So I purchased Civilizations IV along with two of the expansion packs available for it over this past weekend and finally found a game for myself that I can sit and enjoy! It has been a very long time since I have found a game that I can sit and play for hours and hours, and that got me thinking. I would love to add some RTS elements into the Mud Creator engine, such as allowing players to join a military, at which point they could promote through the ranks and command units of soldiers, have additional objects created ect. I have thought about a possible political system so users and AI can run for mayor or something, and then they can have some limited control of the economy of the world. While the price of things will still be hard set via the projects source code or the Mud Creator Tool Kit, the mayor would be able to adjust it by increasing or decreasing the costs of things by a maximum of 25%. It's a thought, while the engine still has a lot of developing to be done on it, and this is something that would probably be added after the engine is released, I thought it would be neat to post about.

In regards to the engine some pretty large progress has been made, the internal testing is going very well and I have received quiet a bit of positive feed back, despite the test copies of the tool kit that was distributed was lacking major features (like clearing linked doors and deleted rooms once created). I spent today focusing on getting the Tool Kit into a useable state, and made some good headway on it. Rooms can now be deleted, linked doors can now be cleared and I have started working on adding objects to rooms. Things are coming along pretty good, and the Tool Kit is almost ready to release in a Beta, hopefully sometime in late June.

One last thing I thought I'd blog about is a possible plug-in feature for the Tool Kit, allowing users to download 3rd party plug-ins (like a magic shop) that can be accessed and used via the Tool Kit. Currently you can use any 3rd Party plug-in that you want if you develop your project using the Mud Creator Engine and a .NET Programming language, but 3rd Party plug-ins are not supported using the Mud Creator  Tool Kit, and this is something that I would really like to address sometime soon. my knowledge of loading and acquiring objects from a .dll file is very limited, and while I have learned a lot in regards to it since I have started working on the Mud Creator (The commands engine supports 3rd party .dll files containing custom commands), I still have a lot to learn about doing it.

Until next blog,

Johnathon
Airhead Gaming