Just One More Thing

The Ares beta is chugging merrily along. Several people have chosen the Easy Mode install option, which is the low-hassle way to get an Ares game of your very own. There are a half-dozen games in various stages of development, and their feedback has been invaluable in shaking out issues and the need for additional configuration options. Having a more rigorous release cycle has also driven improvements to the upgrade process.

Although I declared ‘dev complete’ back in April, I couldn’t resist tacking on a few features from the ‘wish list’ while the beta was going on. The temptation to keep adding ‘just one more thing’ is strong. Some of the highlights:

• Advantages in FS3, which let you represent things that cost chargen points but aren’t skills: Resources, ranks, spells, etc.
• A ruby command to let you execute code snippets from the MUSH client (inspired by Evennia’s @py command).
• More IC Time options, including time ratios and custom day/month names.
• Player tags in room descriptions to identify MUSH beginners (if they opt in to the system) and admins.

I’ve also built out the Ares Extras, which contains plugins that are not part of the main install, including:

• A skills system based on the Cortex RPG.
• A simple Traits system, such as the kind you might need on a statless or comic game.
• Roleplay Preferences, inspired by Cobaltasaurus’ system for Penn/Tiny.

My hope is that other coders will contribute plugins of their own to the Extras repository, so in time it can become a valuable community resource.

I’d like to get a bit more feedback on the coding tutorials and see some people actually successfully creating custom code before I’m comfortable leaving beta. But for now, at least, things are going smoothly.