Quote from: ranlo on September 25, 2017, 08:17:17 AM

Gotta be honest. I have tried to get into the game a few times. It's just not user-friendly enough. It's confusing and somewhat convoluted. I think that's why it's not really catching on -- learning how to even get in the game and do anything is a job in and of itself. That said, I love the idea of a game backing DVC. But it has to be easy enough that passive players can dig in.

Maybe that is where writing could help. Someone could write about their explorations so far, the steps they took and where they led etc.

It does not help that the financial base under it all has kept being pulled out from under it, or even when not the finances the actual servers as when the three third-party servers that were serving as dvcstable01, dvcstable02 and dvcstable06 dot dvcnode.org all went offline due to the hosting company turning out, after all that time, to be massive scammers.

The Battle for Wesnoth modules that educate players about the game (being as how BfW is basically a computer-aided-instruction program with battle scenes interleaved to get the players personally involved in the histories they are reading by attempting to re-enact them) have always been online of course, but with the passage of time I would not be surprised if we have again reached a point where the mainline release of BfW is a newer version so that until we yet again update the modules to match the latest version folks would have to use an old, legacy version of BFW to play the modules.

Possibly the simplest way to initially get one's feet wet is the two-dimensional tile-based interface, "Crossfire RPG", which is maybe retro enough that pretty much anyone can probably manage to work with it although it does require graphics and probably would not work well on a cellphone or tiny tablet.

That is still the only free-as-in-beer way in, and so is vulnerable to account-spamming and character-spamming and, by account and character spamming, the creating out of nothing of in-game resources such as food, clothing, tools and even money and/or valuables. So it necessarily tries to keep the "wealth" on a small scale. Its currency therefore does not appear in the HORIZON system until the coin known as "Amberium", which has a lot of buying-power in the Crossfire RPG system but whose value out in the multiverse at large has still to be determined, presumably by market forces.

The main potential code-modification wanted for the Crossfire RPG code is to fix the support for permadeath.

When playing e.g. Dungeons and Dragons or the like live on the tabletop with players miniatures pencil and paper and so on in one's livingroom one typically is in permadeath mode, which gives a real RPG flavour that is lacking in typical videogames where instead of actually dying, possibly being able to be resurrected if such technology or magick is available, players simply re-appear at their last save point or in Crossfire RPG's case, at their designated "savebed". The code does have permadeath, and we use it, but there is a glitch that is very important economically in that guild memberships bank accounts and even one's corpse that is sitting where one died waiting potentially for resurrection are all tied to the character-name but the character-creation routines do not prevent the creation of a character whose name is the same as some other dead character, so if when you die an opponent managed to create themselves a character of that same name before you do they inherit your memberships, your bank accounts, and even your corpse with all its skills and experience and such. That is a potentially very serious problem that really needs to be fixed!

Arguably it simply adds zest to character-killing as if you kill someone's character there is a chance you will be faster at re-using the character-name than they are, but this is not an intended effect just a side-effect of the permadeath code not having been fully followed-through.

The mainline developers of Crossfire RPG do not actually favour permadeath so are actually maybe more likely to remove it than to tidy up its loose ends, so this is something where a bounty would maybe be very useful. If we can make DVC bounties actually worth something that is.

P.S. In a way it is not just one game supporting DeVCoin, it is every actually working free open source multi-player online game codebase we can find and even a lot of work over the years on trying to fix some that were not really working when we first came across them!

-MarkM-