As some of you may have noticed, we have been absent from the MUSH of late. The reason is that we’ve been in the US since the 23rd of August, to attend the WorldCon and pay a visit to Elio’s family in Las Vegas. We had expected to have some time free to respond to applications, but we have been too busy to manage this. Rest assured, however, that we will tackle them as soon as we can. We’ll be back home on Sunday the 3rd of September, and should be awake enough to process the most on them on Monday.
As a result of this, we will extend the deadline for submitting your beta applications to September 3rd.
The beta application has now been sent out to those who have registered for the beta. If you know that you were registered for the beta, but have not received the application, please contact us as soon as possible on .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
We’ve been forgetting about posting progress reports of late, but we’ll try to do better. Of course, we may not need that many more. We expect the final piece of code for the skill setup to be done today, and that concludes the really difficult parts of the CharGen code. We still need to make some additions, do some bug hunting and polishing, but the bulk of the code is now in place and working more or less as it should. In short, we’ve taken a big step towards the beta.
We are hoping to complete the Assets & Flaws stage of the CharGen quite soon, after which we will move on to dealing with the Stats and the Skills. We have also made a lot of progress with the mechanics, which should make the actual coding that remains more straight-forward. For those who are curious about what the CharGen will be like, we have posted quite a bit of information about it on the forums. We have also answered quite a few questions there of late, and some interesting discussions have gotten started.
A first, almost-complete version of the INFO files has been compiled and uploaded to the game. These function like the NEWS files on other games, and can be accessed by typing ‘INFO’ (the command is case-insensitive). In contrast to how many other games handle this, our files are split over three types of files: INFO (policies, general game information, etc), THEME (thematic information) and SYSTEM (information relating to major coded systems). Typing ‘INDEX’ will provide a list of the various types of files available.
The INFO files (as well as the THEME and SYSTEM files, once these have been completed) will also be added to the website in the near future, but for the time being we invite interested players to look them over on the game itself, and we would appreciate comments on things people feel might need to be clarified or otherwise adjusted.
At the moment, we have 39 players signed up who want to play male characters, 8 who want to play female characters and a few who haven’t decided on a character. We have decided that we will only allow a total of 40 players to sign up for male characters, leaving only 1 open slots. For female characters, we will allow a total of 20, leaving 12 open slots. However, since we are pretty certain some of the people who signed up may not be able to actually take part in the beta once it starts, we will allow people to sign up even after these slots have been filled. The difference will be that they will be put onto a reserve list, rather than guaranteed a slot.
This listing has once again been overhauled, as we have changed the storage and display of both the heraldry and the family tree information. You can now find the list of houses with family trees in the Houses section. As before, you can use the family trees to browse for interesting characters, and then log on to the MUSH to look up those characters, using +CDB <name>.
The new forum for the MUSH has been added to the main A Song of Ice and Fire forum. Until we announce the beta opening, we will make available only a single forum, but later on we will likely add subforums and we may possibly promote the MUSH forum to a parent forum, should it prove to be used very heavily.
Since we now have an excellent new host (the bod.westeros.org:3000 should now be working, btw), as well as some other good news to report, we felt it was time for one of these, albeit a brief one. The CharGen is not yet finished, but what we do have now is a brand new integrated mail and bulletin board system. Based off Elendor’s excellent system, Talvo’s mushmail uses mySQL to store the data, and offers a number of interesting features. We’ll now be working on integrating it with some of our existing systems, such as the code for tracking projects and player inquiries and the character request code, and it will allow us to finish up various outstanding pieces of code.
The new address for the MUSH will be bod.westeros.org:3000. This address will become functional shortly, but in the meantime 69.56.178.186:3000 can be used to connect to the game.
We’re happy to be able to report that we have a new host for Blood of Dragons. We don’t yet have the precise address that we’ll be using, but the game will now be hosted on the same server as the website, allowing us to proceed with plans such as making the character database accessible through a web-interface.
As soon as the game is up at the new address, we’ll post to announce this.
Unfortunately, we have some very bad news. Our current host, mux.net, will be closing down in two months, leaving Blood of Dragons without a home. Those who have logged on recently will know that the timing is about as bad as it could be, as we have recently been preparing to finally open for beta play sometime relatively soon after the US release of A Feast for Crows.
At this time, we have no solution for this problem. There are many commercial hosts out there, but quite a few don’t take PennMUSH (and changing to something else is not an option for us) or offer mySQL databases. Furthermore, we aren’t sure we can manage a commercial host financially in any case. We will be investigating what other options may exist, however, and if anyone has any suggestions, feel free to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
Despite our work being a little disrupted by the server’s downtime, we have now reached (and done much work on) the Assets & Flaws section of the CharGen. We are also working on finalizing the INFO (NEWS) files to be able to upload those to the game and to the website.
Blood of Dragons is now back up, thanks to the hard work of mux.net’s site admin following an attack on the server. Please note, however, that the port is now 3000.
At the moment, our host (mux.net) is down, which of course means that Blood of Dragons is down too. Unfortunately, we have no idea what is wrong with the server as our only way of contacting the site admin is through is mux.net email. Hopefully, the downtime won’t be too lengthy, but at the moment we can’t say anything about when the game might be up again. We’ll just have to hope its nothing serious, especially since we were making good progress with the CharGen before this happened. As soon as we know something more, we’ll post again.