Bleh

Has it seriously been an entire year since I even looked at this thing!?

I guess so. Hello everyone, and welcome to yet another installment of Samakhulis Moonflair's big fat bloggy-blog where we talk about anything Achaean. Or at least I do.

What's been going on? Lots, then again, not a whole lot. I've been away quite a bit. Can't put in a lot of full-day stints in-game, mostly because I picked up a new full-time job OOC in March, which has been keeping me very busy.

HOWEVER, been making new friends, finding old ones coming back and all sorts of things!

What to talk about? Umm..no idea. Garden's stalled also, due to the job thingy, though there've been new people ever since I published on some of the fun little sites like The MUD Connector and MUDstats. Most of them don't stick around. A few pop in every week or two. Others connect but never log in. It's...slow.

Sorry, if I'm in a tired mood, but I am. Perhaps I'll hang it up here for now and see you all again in another year!

The Fairy Garden - HUGE Update!!

As of...two days ago, we finally activated DSL at our house. With this news in mind, I've decided to try and make the Fairy Garden live 24/7! No more of these third-party hosting services that never work and take days to figure out...I've got this one set up already and running! And on the old address to: fairygarden.no-ip.org:3349

And just today I created a forum based on the free phpBB software. THAT is located at http://fairygarden.no-ip.org/forums/.

Anyway, hopefully I can keep developing it a little more now that it's up, and of course, hopefully I'll have more people asking in or just popping in....

TFG Updates

There have been a TON of major updates to the Fairy Garden.

1) MCP-Server finally sent me an email saying they were shutting down free service at the end of October. So with this confirmed, I opened up a new service with Vermaxhosting. And they didn't let me pick my own port, so the online service, whenever it's on is at:
Address: vermaxhosting.com
Port: 9304

2) I've also been hosting the server from my own laptop with a free DNS thingy.. That is at:
Address: fairygarden.no-ip.org
Port: 3349

3) We have a new player: Lynara, from Achaea, who has actually been debugging a TON of stuff within the last week. It seems to be her area of expertise. But of course, I've told her not to break the world..just a few bugs at a time please!! ;)

4) We've upgraded to 1.8.4p1. Fun fun.

5) I want a TON like I said I had, so here's a fifth bullet point.

Anyway, I can't think...no wait. oh here's something else.

6) The localhost fairygarden.no-ip.org one even has a nice website with wiki and Shimmie and I already announced this didn't I? Yes I did. I recall seeing the Shimmie tag in one of my previous posts. Never mind. Carry on.

Anyway, I can't think of anything else right now..so take care and have fun.

-Alara

Websites Websites Websites

I love websites. I love how they don't work sometimes and you have to find backups!

So I've been trying to get my fairy garden thing together. But my free host keeps shutting off..like...they run out of money to keep it online, so they just turn the server off or something. Therefore I have kind of switched over fully to my backup system. It'll be easier to maintain anyway.

And on top of THAT, I can create a better fully-featured website to provide an information portal.

The information for the new server is:

HTTP: http://fairygarden.no-ip.org
Telnet: fairygarden.no-ip.org
Port: 3349

It will not be on every day all day for a number of reasons, but if it is on, everything will be available to you.

ZMud Connecting to the Fairy Garden...

Remind myself! Let me step myself through ZMud really quick so I know exactly how to write it out here :D.

So after installing and what-not, you'll get a window that shows a list of MU*'s to connect to (especially if you told the installation to include sample MU*'s). Anyhow, you'll use the New (+) button up at the top, change the host to fairygarden.mcp-server.com and the port to 3349 and then click the big Save button. If you get MUDConnector.com listings, don't click through them because that'll just change all that information that you just entered.

Once you've saved it, you'll see a new icon in your list that says, "fairygarden.mcp-server.com." You can now edit this and see a few more fields to change like the Name which might be something like "The Fairy Garden." I added a custom icon I created from a fairy avatar I found someplace also. This is done by clicking the big square button with the default icon on the right. If you so wish, you can also pull down the Type drop-down and change it to Mush, although this is probably only for sorting and searching purposes.

Once you've edited it like you want, you can hit "Save" and then "Connect." Now the connection window will disappear completely and the world window will open. From here I'd suggest possibly loading the map file I've created. This is located at http://cid-95ca1e074aa3e174.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/.Public and is that FairyG.mdb file. Download the file to some reasonable location which you don't expect to move it from, then click the Map button in ZMud. It'll open a new blank map. Do File>Open and browse for the mdb file that you just downloaded.

Load it and it should open up the map with the active room as the last room I just edited. It'd then be best to search around, most likely in the World zone, for the room where you are at. If you do a THINK LOC(HERE), you can find the dbref of the room that you are already in and then search the map for that room. The map rooms also have dbrefs associated with them, but should not be confused with the default room numbers which are autonumbers given to them by ZMud itself. BTW, if you are starting out as a completely new player, you'll start in Room #0, which in the Map is Room #606 (Before the Cave of Creation), located in the Limbo Zone. If you right click this room and look at Properties>Other, you'll see that VNum has been changed to 0 to reflect the DBRef of the room. In any case, find your current room, right click and Set Current Position.

Note: This map is not PERFECT, as some exits will lead to random locations where the map will not be able to anticipate. Therefore, it might be useful to play around with your map follow options and stay on Safe or Slow mode and research on how to trigger your location with the room number. Of course, as a mortal player, you'll not see room numbers by default, and many of the room names are duplicates of many other room names, so that'll take a bit of work on MY part. Maybe I should make sure that the room number is included no matter if you have the flag set to see them or not.

Yay! Hope this works! If you have any questions, ask....Sevilla. She's better at ZMud than I am. I like my MUSHClient ;).

Hip-Hop-Happiness

Hey all you! Guess what? I have started a Google Site thingy. Actually, it's more for the Fairy Garden, since I want to be able to put information up about that without having to use the default web space given to me by YourMUD.net. So if any of you haven't gotten into the garden or don't even have a nice client to do so with, maybe I'll try getting a client up there if possible. But in either case, I'm going to start putting fun-ness up on that thing. Oh, you'll probably want to know where it is..it's here: http://sites.google.com/sites/fairygardenmud. Enjoy! And hope to see you there.

Thoughts on Roleplaying and PK

Over the recent months, I've noticed an increased amount of PK, especially in my area of allegiance. Of course, it is acceptable and allows for a bigger player-base. However, it seems as though much of the PK that occurs is due to spite and grudges. None of it, in my opinion, is roleplayed very well. As I've been working on my own MUSH, I read through the PennMUSH developers' writings on roleplay, factions and things. And I have to say that they brought up some very good points.

From what I see, and from what I perceive, those factions specifically aligned against my own seem to know when our defenses are low and make gigantic and harmful attacks at those times. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's how it seems to be. Javelin, or was it Raevenos, or someone else..I don't remember, said that factions and roleplaying should be best brought together with agreements by faction leaders. It seems a little backward from the way things are, and I admit that true underhanded playing adds a LOT that you would not have with roleplaying agreements. But the idea was this: HL1 gets together with HL2. House1 is enemied to House2. HL1 says to HL2, "I want to try a roleplay where our houses fight it out and do such and such" and HL2 says, "Okay..but make sure you do it around this time, because my members will be around then and you won't have an unfair advantage." And so it goes on and the house leaders make some sort of arrangement.

I really like this idea, simply because I'm horrible at PK. And it seems more enjoyable to me and I'm sure to others like me. I mean, I'm not into PK. I'm into roleplaying and monster-hunting. If I experience an unexpected and unfair attack by an enemy faction, well, it pretty well depresses me for days on end, because I can't stand how I'm not that good at doing what I'm supposed to be good at doing (specifically DEFENDING Nature). So this idea of agreed roleplay between factions seems like a very nice idea.

Of course, I know most people will disagree with me, and even -I- might disagree with me, because, like I said before, underhanded and unannounced roleplay is so much more exciting than a planned out war.

Okay. I'm done! And it's late. And I'm tired. And I don't want to wait for the Fairy Garden to shut itself down (which it now does at 3:00am EST).

The Fairy Garden

New PennMUSH is LIVE!! Whee! I'm so excited.

fairygarden.mcp-server.com
Port: 3349

Right now I don't have character creation enabled, so you'll have to email me or contact me in-game with one of the guest accounts what you want your name and password to be.

So, this would be in official terms, beta stage. Nothing is very interesting. Two areas, a plain and a forest..oh and a big tree inside the forest. Plus all the storage rooms and stuff. Anyhow, all you thousands of fans of mine (actually, three or four from what I can tell from the comments) can try it out if you want. Ideas are already pouring in from people..Loreen in particular. I'll have to sort through them and figure out what I want. But for now, it's just a basic 'let's get it working and make it interesting too' kind of stage.

We'll see. Let me know!