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Ok, this is probably the most childish of amusements posted in these forums, but I figured I'd revive the humor forums and post a moment I found funny at 3:00 AM while coding some NPC functionality.

So I was working on a "taming" skill for players to use on applicable NPCs -- once tamed, the creature will follow you around and attack your enemies, etc. In this case, I was testing a squirrel who vaults nuts at your enemies during combat (that's not the funny part...).

So off I go with my squirrel friend in tow to find a wolf to attack. We soon find one -- I attack, and so the squirrel begins his habit of vaulting nuts at this wolf.

As coded, the wolf not only started attacking me, but was queued to attack any other active enemies in the room once its current target died, left, etc. I meant for this to occur in the case of two players attacking an NPC and one player dies -- the NPC should automatically start attacking the second player.

The wolf ends up decimating me, and as I'm preparing to reset myself, I notice the furious battle is continuing. Stupid squirrel is still pelting the wolf with nuts, and in one solid snap of the jaws, the wolf kills my poor pet squirrel.

I just sat dumbfounded for a moment, then laughed hysterically at the notion that I had, in fact, created "suicide squirrels" unintentionally.

The only thing better was a few minutes later when I again died to a wolf but had apparently gotten it down to 3 or fewer hitpoints, so the squirrels next 3hp attack killed the wolf. Fun times.

So what are some of your favorite moments in your MUD development experience?

-John

This was some fun while building. I was making a large corporate building with a lobby that's open several stories up to a skylight. And all the upper floors had this section over the lobby. Well apparently I forgot to flag the exits as rails because in a matter of minute, like lemmings. Bodies started falling from the sky and shortly I had a pile of some 20 corpses sitting in this room as mobs on the above floors would wander into the open air over the lobby and go tumbling down! It was an easy fix, but I was in tears it was so funny standing there.

One time i was coding a room with a door that involved a key, but the room i was in was not accepting the key file at all. I asked around and not too many people were familiar with the new ::lock inherit. Looking at the file for almost an hour when suddenly:

[Zadok logs into Seasons of Almadyn]
Zadok arrives from the shadows.
Zadok looks at the door.
Zadok hrms.
(about a two minute delay)
Zadok gets creative and clones a Faerie.
Faerie Fiona says: Hey Lets go on an Adventure!
Zadok beams brightly.
Zadok unlocks the north door with a faerie.
Zadok says: Forgot the .c at the end of the file! :)

So next time you forget your keys somewhere, faeries work just as well :)

*snicker*(tm)

I saw one of the builders one time create a mob with 0 hp for one if his quests. He couldn't figure out why it is that everyone was leveling after killing only a couple of critters.......

These aren’t mine, honest they’re not.
Someone coded a gambling game where they only checked for gold on the player at the start. This resulted in players starting the game, dropping their gold on the ground (or giving it to another player) so if they lost there was loss to them.

Someone confused NPCs by giving them negative amounts of gold Give X -200 gold, resulting in getting the benefit without the same risk.

This actually is mine. I once coded an effect to stun players with a message they were entangled and could not move, but didn’t take into account that one class had an ability to reduce stuns. The result was that the stun would wear off the player, the player would leave the room, perhaps even the area and then received a message that they were no longer stunned and had just wiggled out of their entanglement.

In Achaea, one coder had several things go wrong with a single system which I found amusing. Someone developed a game ‘Foozle’. The game consisted of a box, which produced a card. The card listed various mobiles. The goal was to find the mobile and in the presence of the mobile push a button (think of finding a critter and snapping its picture as an analogy). I seems to remember there being three or even four times they had to stop the game due to problems, but two stand out. The first was that one could probe the boxes before the game officially started, meaning one could get a list of mobs and run to their location. The other was far more damaging to the integrity of the game. However, it was that the game determined there was a match between the list and the mob was quickly thwarted by someone or someone who found out they could rename their pet (i.e. Zombie) to the name of the mob and that would count.

can I have that code? haha

Since we're discussing potentially humorous situations resulting from unexpected/emergent behavior in MUDs - I've got a good one from the MUD I design. It does necessitate a bit of explanation before the setup, though. In my MUD, there is a plain with a well fleshed out ecosystem. At the top of the food chain is a race of creatures called Tseraks. The Tseraks are propagated by their Queen. In turn, the Queen needs to be fed to continue her reproductive cycles and increase the population. This is accomplished by the lesser Tseraks going out and hunting food, then hunting back to her to return it. They also have behavioral directives toward aggression (necessitated for killing to get food for the Queen) and defending their Queen.

That covers the necessary explanation. Now, here's the setup: A fellow admin was frustrated with something (I forget what it was now) and decided to take his frustrations out on the Tserak Queen. He incapacitated her, tied her up and proceeded to drag her unconscious body halfway across the continent to the beach on the northern shore, presumably to drown her. For some reason, he was delayed in this task.

Meanwhile, a player died and suddenly asked on chat why a herd of Tseraks had come stampeding through the canyons (an area a bit north of their normal hunting territory) and killed him? At the time the question was asked, I was slightly puzzled by it. Shortly after, every Tserak (100+) emerged onto the beach and swarmed the admin who had abducted their Queen. Naturally, he had invincibility - unfortunately, he was also afk (which turned out to be the reason for his delay in killing the Queen).

The Tseraks obviously sought retribution, as they threw themselves at this vile abductor. His auto-combat kept him fighting, as his invincibility kept him alive. Some of them were bludgeoned to death. Some of them were thrown into the water and drowned (they can't swim). I watched the spectacle for a good 5-10 minutes until they had finally managed to free their Queen, and she was on her pathfinding way back to the plains. The few survivors among the Tserak population then gathered up the butchered remains of their fallen brethren (for food), retreated and began following her back (resumed normal routine and were hunting toward her).

The plucky admin protagonist (or would he be the antagonist in this case?) of our story returned another 10 minutes later to find the queen gone, his life reduced to 1 point, his logs overflowed with spam and the entire area bathed in blood, body parts and waterlogged corpses. His first and only response was, "WHAT THE **** HAPPENED!?"

Having written code from scratch, and a somewhat sophisticated mob AI, I have a few:

1) I created a mob with no name, and couldn't figure out how to target it. Then I observed a second mob successfully target the mob with no name. I ended up snooping the mob to figure out how he'd done it.

2) not a forgot the mobs could do it, but I had a roc swallow itself, resulting in a crash in early development.

3) one time I hit a low level spell caster mob as he was casting a spell, interuppting his spell. The mob lost control of the magic (as opposed to just losing the spell) and out came an incendiary cloud that killed both of us. Ouch.

-Katrina

3) one time I hit a low level spell caster mob as he was casting a spell, interuppting his spell. The mob lost control of the magic (as opposed to just losing the spell) and out came an incendiary cloud that killed both of us. Ouch.

*grin*

Bug hunting (or accidental bug finding) is one of the things I miss most now that I am not working on a project.

I was adding pythons to a swamp area in a Java code MUD. I decided that "Constriction" would be a nice combat skill for them.

I went through and coded it to bind the target, and then to cut off their breathing, causing damage per round based on lack of air.

I add the MOB to a test area, and ask for a player-character (PC) to test. A 35 level Necromancer that had turned to a Lich volunteered.

The python attacked, it entangled them and began constricting. They were bound, and trying to escape, but round after round there was no damage being caused.

They escaped, and I purged the MOB as I began to ponder what went wrong with the code. Then it occurred to me...

The PC was a Lich, and Liches are undead. Undead do not breath.

Bug hunting (or accidental bug finding) is one of the things I miss most now that I am not working on a project.

Why aren't you working on a project anymore, Kitkat?

One day I decided to stop procrastinating and actually add poison to my game. Having already added an event system, I thought it should be easy enough, right? I created a event called "poison" which would spit out relevant messages (based on the victim's current health) and take a percentage of their health when it finally landed. Lastly, assuming the victim's health was not 0, it would create a new poison event just before expiring.

Did I mention that it set a flag on the character it was attached to? This flag, which saved to the player's file, would trigger the "poison" event upon login.

Does anyone see my mistake? I missed it totally, all the way up until I created a snake, gave him poison as a bite affect and then started slapping him around.

When he bit me the first time, the first message rolled. I checked my flags and health and verified that it did indeed start out just as I imagined. I destroyed the snake and sat back watching my health deteriorate. At this point, I was already dreaming up the varieties of poisons and antidotes that I could create, the possibilities were amazing at that time.

Once again, I will ask: Do you see my mistake?

Yep, when I finally died, my health points went below 0 and so that stupid event didn't cancel itself. As a matter of fact, it continued to wipe away while I was receiving my "You have died" message and still another as my soul was whisked away from my body.

I re-entered the game, to immediately die again. And again, and again. I went into the player file and reset my health points back to their original state and re-entered the game... and again the poison came back.

I finally figured it all out and deleted the stupid "poison" flag and reset my health, but by this time I was so unnerved that I couldn't think straight.

The whole project up to that point had taken maybe 1 or 1.5 hours. It was nearly a week before I finally got the whole process straight in my head and I was able to compensate for the vagaries that could occur, for instance if someone was already poisoned or if they were in combat. Also, fixing that n00b "0 health" mistake to "less than or equal to 0" helped a lot too.

Why aren't you working on a project anymore, Kitkat?

I got behind on a lot of things while I was pregnant and had to stay in bed. Then trying to do stuff with the baby while also playing catch up just didn't leave any time for mudding.

I would love to do some building but I can't really commit to a project since I have no idea how my schedule will go during any given week.

We have a time system based on two moons, except with the random element to tick times, days of the week would occasionally vanish or never occur.

So a previous coder on the MUD I staff at built a 100% unique archery system. He had it about 90% functional, and then decided to code his own immortal-only arrows that were insta-death, add-lag, etc.

So when I begin coding there, I finish the necessary 10%, link it up to the ranger class, and then put in about twice as much code doing archery features, advances skills and techniques, etc.

So we test it, everything works fine and then I realize we forgot to check for the most basic of things. A player put a quest item (non-arrow) in his quiver, shot the quest item at a friend just to "see what would happen", and the code (instead of crashing) handled it as the insta-death immortal-only arrow. I'll end by saying that archery in PK was slightly overpowered until I logged back in. :P

We used to have a pair of mobs that were meant to keep high levels out of a particular leveling zone for lowbies. Their method was to 'push' a person south with essentially a function that emulated our falling code. They'd go 4 rooms and hit the wall of a clanhall that was also in the vicinity, take 4% damage (1%/room) and life goes on. Well that clan decided one day to uproot and move their hall...

Without it being there the usually tame act of the throwing people south from those mobs now sent them across the vast vMap(several hundred rooms south), killing their link from the travel spam and killing them when they'd finally slammed into the south 'edge' of the map.

Bonus points was the code also randomly discarded objects from a person as they fell so it left a long string of their gear along the entire flight path. :P