Stillborn - a MOO with cyberpunk themes, post-apocalypse, Lovecraftian horror, and morbid allegories
153 replies, posted
that happened to you too? i'm trying to log back in but i can't even access the website homepage but i'm asking other users and everything is fine
[editline]3rd October 2017[/editline]
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[editline]3rd October 2017[/editline]
it was probably a hiccup on the server provider's end, everything's good now.
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made these so players outside technologically advanced civilizations can respawn
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[editline]8th October 2017[/editline]
in all seriousness, more work on new areas is underway, jacobson tenements is open and is reported by players to be very scary, and we actually seem to have at least 16 players on at all times! (to my awareness, that is very good for a starting MUD)
up next on the list are traps (bear traps, snares, etc) and player constructions, like houses and sheds, so living outside of civilization is actually possible. that's going to be important when there're mutations that're universally hated by some civilizations or if you fuck up so hard you're not allowed to clone in that town anymore.
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[editline]8th October 2017[/editline]
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a skymap's in the works so we can determine the general size of areas and their relative distance between one another, in order to make sure that areas below are proportionate with what's shown above. plus i'm hoping to get an actual continent-looking shape.
[editline]10th October 2017[/editline]
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first scoeth mountain right now, from peak to 3 z-levels down
[QUOTE]The fanatic doomsayer
Once an inhabitant of Sector 4, this one rambles on and on about the brain plague.
He is holding a woodchopping axe.
He is wearing a jet black leather trench coat, a pair of grey flak trousers, a pair of grey work boots, and a silver ring. He is wearing a white PBF gas mask. He is wearing a heavy cross made of gold as a necklace.[/QUOTE]
new areas and hopefully PvP-sparking content soon
because of incompetence-related fuckups and my inability to use a linux terminal (and mail not working, for some reason) we've relocated to another server host set in western europe. this is probably good since a lot of our players are european anyway.
if you connect via sabbath.online you shouldn't need to reconfigure any connection info. if you're in the western hemisphere, you may notice a slight delay.
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[QUOTE]The gnarled root demon flicks a bloody string-tongue across itself to absorb moisture.
The frostbitten root demon draws back and whips its spiked tendril at Sotla.
The frozen zombie groans as a chunk of its flesh falls off and cracks against the ground.
The chilled zombie takes a swing at Sotla with its frozen claw.[/QUOTE]
slowly but surely returning to the groove of development
it's a small update, but a significant one nonetheless; the black god's sanctum is open, along with an NPC that can mutate a player into a zombie or a skeleton (at the time of writing, zombie requires a sacrifice that uses an item that you can't acquire yet, but that's next on the list of things to do. skeleton is fully mutable) and provides lots of delicious story info.
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been working on a little somethin'
this shit looks fucking awesome making a character now
it's been motherfucking forever since anything useful got done. hopefully that all changes soon
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fucktons of content hopefully shipping this month by or shortly after the hell sabbath (jan. 7th), the content pack will be named Sepsis
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we'll be done with the bodypart stuff within the week at this rate
[QUOTE][7:11 PM] Sotla: @here the advanced health system has rolled out fully
[7:11 PM] Sotla: [IMG]https://i.gyazo.com/ce2e36a4ece6e72e2b44db2f1ab404a1.png[/IMG][/QUOTE]
:cool:
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limbs can be ripped off now by weapons specified as limb rippers. right now this is just the fist and every whip except the riding crop.
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health display is now much better. should get some areas done today, too
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more bugfixes, more systems
[QUOTE]Sotla: working on sepsis
Sotla: made a more advanced framework for diseases
Sotla: we were testing the septicemic plague on an unwitting player
Sotla: the poor guy died by fever overheating before he got to severe muscle strain, hemorrhaging, and gangrene
Sotla: it was unfortunate
Sotla: but i had fun watching
Sotla: he had fun testing it
Sotla: even though he described the process as terrifying
Sotla: first came headaches
Sotla: but he was prepared, he had aspirin
Sotla: so that subsided the effects for a bit
Sotla: then it got a little worse, he started getting a fever
Sotla: but at that stage of the plague it wasn't all too bad
Sotla: then came the chills, which fucked all six of his stats
Sotla: made it hard for him to move, or interact with anything meaningfully until they went away
Sotla: then his muscles started hurting and straining even though he wasn't doing any hard work
Sotla: it was at that point the headaches were getting stronger
Sotla: and he didn't have enough money to get more aspirin
Sotla: so he ended up chugging down liquor to deal with the pain, passing out a few times in the process
Sotla: by the time he woke up the fever had gotten so much worse that he practically couldn't wear clothes, he felt like he was blistering
Sotla: even though he physically wasn't
Sotla: so he stripped off all of his clothes in the middle of the street, still wasting away on the inside
Sotla: eventually he took enough damage to become incapacitated and unable to anything
Sotla: and he lied there and groaned in pain until the admin reports told us he died
Sotla: had he gotten further it would have been much worse for him
Sotla: if the chills weren't fucking him, chronic fatigue would have
Sotla: and then the necrosis of the skin, and then muscles
Sotla: which would eventually reach the brain
Sotla: but hey.
Sotla: we learned enough
Sotla: i feel like this is the kind of experiment that breeds war criminals[/QUOTE]
began work on more realistic/scarier disease systems. more on that we're pushing out actual content faster than before, so a few areas may be done within the next week
hey so its been a while since there's been any new developments, but big shit happened lately, so i'll just explain the gist of it
the two most important things to mention which i'll go over are the core change, and the complete redesign of the game's philosophy. we'll start with that second one
stillborn never was really the painful agony simulator that i wanted it to be the first time because i quickly caved in to "game too hard", which made sense at the time given that, at that point, stillborn was a persistent RPG like an MMO, so permanent consequences/high difficulty sucked major nuts because what you had you have forever until you lose it, which might feel like complete bullshit when it happens. plus, permadeath in a persistent world model completely fucking sucks, and what's more, you can only go forward in time -- meaning that earlier lore bits that're potentially exciting couldn't be explored in any meaningful way.
so then i played enough ss13/lfwb to figure out why neither of them had the issues of feeling an irreparable sense of loss from permadeath or losing your text (or in that case, bitmaps), power creep (old stillborn had this problem big time as we tried to adjust new stuff to match players that grinded endlessly selling meth for instance), broken economy, or oldies having a permanent edge over new players and understood the impersistent round-based world model would enable me to do literally every goddamn thing to make stillborn the experience it's supposed to be; a game with a fuckton of lore, all of which can be explored in the most immersive way, and one in which misery is commonplace while being a source of fun itself. the round shit lets me do all of that, since different rounds can take place in different places in different time periods without being just one 'travel exit' away from another, to keep the theme as cohesive as possible for the region.
to my awareness, no other MUD has such a model. rounds are set to last indefinitely and end by player vote, the likelihood of which can come about by permanent damage to the world in a round (which isn't possible in a persistent game, since such destruction couldn't be accounted for, and would fuck the game permanently and make it unfun after a certain point) or enough characters being killed.
the other big thing is the core change. for fucktons of reasons i've given up on using hellcore. stillborn now uses ghostcore, which was authored by the same dude that authored ghostwheel and was one of the three founding admins of cybersphere. there are many, many advantages to this, but the main one is that it's not broken and doesn't reference a bunch of things we'd never need that's exclusive to hellmoo. plus, we can operate it using the Stunt MOO binary, and what that means is that we have much more flexibility when it comes to manipulation of data. in non-nerd terms, that means we can do a lot of shit such as functional computer simulations complete with filesystems, and PROPER advanced health simulations that we only barely made work in old stillborn by way of more hacks than i'm comfortable with.
from #ticket-booth on the discord server:
What do you mean round-based? Why is it that way?
Rounds are instanced timelines within a certain setting and time of Stillborn's world. Because of the lack of persistence and the usage of a round-based structure, the world can be modified in many ways, positive or negative, through the actions of players or acts of gods. The persistent worlds of most RPGs inexorably create multiple problems, such as unbalanced economy which cannot be fixed, older players always being at an advantage as their progress never had to be reset. This system also allows players to be justifiably powerful enough when they start to do what their selected role dictates instead of necessitating grinding to be above 'barely adequate' so as to make a persistent RPG balanced.
if stillborn seemed interesting before but too fucky for the reasons mentioned or too similar hellmoo now's the time to get back on the train.
https://discord.gg/e8ZQGvb
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Stillborn - a MOO with cyberpunk themes, post-apocalypse, Lovecraftian horror, and morbid allegories
