New, seeking general advice.

Keign

Hi everyone - so, I'm brand new to Achaea - actually, new to MUDs in general, but my brother-in-law has gotten me started on yet one more outlet for my roleplaying needs, and so far I definitely enjoy it.

Anyway, I have realized that a lot of people(everyone?) use a great deal of scripting for this - and the way combat flows even at low level I can understand why.

I have a light programming background, and with help from my brother-in-law I've set up some really simple keybindings for easy hunting and sipping.

BUT, the reason I am here is I am hoping for assistance in prioritizing the triggers/timer/scripts I'll want to set up. I have some interest in pre-built systems, to the point that I've downloaded Omnipave - however, I want to know how it works, and I find it impossible to let myself just use it. I've spent more time trying to dissect the system since I've gotten it than I have spent in Achaea using it.

So what this boils down to is, I know that I want to work my way from the ground up, organically expanding a working system for myself along with my character. I feel like it could be a great deal of the fun for me - and it would help me not feel like I am somehow cheating by using scripts that I don't even comprehend.

So... any advice on where to start, as just a solid baseline? 

Oh, and I have Mudlet 2.0, and Lua looks like it makes sense so far. Though I'd never heard of it, it reminds me of other languages for what I'm sure are obvious reasons.

Nizaris

Basic curing system works like this:

• Triggers register when you receive an affliction. The triggers add these afflictions to a queue.
• Another set of triggers registers when you recover balance to cure. (You can only cure afflictions cured by herbs/minerals once every two seconds or so, salves every second, etc.)
• When a trigger registers that you have regained a curative balance, it pops off the highest priority affliction, looks up the cure for it, and then takes the cure.
• System also needs to be 'smart'. For example, if you have anorexia, you won't be able to eat or drink. So, one would need to cure anorexia first before eating or drinking another curative.

I recommend speaking with @Mishgul / Carmain (the author of Omnipave), and @Vadimuses (the author of SVO).

Lyr

I'd start by creating aliases for things you do often. I'd also set up a very basic sipping script for health and mana, and then expand into doing the cures.

However! No one considers using a system to be cheating, even if you do on some level. Collecting all of the lines for afflictions, prioritizing certain ones over others, all that is very tedious. You want to play the game, not spend hours and hours getting all the triggers working and debugging. I'd recommend looking through omnipave, seeing what things do, and just learn your system and figure out how to hook into it (svo has examples, I know) instead of doing it from the ground up. I have scripted a TON of things, and I use svo-- it's nice having a system to hook into, especially since svo raises events and has an API.

Tanris

I'm a pretty big advocate of writing your own system eventually, because I know how much it helped me. Pre packaged systems are good, but writing your own really does give you an appreciation for the mechanics that you might not get otherwise. Anyway:
Major components of a system (coding side, obviously you need triggers and whatnot):
- Balance tracking
- State tracking (affs, current health/mana, etc)
- Curing part (determines your current affs, and what's optimal to cure first, this is the bit most people all do differently so I'll come back to it).
- Misc required things (pipe refilling, pre outrifting, things of that sort).

The curing part is the bit that should take the most time to code, as I'm using the term broadly to include aeon curing, the sipping, and all general curing. A lot of people handle aeon/retardation curing (aeon is an affliction that causes all commands to be delayed by one second, meaning you can only input one curing action at a time and then wait) completely differently to standard curing, whereas some tie the two together pretty cleanly. When it comes to the curing aspect, I'd start with an autosipper (its simple, is the thing you'll do the most, and let's you make sure your balance tracking is working correctly). Aff curing is a pretty huge topic since everyone has a preferred way to do it (some people have one function which determines the set of affs to cure next dependent on balance, some people use separate queues dependent on cure type (salve/herb/pipe etc), and some people have other ways that they do things specific to themselves). If you're not sure how best to handle this after some thought, its worth talking with some people who have written a system in the past, as even if you don't do things their way they can generally offer some pretty invaluable insight.

Balance tracking is fairly simple, although you'll want to consider  illusions in your design. Enable triggers when you send the sip/eat/apply commands and disable them after, etc. That'll be something you'll figure out as you learn the mechanics of achaean combat, which is a prerequisite if you intend to be successful when writing your system.

My main advice would be to use omni pave for a bit, start fighting people, and once you feel you understand the mechanics well enough consider working on a system of your own. Going in without knowing the ins and outs of how things work will just end up in a nasty mess of things which almost work but don't.

Keign

Collecting all of the lines for afflictions, prioritizing certain ones over others, all that is very tedious. You want to play the game, not spend hours and hours getting all the triggers working and debugging.
See, this? Not true at all. I love all of that, and the only reason I don't do it for a living is because the schooling was too expensive and most great hobbies get ruined when you're obligated to perform them for pay.

Thanks to all three of you - I'm pretty sure I know where I want to start now, at least. I think I'll get to tracking balance and states first, and leave off actually setting up scripts for things like affliction curing until that actually comes up. At the moment, I'm pretty sure I really only need health/mana sippers and maybe a moss eating trigger for bleeds. Once I've made hunting stupidly easy, I may (or may not...) start worrying about things that will come up in player/player combat.

Unless I'm missing something obvious, this feels reasonable to me.

Tanris

Moss doesn't cure bleeding. The moss tattoo does that, the moss that you eat cures 10% of your max health and mana. But yes, worth including that in your autosipper, since they work under the same general principle.

Iocun

Tanris said:

Going in without knowing the ins and outs of how things work will just end up in a nasty mess of things which almost work but don't.

That may be true, but it isn't really such a terrible thing in the long run. I wrote four different curing systems for myself, for three different clients, and from today's perspective the first three of them were pretty bad.

The first actually just consisted of having a single unprioritized queue to which my triggers added cures corresponding to the afflictions I received, and I would simply execute the first cure of that queue whenever I regained herb balance. It didn't then take me long to discover that this was a highly suboptimal way of curing, so I set out to make a new, better system. But the fact that I still had made this subpar system had allowed me to learn a lot about curing mechanics and discover several potental system flaws on my own, which I then was sure to avoid in my subsequent approaches.

I think it was mainly due to the fact that I already had built three systems, all with certain faults, that I was able to structure my current one very well from the start and never had to change any of its fundamental mechanics since.

So, what I'm trying to say: yes, just leaping ahead into building a system without good knowledge of curing mechanics and common curing system approaches will likely result in a mediocre system, but it's still no wasted time, due to how much you'll learn in the process.

Erasariel

I can agree with Iocun here. Hell, I can't even program anything beyond simple aliases, so I just created a set of triggers and echoes to tell me what to eat when I get afflicted with something. Researching all of it taught me what cures which affliction and what lines mean which affliction, something I have had tons of trouble with for most of my time. It's no system and I still have to cure manually, but at least I learned lots of things from it!

I also am now good at making triggers and echoes, yay