TriadCity Message of the Day
2001-02-01

Quite a lot of new code went online last night, as we prepare TC for larger numbers of alpha testers.

Experience and Levels are now implemented. These are traditional MUD concepts modeling the growth of characters. Experience represents accumulated knowledge, lore, and skill, in a quantified way. With enough Experience characters can rise to new Levels, which act as thresholds to new knowledge. For example, many Skills are available only to characters at or above a certain Level. As you gain Levels, more capabilities become available to you; and these are often more interesting than the basics available to all.

Where traditional MUDs privilege violence as the main or even sole means of gaining Experience, Triad provides quite a wide range of possibilities. Looking at things, picking them up, interacting with automated or human characters, exercising a Skill, buying or selling, posting a message, answering a question, and for that matter really pretty much anything else can provide your character with new Experience. The Experience mechanism is under the control of world authors, who determine what Experience a given action is worth.

Events are an important addition to the internal workings of the Triad environment, allowing world authors a very flexible means of establishing responses which will follow specific causes. Basically, any time you submit a command -- look, move, bow, say, laugh, etc. -- an Event is generated corresponding to your command. Every "thing" in the Triad universe can be instructed to respond to specific Events in specific ways.

Here's one example which we hope will set your imagination working. You'll find automated characters called Sylvan Archers throughout the City; these are a type of professional police or constabulary reporting to one of the main political authorities in the Triad world. When you bow to one, she'll politely return your bow. This example is intentionally trivial, but we hope it'll illustrate the concept.

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