I've been a little bit busy with other personal stuff, but I also have a confession to make. I've been playing the original B&W a bit. I just love how that came has a trainable pet that's a little bit unpredictable and just love the illusion of interactivity you have with the ape.

But this got me thinking about two things. First, if I ever get a pet for Tully, it will be an ape or monkey.

More importantly, has anybody ever tried to create a system similar to B&W and other virtual pets using zMud or something similar? You know, train a pet to do it's own reactions based on senses and punishment. This would only work on pets that have lower intelligence, of course.

Either that or maybe it's something that could be a future project for Lusternian coders.

I could do it, but I don't like wasting my time on rediculous, boring and tedious projects which earn me no money, bring me no respect or happiness or don't make me extra money.

I think the admins may share a similair view.

Help Riding. Even the most useless skillset in existence still manages to rake in the cash from time to time... but the skillset itself is just bleh, bleh, double bleh.

that was ported in from achaea as a whole, and no-one made an AI for it.

The riding skill set does have uses.

In case anyone is unaware, you have to be mounted to do anything with riding. Any attack the knocks you prone, moves you away from entourage, etc. dismounts you instantly, making it worthless. Every class has many, many ways to knock prone... its just not possible to stay mounted to really achieve anything... and then you have that icky off balance time to remount just so you can be knocked right back off.

In my case, I can knock prone (vapors hex, pooka, etc) 2-3x faster than a faeling could vault.

I was just kinda seeing if anybody thought about or had already some AI algorithms in the client. I'm actually a programmer and could do it myself--but since I do program for a living I hate to do "work" as a hobby.

I could see the benefit for players though. Just at least something that would teach a pet to emote and behave in certain ways.

*whip* You should apply for an ephemeral and code for Lusternia... and do all sorts of things like this behind the scenes.

Oooh...*daydreams about a useful riding skillset*...

because right now it's just depressing

That definitly sounds intersting enough.

Make a slap emote that raises your slap counter up, and a praise emote that raises the praise counter up.

Then have self made triggers , and using the "tell pet emote" or "tell pet say" commands, you can have it do one thing if the slap counter is higher than the praise counter etc.

Of course, keeping track of different activities in relation to the slap/praise counter could be a bit difficult for zmud, along with all the other triggers you would have for combat.

I doubt you could implement this easily on ZMud or TinyFugue, but a client that implements real programming languages (Perl on KildClient or Lua/Python on MUSHClient) would make this feasible, if not easy.

It seems like a waste of effort. Why do you need a system, can't you just roleplay out the pet's personality?

I thought trample was at least a bit abuseable.

Trample is the only decent ability in the entire skillset (except for maybe blocking, but I use icewalls so that's moot).

Example:

ab riding fording
Syntax: FORD
You can ford across rivers and other watery areas upon your steed. As long as
you remain on your steed, you will not be in danger of drowning.

------

That sounds nice, kinda... except for the fact that swimming is an innate ability in environment... guardians/mages/totem users (read: pretty much everyone except Ur'guard, Paladins) have access to waterwalk/waterbreathe/trout spirit with LESS lessons than it takes to get this in Riding.

=========

And this essentially sums up the -entire- skillset. The mythical ability is Jousting! Imagine! If you were a warrior who wielded a lance, you *just* might be able to use it.

Whistle is worth getting if you're a mage or druid to call back your pet if you lose it, but other than that, yeah, Narsrim got it right.

There's flying for the non-faeling/trill/wiccan/guardian/crow person too. :/

Yes, this is why we made a full report on riding in envoys, this thread is about Pet AI not the riding skillset.

I would like to write a few simplistic responses for Malach because I'm too cheap to pay for extra stuff for him. On the most simplistic level you could trigger certain emotes or the like and order your pet to do the response you want. The problem with having reactions coded within your client is that if you aren't with your pet it won't do anything the second you aren't with it(unless you convince the divine to have the pet send you a tell letting you know who emoted at them and what the emote was)

While yes you probably won't be away from your pet all that often if you say... lose your entourage it could be left somewhere, someone wanders up does an emote and doesn't get the same response they always do.

Of course this is all useless if you simply pay for the reactions.

But for something more complex... I don't know, there could be a database comming into the equation if you want the pet reacting based on affiliations guild/hometown aswell as a feelings factor. Then every emote type thing would trigger a response that checks these various things (Malach might hiss at any magnagoran that uses emotes on him, but if a Moondancer he likes uses moonsong perhaps his markings could glow or if he doesn't really like them he could 'curious' them) then you have to add in all the stuff that can affect the pets feelings for someone.

Behold my ability to make things complex bwahahehehe

Oh and anything that makes riding more useful is something I will sing a hippie song for, Seriously I only learn't it because my pet is mountable which I was actually against but I gave in.