After processing the applications we have received from the players who had been guaranteed a beta slot and those that we so far have received from players who had been placed on the backup list, we have determined that there will be enough room in the beta for us to open up applications more widely.
If you are interested in submitting an application for the beta period (requirements for being accepted are listed within the application file), please contact us at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) and we will send you further instructions.
The deadline for submitting an application is September 20th, and applications will be dealt with on a first come, first serve basis. The limit is 60 characters, ideally 30 male and 30 female, though we will allow a deviation of +/- 10 either way.
Those characters already spoken for are listed here: http://asoiaf.westeros.org/index.php?showtopic=11975
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.
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.
We’ve now finished adding the batch of houses we created during the summer to the character database. This brings us up to a total of 1767 characters. Of these 13 are Features, 623 are Closed (due to being dead, too young or unable to be in King’s Landing), 171 are Restricted and 960 are Open. So, there ought to be something for everyone in there, or so we hope.
A few more characters will be added later on, but almost all of these will be Features, so the characters currently set to Restricted or Open are pretty much a definitive list of the characters which will be available for players to chose from.
Since we’ve had a few people comment about the lack of updates, here’s some information on what we’re doing at the moment.