The underlying infrastructure for the MUD and website is getting a 360-degree update over the coming month.  I will be trying to do this as unobtrusively as possible, however I will give news announce warnings on the news here, as well as some OOC shouts in-game before anything particularly earth-moving.

This will be happening in a few ways:

1] A major rewrite of the game internals will be loaded in.

The way that inventory has been handled has been looked at and revamped to accomodate how we want to extend inventory object capabilities.  This will allow things like crafting, enchantment, weapons that aren’t horridly hard-coded into the system, and so forth.  A further rewriting of the room code will allow for a room to be owned and developed on by its owner, which we hope to use for the city/town system to allow players to expand and develop upon their respective cities and towns.

2] The first towns are being released

Well, technically they were there from the moment of inception, but they are being linked to the gameworld as a whole.  There is one for each of the  major cities, and I’ll leave it to you to discover them for now!  After a bit, May or I will post some information on all of them, after people have had a fair chance to find out for themselves.

3] The server engine powering the MUD has been updated.

Many points of the server engine code duplicated code and concepts in the game scripting so we have pruned back as appropriate.  Furthermore we have made the code for handling sockets more efficient, so hopefully it will reduce slowdowns from the server.

4] The server itself is being upgraded

Or rather, May and I are pooling our money to construct an entirely new, much more modern system than the current system running Elvenblade.  It will be using the latest and greatest hardware so this should eliminate any slowdowns really, as a result of the server.

May or I will post a notice about the migration when it comes time.

Hopefully this will have things working much cleaner, and make the world better for you all!

Also, we are looking for people interested in building for the MUD.

I am more than willing to take the time to train people, as is Maya, in the building aspects of the MUD, so all you need to bring, if you are interested, is writing skills, and enthusiasm for Elvenblade.  If you’re interested, drop a line at chahiero@elvenblade.ca

Cheers, Peter