you can have deposited. Because the game stores bank accounts in signed long integers (32 bits), it cannot count past 2,147,483,647 gold. If you deposit anything in excess of this, you wind up having negative gold.
• As of this writing, the game currently takes up 35.5MB of physical memory. This is not to be confused with how much disk space it takes up; that figure is somewhere in the vincinity of 250MB.
• Since I have become the coder, Dark Risings' official policy is to not use code snippets, ever. All new code is written specifically for Dark Risings from scratch, as the time it would take to properly audit, port, and test others' code (which is often amateur and unreliable) would take far longer than just writing it correctly from scratch.

As people come up with more goofy rumors and outrageous claims over the OOC channel, I will post more of these little clarifications and fun facts. Of course, this isn't to say that us admins are going to disclose how everything works; some aspects of the game (such as what role intelligence plays in spellcasting) will remain deliberately ambiguous.

Premise of the Dark Risings Admin Blog

In the past, I've not thought there to be much of a reason to expand Dark Risings outside of itself; notes, ideas, histories, changes, and the OOC channel really seemed to cover all of the necessary bases. I didn't think there would be any reason for anyone to post thoughts or comments on anything mud-related anywhere else, and the short-lived, unofficial Dark Risings forums sort of exemplified that. After all, if someone had something to share with the rest of the players about the game, why wouldn't it get blurted out on the OOC channel (as what usually happens) or in a note?

Of course, I've become somewhat wizened over the years to the fact that there are gaps within our mud's channels-notes-helps communication fabric. There exist a wide range of thoughts and responses of mine which aren't important enough to warrant a note to everyone yet should reach more screens than just the people who have OOC turned on. Help files are meant to fill in that gap, but they tend not to be topical and tend not to be discovered until long after they are written. While I could just be more liberal on what I say over OOC or what notes I post to everyone, I'd rather give players the option to "opt in" to all of this less-important information. Thus, having some sort of blog where I can easily post information without forcing all players to wade through it all seems like a good idea.

While I cannot speak on behalf of the other admins, I do have an idea of what I would like to post here. One major motivation for me writing to this blog is that, as an admin, I have unique access to a tremendous amount of interesting game information that nobody else does. Although some of it should be kept secret in the spirit of fairness, a lot of it is information that isn't secret; it's just hard to get out there. Nobody seems to talk to me on instant messengers except my fellow admins, and most people seem to regard the helpfiles as completely unchanging, so I cannot rely on them as a medium for disseminating new information. This blogging business fills a nice gap, as it appeals to everyone's secret desire to spy on others over the internet and get insider info, yet people who want to contribute to the discussion are free to do so (using the comment feature which should appear at the bottom of this post). All of you readers can get topical, insider info at your leisure, and can participate to whatever extent (if any) you want.

There are also sometimes new and fun things which us admins get excited about but simply have nobody to share it with, and I hope to start venting some of that here as well. This Project Sacred Spork is a good example; I personally have been working on it full-time (in excess of at least eight hours a day) for a few days now, although it has been in the planning for months now. As it nears completion and we get to test it out to make sure it's all in working order, it's hard not to get excited about it--it's fun, it's fresh, and it's finally taking its final form before our eyes. It won't be long before you all get to use it, and I hope most of you will be as pumped about it as we have been once it hits the game.

Finally, I can also see this blog as being a potential place for us IMPs to let our voices be heard with regards to some of the gossip that we know floats around the instant messages. Although I'll not get into it now, one of the biggest frustrations associated with being an IMP is that we don't often have a way to share our side of things with people. For example, when we ban someone, that person is free to (and usually does) tell everyone who will listen how we banned them for shoddy reasons over instant messengers. I'd say 99% of the people who hear how the IMPs banned _____ for no reason just leave it at that, and never hear the other side of it. Although I don't envision this blog as being a "hall of shame" sort of setup, I certainly can see it as being an appropriate place for us to vent. And, since everyone is free to comment here on what we say, it's a bit fairer than just having us IMPs talk smack about people we banned on a place where they can't defend themselves.

So, for those of you too lazy to read the giant block of prose which preceded this, here is a summary:

• This blog will be a place for the Dark Risings admins to share our thoughts on current things happening on the game
• Everyone will be able to stalk us on the internet anonymously and get insider info without us IMPs explicitly knowing it
• This'll be a place for us to respond to good ideas or common misconceptions that keep cropping up but don't quite warrant a note to all or a help file
• We might vent here from time to time--but everyone will be allowed to post comments

I should also say that, for the time being, this blog is "unofficial." Despite being the DR Admin Blog, what I post here under my name are my thoughts alone. Unlike the notes I post to everyone on the game, what I post here has not been previewed and approved by the other admins, and my views here may differ from my "official" stance on the game. Don't expect to be able to hold anything I write here against me in the game.