Feature Update (0.1.6)
Dive into the latest features in the upcoming colony space RPI MUD, Untold Dawn, including currency, chargen, cyberware, and more!
As promised, this week was incredible for Untold Dawn. First of all, we engaged with the community to figure out our currency wishlist and implemented our first approach to a currency system, alongside other coded features!
Let's dive together into the new features developed for this week.
Character Generation
This week we had the exciting development of making the first, internal iteration of our chargen system. We had so many ways to do this, but we decided to make it immersive!
Keep in mind none of these screenshots are final and there's still a lot to tweak, but here is the end of it.
This system works with a stage-based system, which means that we can easily add or remove stages to it. We're pretty happy with the end result.
We're still going to work hard on this, and the portions where you define key things about your character are not yet done. Stay tuned for those!
The QC Chip
We recently posted a blog post on the lore behind the Quantum Communications chip. If you haven't read that post, we recommend you do here. It is a great lore dump made by our staff team!
This week on the code side, we started to implement the chip. On chargen, you get implanted with it, and it gives you access to the QC command (it is one of the big reasons why we ended doing chargen now).
This also involved making a functionality for objects to have a monetary value attached to them, although right now only the QC chip has one based on the internal representation of money it has.
This led to us implementing the QC BALANCE command which shows you how much money you have allocated to your QC account. This is our first approach to a currency system and no doubt will set the tone for the development we'll do in the coming weeks.
Keep in mind that this all depends on you having the QC Chip implanted to you. So if we implement alien races, they would need to find other ways to operate with currency. That said, as we mentioned, we made objects have monetary value, so no doubt we will end having many ways to interact with currency beyond a chip in your brain.
We're pretty excited about this one!
Minor Look Upgrades
We did some under the hood optimization of the look command, adding an additional step dedicated exclusively to containers.
Command Optimizations
I had been thinking about doing an upgrade to commands for a while.
This week, we created traits for various MUD commands, including generic ones (with utilities for sending messages easier than ever), and character commands. These greatly streamline a lot of boilerplate code.
One of the most incredible benefits of this system is that it forces us to adhere to certain standards. For example, one of our community members made this suggestion:
Generic error messages don’t really tell the player what they should be doing, they merely tell them that something’s wrong with their input. Some MUDs offer help on individual commands, and if that’s the case, then it won’t be too much trouble to typehelp <command>and read up on it’s proper usage.
[...]
An elegant solution is self-documenting commands, or, commands that inform the player how to use them when they type the command with no arguments. If there is a, “cast”, command, for instance, then typing cast by itself probably wouldn’t have an effect, and the player would see an error message.
bscross32
Starting now, thanks to our new trait system for commands, every MUD command needs to have a help entry at least facilitated (although it is up to the discretion of the coder to determine when to print it). This is part of an ongoing effort; no doubt, in the future, that very same function will be the one used to populate helpfiles per command.
This involved going through every single command in the game and adapting some of its methods to the new standards.
Login Screen Improvements
We have optimized our parser to be more helpful when you have not logged in, prompting you to type one of the two commands available to you.
What's next?
This was a pretty fun week for Untold Dawn, full of great progress both in code and lore.
This coming week we will likely drop another lore blog post soon related to money and how it operates in the game-world.
If you have any suggestions on features you'd like to see in the long term or short term, do not hesitate to drop us a message in our forums!
If you enjoy our vision and progress and would like to help us field the costs of our growing list of services, please consider becoming our Patreon. It helps us infinitely to be able to develop this project without worrying about server costs!
