Heyo!

I just wanted to touch bases with folks and let you know where things stand. The big news is that the Mythical Beast is all but dead now. The Play Rewrite is in the final stages of Quality Control (QC) -- out of 18 different sets of code, only 1 remains, and it has already been checked. A few minor fixes, and the new Play should be ready to go. Keep in mind that until it is live, everything is subject to change.

What will be different? I'm not going to give away everything right now, but a few teasers:

(1) The new play should allow instrument training well past 1500 ranks. That should keep everyone busy for a while.

(2) The "training life" of any given instrument should be drastically extended. Learning will be much more heavily focused on the choice of song and style than on instrument, although instrument difficulty will still be a factor.

(3) Musicians will have much more control over what they are playing. There will be over 30 different song types to choose from, and over 20 styles/moods to mix and match with the song types.

(4) The new play will include a fairly extensive HELP option. While it won't give exact numbers, it does rank song types in order of difficulty, to take a lot of the guesswork out of things.

(5) Support has been added for worn and ground-based instruments. What does this mean? Among other things, keyboards are coming. Yes, we already have a working model.

(6) The ability to play songs for a specific target has been added. While this particular feature has limited uses in the initial release, it opens the doors to all sorts of future releases from musical locks to having NPCs/critters react to music.

(7) For Bards, two words: Dance music.

(8) Two more words: Freeform performing.

(9) Yet another two words: Less Scroll. The new messaging system is more robust, and should give more variety but be a bit more instrument-appropriate. However, the amount of scroll produced by playing should be much lower.

(10) More freedom to do things while playing. Actions are still limited, but not as restricted as they are now with the current system.

What won't we be seeing?

I wanted to include group playing and the ability to play scroll songs. In truth, the main support for both is in place, but to finish them requires some major work on other systems, and I didn't want to hold up PLAY for those. In short, the mechanics are in place, but until I can revamp a couple of other systems, they won't work.


That's just some of the things involved in the PLAY rewrite. There's definitely more, but a surprise or two won't hurt anyone. I will say that one of the main reasons PLAY was overhauled (other than to extend training past the 300 rank range) was to make it much easier to plug in special play-based feats. In addition to freeform playing and dance music for Bards, two other guilds will see a new musical feat with the initial release, just as a sample of the possibilities.

I'll keep everyone posted if there are any unexpected delays, but right now things are looking very good. It's just a matter of time now.



- GM Dartenian

"You ain't seen nothin' yet!" - Al Jolson

LiveJournal: http://www.livejournal.com/users/dartenian/