Note: Please try to keep the hate and flame away.

After thinking on Zulg's reasons for leaving CF, I was curious if any immortals would care to shed some light on what the future of CF holds. I would love to have some warm and fuzzy feelings to replace the dread many seem to be experiencing right now.

Also, will we be getting a new Santa this year or are the boys and girls of Thera going to need to beg?

None of us have a crystal ball. I've gone MIA from CF for extended periods on more than one occasion, assuming the MUD would die of natural causes, but here it is, still alive and kicking.

In my RL, I had occasion to play and run a few table-top roleplaying games again in recent years - something I hadn't done since college due to time constraints and finding players. For about 2 years, the stars aligned to play and run those games, and I just loved it. It was something I looked forward to each week. Unfortunately, the stars fell out of alignment and that gaming fell apart.

I realized how much time I spent on the table-top games I ran. People enjoyed it. I enjoyed it. I didn't worry about how permanent my efforts were - because I knew they weren't permanent, and wouldn't last longer than the duration of my games. I did it for fun, because it was fun, in the present. That made it worth it.

That's the kind of energy I've decided to put into CF as an immortal these days, without serious worry about the future. Maybe CF will limp along with the same activity it's had for a while now indefinitely. Maybe it will die. Maybe MUDs will experience some sort of retro-revival as some generation of kids discovers it (look at Minecraft, for example. I sure as heck would not have anticipated that level of popularity for that low-tech a game with kids.) Who knows?

Specific direction of the game will depend largely on the players and imms that are invested in it, and as Daevryn pointed out, there are a lot of variables in that mix. A lot of firm *direction-altering* changes depend on the time and focus of our currently-available coders, and that is a huge and unpredictable variable. Fortunately after all these years, we do have enough game content and tools to keep things viable and fun without code changes for coder-lulls.

My main message here is - let go of the dread. Just enjoy the game in the present. Whatever will be, will be. To quote John Lennon, "Time you enjoyed wasting, was not wasted."

I think charting a future course for CF will be, as it has always been, a bit of a struggle and balancing act between opposing concerns.

For example, the "killer" contingent of players (to use Bartle's MUD player types) would prefer that there really aren't any secrets to speak of in the game -- the formula and factors all known, maps and quests and stats and everything under the sun on a wiki somewhere. That's fun for them, but that isn't fun at all for the players who like exploring and big PvE challenges and figuring stuff out.

For some people empowerment is their favorite part of the game, other people can't stand it.

Some people like being part of an active religion or other RP-centric activity, other people aren't interested (and rage when the first group gets any kind of reward, regardless of what for).

Some people want leveling to be even faster and less risky, whereas other players miss the days when heroing was actually an accomplishment.

Some people think the hardcore/risk factor of CF is what makes it unique, others would rather have a more casual game, maybe even one in which you can't loot other people or can't loot them very much.

Some players want us to make unfavored or uncommon combos more interesting, others mostly just want us to buff whatever it is they personally enjoy playing.

And it goes on. There's never making everyone happy, but we'll continue to try to strike the best balance we can between these and many other competing factors.

As much as I appreciate this response, it felt too political without ever truly stating where you think the IMM staff falls on these issues. Not that it is a bad thing to remind us that you guys care, but where are the secrets? :-)

nt

xx

If you're worried that someone is going to go hit the CF box with a sledgehammer, then fret not.

Middle to late last year Z talked about wanting to move CF to a VPS to resolve some of the access issues we were having. As he mentioned in his farewell, his time trailed off after the new year and some of us were getting anxious to see the move take place. So we started looking into a new server, found a provider we liked, and started making it happen. At that time Z decided to retire and handed over the keys to the kingdom.

I was overseeing the move and, unfortunately, the timing wasn't great; I have had a lot on my plate as of late (the good news, though, is that I completed two postgraduate degrees over the weekend--both contributing to a huge time commitment). My plate is by no means empty, but I should finally have a little more time to commit to the move. In my relative absence, Vilhazarog and unnamed Immortal stepped up to get most of the new environment set up. I'm getting myself back up to speed this week and hopefully we'll resolve the remaining issues and make the move fairly quickly.

Right now, that's the biggest item on the to do list because it's a bottleneck. We have other projects that have been held up by the code/area freeze, so once we switch over you should be seeing a fair number of changes go in; some of the first code changes will probably be invisible, since the move pointed out issues like memory leaks (which have been fixed). We have better access to the website now, so a lot of the long overdue updates can go in.

You might have been looking for something a little more Hallmark, but this may be helpful as well.

n/t

Here's a small addition to the future direction for CF. If folks can't participate in a civil manner on these forums, I won't hesitate to ban them. I'm not wasting time on trolls.

<3

nt

hawtness

nt

(tongue-in-cheek)

I know I've asked before in the past, but have you guys ever tried running any static analysis tools on the CF code-base? Or building in run-time leak-detection libraries on the test server? I could be totally wrong, but my suspicion is that both would be profitable in terms of improving stability.

Did some googling. A couple promising (free) static analyzers:

Cppcheck
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cppcheck

Splint
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splint_%28programming_tool%29

And for run-time memory leak detection:

Memcheck (part of Valgrind)
http://valgrind.org/docs/manual/quick-start.html

Valgrind has already been run on the new server and it uncovered some nasty issues.

Awesome. Shouldn't have doubted you. :)

Games and people evolve.

I'm sure at one time Zulg saw himself with a wispy gray beard, rusted axes in his hand as he aimed them one last time at the server to end CF for good....but life changes.

As Nepenthe said on Zulg's thread, Nepenthe left the game for a while and never thought he'd come back.

So did Twist.

I never thought I'd see Thror back, but here he is in his stumpy glory.

The game is evolving. Do I like ALL the changes? No? But I respect the fact that they are not just sitting around and keeping CF the same.

This is mere speculation but the changes Zulgh seemed to like were more automation and less secrets. I think he liked the style of the new dragon lairs more than the enormous area explored filled with secrets that just a few players/imms know. And the way he coded Empire without needing much imm involvement. Also he did put up an official wiki even if not much came of it but it reminded me of good old Strahd (damn, that page helped me as a newbie). I do know the wand system kind of works against this theory but still..

I don't think the current imms that I know of have that philosophy. If I can continue to speculate I think they more want a cf that is deep and mysterious and that means secret areas, secret quests, imm driven quests and rewards for a few people but everyone should be able to strive for them etc.

But what the hell do I know. I have no idea how many imms there are or what their discussions are about. But that is just a general feeling from the outside of things.

I do hope he comes back. He seemed to do heck of a job coding and I still remember when he empowered me as a new imm.