Laeron is the MUD game that I, personally, have wanted to build for many years. I've constantly started projects that veered towards open-ended features/capabilities like DragonMUD; however, the time commitment involved in solving the generic use case can be more significant, especially when it has to be completed before development on the game can actually begin.
So I have made the decision to build an opinionated MUD server that fulfills the needs/desires and goals of Laeron directly so that I can build the game alongside the development of the engine and let the game's needs drive the development of this server. As with most of my tools that I end up building, the server itself will be available to everyone so that they can build their own experiences on top of the same rulesets as Laeron but with their own flavor or hack their own unique behaviors in to add that extra personal touch.
Projects like DragonMUD will eventually be completed and be the entirely open-ended server that let's potential server developers pick and choose and completely customize with ease.
This is (and for a while, will be) an incomplete lets of features/behaviors that this server will exhibit in it's default state. It will also kind of serve as a rough picture of a roadmap.
NOTE: My knowledge of the internals of typical and classic MUD and MU* variant projects is extremely limited as I've always aspired to build my own vs. learning/building off of another engine. So forgive any incorrect commentary towards "classic" behavior and feel free to open an issue describing the where the assumption is invalid so these blurbs can be updated to be more accurate and specific.
- Classic Rooms, basic 10 directional traversal (N, W, S, E, NW, NE, SW,
SE, Up, Down)
- Instanced Rooms, specialized rooms that, instead of behaving in a "classic" manner an intanced rooms spawns an "Instance" of itself when a player enters and associates a party (which could just be a single player) to the instance before eventually killing itself.
- Node Based Room Growth, rooms can associated to "nodes" which can map to an area (named group of rooms) or multiple areas, etc... which means that certain activities inside of node connected room will affect the node associated to it. (e.g. mining resources from a forest will reduce a total "resource count."
- Phased Rooms, each room can have several phases that are switched on or off by various values (maybe player accomplishments, global changes, etc...) to enable the feeling of growth and effect that players have on the world they inhabit (e.g. clearing a village of enemies and eventually getting NPCS, or clearing an area of once dense forest into a field of stumps)
- (many, many more to come)