This isn't such a bad idea, you could keep the nice wordy sentences intact, just separate them.
IE:
(1)With a powerful look, Murphy strikes your head with a hammer of bitchslap.
(2)Your vision blurs and blood begins to seep from your ear.

Would make it a LOT easier to track what's going on, espeically for those building a system. It's quite complex to have a set of triggers turn on and off in comparison to straight affliction tracking. It doesn't diminsh the potential for rp flavour of knight combat, and is far superior to other games where it's just 'murphy slashes you twice with his dwarven battle axe'.

How is your example any simpler than what we already have for warrior messages?

Hmm rereading that I can see I forgot to add a couple of important points.

1. All 2nd affliction lines are unique to that affliction, but uniform regardless of how it's given. (This may already be the case)
2. The first affliction lines rewritten to have the cool stuff at the front, but ends with the same line depending on if a lunge or a normal hit. IE Murphy powerfully strikes your head (lunge) or Murphy strikes your head (normal attack). It can still be rewritten, but for simplicity the last few words are uniformly indicative of the type of affliction, and location.
Note: This should be a LOT better worded, i'm not at all creative. There has to be a way to write it, keep all the awesome description but make the last part the bit that you track in a system.

The biggest issue with making the extra lines is the use of illusions, I think.

Besides, with that method you're really just making every attack that gives an affliction such that you have to enable/disable the affliction triggers. Seems like a step in the wrong direction, if you ask me.

You can already drop warrior illusions in 2 lines, so no change there.

You have to attribute the wounds of each attack regardless, and you can look for a prompt on the next line to decide if you're going to activate triggers for an actual affliction or not. EG murphy strikes your head. ^%1h(all the other prompt stuff here) Then do an if check of %1 and if it's only numbers then you don't activate knight triggers for afflictions. If anything it simplifies trigger activation, and if you aren't worried about illusions or aren't able to figure out trigger activation, then you can do simple coding and just trigger = affliction without difficulties.

It definitley simplifies things, I don't know about you but when I started coding all I had under my belt was java programming 101 (first year subject) at university plus some basic working knowlege of zmud from achaea. To get my first knight affliction system working properly, it took me at LEAST 100 hours of coding, plus another 50 hours of playtesting as a minimum. That's 150 HOURS of time, which is a lot to dedicate to a game. That doesn't include actually playing the game. I'm pretty sure you've got a full computer programming degree.

For someone to do this with no prior knowlege? Man its no wonder we have a low playerbase. Let me ask though, what do you think would be some ideas to streamline warrior afflictions? How would you change it so newer players, who may not have experience coding, would find it easier to build a system?

Get someone to release a basic, functional version of a free system on zmud.

I'm absolutely not joking about this - having a system to fiddle with gives people a starting place, and zmud is a lot more user friendly to newbs. It doesn't have to be fancy, but as was mentioned in other threads, so many people use mushclient pretty much entirely because of Treant.

You'd be surprised how much people learn just by seeing examples and being able to copy/tweak things. Today, for example, I walked Halse through writing a basic sipper on Nexus. After I hand-held him through setting it up for health, he was able to follow the concept through and extend it to mana and ego and scroll and sparkleberry - and he got really EXCITED about that, when he realized that he could use the concepts to make more things on his own.

Warrior afflictions are easily the most straightforward when it comes to triggering them. In fact, you can already trigger them in the way you're suggesting, if you want the easier route, just going for the second part of the messages to grab the afflictions. I see no problems whatsoever with warrior lines as-is.

The parts that need to be streamlined are the many symptoms you get for one affliction (or, conversely, the many afflictions that give the same symptom message), the many special cases for all the things that prevent curing or acting, and the unusual or masked afflictions (Telepathy or Astrology, for example).

I DO have an old copy of my system from a little while ago. It'd have to be updated a little for affliction lines and any glaring bugs. Hopefully it's on my email server somewhere. I could release that as a freebee or something. Some good ideas in there if you can follow my style

Also zarguan, i've always hated masked afflictions. I would much rather cure against an evileye affliction set than trying to code for guessing what affliction i'm getting. Don't forget you've had years of coding practice (in theory your system should be godlike and close to perfect. This is rarely the case haha).

I don't do too badly now, but I would need more than the hours of free time I currently pour into it and things like the masked afflictions definitely don't help matters, either.

Could potentially make it into a group project of sorts, and if there's a thread on it, updates can be kept current. I'd help contribute to that and do what I could to help answer the zmud questions which will inevitably crop up.

Personally, I'd love if there were a zmud system option - I really admire Iasmos for releasing his version, but I get bummed when I can't help people out with coding stuff and have to tell them I have no idea how they can do what they want. I know a lot of midbie-level fighters don't know how to modify the systems they have or how to make settings more complex than aliases and simple triggers.

I might poke around, I had about 40-50 people who bought my system, i imagine at least 50-60 more had a copy they didn't pay for (not that I care, I haven't bought a game since pre-2000).

These things usually die out without the creators support though, which I don't have the time to give. I could answer messages once a week or something. Lemme go have a look see if i can find one.

I think the idea was to create a very basic skeleton framework, maybe with 'insert your junk here' type of coding, and put it out there for others to learn from and start building on. If it's released as something else that needs to be maintained by the author, it's not much different from what's already available.

If I had the time and patience, I'd add more to my little MUSHclient tutorials. I do, however, recommend that beginners watch Nick Gammon's YouTube screencasts, as they're very basic and very good walkthroughs. (Links available on my web site.)

Are there any free cmud systems out at the moment? I could have sworn catarin did one!

Catarin hasn't been around in months. Her domain name registration lapsed, so you can't even get an old version from her site now.

She did, but CMUD is just too unstable and icky for most people to want to use.

Also @ Murphy, you'd be surprised how systems can endure. Probably about 75% of the zmud systems in Aetolia spawned from one system initially, with lots of modifications and tweaks made by various people until you have a bunch of different systems with the same curing concept at the core.

True, but the ones that take on a life of their own and get multiple maintainers often go in very different directions. They also go "underground," meaning that they're passed around amongst friends but not publicly shared by all.

I'm still amazed that people in Achaea are using my free system that hasn't been maintained by me in over five years. (And, I never liked it all that much myself, honestly.)

Yeah I had a copy of that system, only used it as spare parts really to look at the problem from another perspective. Still a good piece of logic is useful no matter what.

So do people really use zmud over cmud? I can't understand why, cmud is sometimes a little anal, but is way better than zmud.

I have an old computer and CMUD makes it very grumpy.