Crawl: Stone Soup

[Tabasco]

I was perusing the forums the other day and came across one of Secrets' posts about new custom servers.
Having started my own a few months ago I went down the list of common practices and realized that I had done nearly every single one of them. My only defense there is that I think people new to Emu generally enjoyed the same or similar things about EQ so they make a server to accommodate their whimsy and nostalgia, but eventually that gets old.
I'm happy with my server and I think I at least have a somewhat unique twist on the same old things. I've also been trying to make more quality content rather than just pile on crap tasks with disproportionate rewards, but I think everyone else is as well at this point.

What can be done to make a truly unique emu experience now? Everyone is writing new quests and making new content, telling stories, etc. Some are even ambitious enough to rewrite the whole world, but at the end of the day it's still EQ and most people will gloss over even the most interesting stories to find out who they have to kill to get the shiny sword. (There are exceptions to everything, of course, I'm speaking very generally)

I still play nethack and crawl:ss from my shell now and then. I think they're timeless games, and their audience and development track record indicates the same.
I have a dev box laying around that I'd like to turn into a hardcore dungeon crawl server. Items would be much fewer, but if you've ever played nethack or crawl, you know that a good artifact item will take you a long way. Wands, slightly different spell sets, more powerful and permanent beneficial effects as well as detrimental effects, and so forth.
The game would be winnable, but death would also take you back to level 1 at the entrance. I could keep a record of dungeon depth and level, then post leaderboards somewhere.

Would anyone be interested in something like that?
For those not familiar with crawl or nethack:
http://crawl.chaosforge.org/index.php?title=CrawlWiki (I'm leaning more toward crawl as foundation at this point)

[bowmaster]

server seems well rounded
get this server Online bro

[bowmaster]

im happy its on the server selection , just needs be unlocked now
hers the question
Will server be like cant box?
cause sounds of it , you dont need 2

[Tabasco]

There's quite a bit to be done before it's playable or testable, but I think I can do it in a pretty reasonable amount of time.

I'm working up new items based on the Crawl wiki and scaling their stats to be more in line with EQ damage/delay/ac, etc. Once that's done, I fix starting player gear and I already have everyone dropping into a 'prep' zone.
That's the easy part.

I don't see a way to do cursed items effectively without making modifications in the client. I have a few ideas, but I'll need to test them to know if they'll work. The same goes for having to identify items to see their stats. A large part of the game is finding something that's all sparkly and magical, yet not knowing if equipping it will give you phenomenal cosmic power, or melt your face off.
It doesn't look very difficult to add new quest events and that may be required for some of it.

LDoN provides a lot of appropriate maps, but part of the fun of crawl is that the experience is different each time. To that end I figure I'll make some backend scripts to randomize the dungeon levels by manipulating the DB and then run a new dungeon every week or so. I'm figuring on having an invisible man NPC on each map that actually handles spawns so I can more granularly manage spawn points and population. Anyway, there are a lot of details, but they're getting worked out.

To answer your question, no, the server won't be set up to allow boxing. Players could conceivably group, and that may be the way to go if a person actually intends to survive, but the traditional crawl environment is ironman solo. Completing the mission and ascending should be pretty difficult.
If you haven't played crawl, I highly recommend it. It's not the prettiest thing in the world, but the gameplay is very deep.

[nenelan]

Granted, I don't think there would be a way to handled wearing unidentified items, however, you could easily have stock "template" items that take the place of your unided item. Say items like "a dagger", "a broadsword", "a robe", "a potion", all with no stats what so ever, this is the loot that you would find on monsters.

Then we have a mob that lets you hand in a scroll of identification and said unided item, and it returns you your new shiny object based on a random roll, weighted towards the "junk" items. Shouldn't be all that difficult with some practical application of perl, though would be exhaustive work first setting it up, going to be a fairly large quest file to handle every single kind of item and reward. Hit me up with a PM or email if you need a hand with it.

[Tabasco]

I contemplated something similar, but I'd really rather not have an NPC required to ID things. There ends up being no risk for using an unidentified item, just the inconvenience of having to ID it to get the bonuses.
I also thought about having my zone manager npc pop groundspawns that could determine cursed status using EVENT_PLAYER_PICKUP. A quest popup shows the player the generic item name and if they go ahead and pick up an item that turns out to be cursed, I cast a nasty spell on them.
At that point I could have loot just drop on the ground when an NPC dies instead of using traditional loot tables. I have some pretty major issues with that as well, I just need to put some more thought into it.
Compromises are going to have to be made in any case, I just want to carefully consider what and where.

I've been poking around in the source looking at inventory functions and I think I might be able simulate the behavior I want. It would essentially be what you suggested, but instead of swapping items through an NPC it would be done by the server after Identify is cast, or on equip. At that point I think I could also do cursed items by preventing the client from unequipping a cursed item. A remove curse spell could just iterate through player inventory and swap cursed for uncursed items.
Of course, for all of this to work I'll need an item for every possible variation and status, but I'm already writing scripts to generate those. I'll also need to keep a record of the player's knowledge of items in a table somewhere.

Before I go too deep into any of that though, I'm completing more readily achievable goals. The transition into the dungeon is complete and the zone manager NPC is working out very well.
Next I'll probably play around with Trevius' randomroam script and see if I can use some of the logic therein to automate the generation of spawn coordinates, rather than #loc'ing all over each and every map.

I've been enjoying the atmosphere so far, and wands are good fun. If identified and cursed/uncursed items just don't work out I think it will still be pretty enjoyable.