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.
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