Thursday, November 5, 2009

Mud Creator Re-design. Revisited.

I have had several problems with getting the Mud Creator to commit to CodePlex's SVN over the last two weeks. It keeps erroring out and giving me a headache. It had been working fine for the last year or so, something happened that screwed up my repository and now I can't get it fixed. With that being said, it looks like a good time to sit back and re-look at how I want to design the engines tool kit. The re-design was already underway when this error occured, but I hadent really put much thought into it. I was flying blind. Today however, I took the time to sit down and right up how I felt the tool kit should be laid out.
I'm going to design the tool kit split into seperate programs. One program for designing rooms, another for creating skills ect.
I'll develop an application that will act as a HUB, displaying all of the editors that can be launched. I've jus spent about 30 minutes on the editor list and in what order they'll be laid out and came up with a decent list I think
1: Project Manager
2: Currency Editor
3: Race Builder
4: Class Editor
5: Realm Editor
6: Zone Builder
7: Room Designer
8: Equipment Builder
9: Item Designer
10: Skil Designer
11: Book Editor
12: NPC Manager
13: Quest Builder
14: Monster Creator

That's my basic list of editors for the moment, with the names and order of work-flow still pending. Most of the editors are self explaining as to what they're for, but I thought I'd clarify what the Zone and Realm editors will do.
A Realm can hold an unlimited number of Zones. Zones can hold an unlimited number of Rooms. Since rooms are what players traverse, you can think of them as a physical room. A zone could be a single house, a city street, an entire city/kingdom, a complete forest or what ever you want. A zone is how you will setup borders for the player. The player can easily find out what Zone they are in, and these can be used to inform the player as they move from city to city or something along those lines.
A Realm can be used how ever developers would like to use them, but the original intent was that they would act as a country or continent that contained several kingdoms/cities (Zones) that the player explored. This way a Race can be tied to starting out in a specific Realm, and each class for that race can have a seperate starting zone for the realm their race is tied to. Traveling outside of the realm into another realm can be done if the MUD developers allow it.
I'm planning on giving a brief overview of each editor over the next couple of weeks as I begin fleshing out the new design.

-- Posted from my iPhone

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