Merzbow's Taxi Partnership

[Merzbow]

Introducing, umm...

Merzbow's Taxi Partnership!

This script is an SBC (Sahra's Bus Company) 7.0b derivative for StormFront. I started this while Sahra was on her break as a project to add new hunting areas. It turned into a massive upgrade that resulted in all towns and almost all hunting areas under level 50 being added.

Sahra returned recently from her break. After consulting with her, we decided that it would be a good idea to roll these enhancements back into SBC while in the meantime making them available to users immediately via MTP. So I've tasked MTP to be a sort of a test-bed for stuff that will eventually make it into SBC.

Limitations of MTP compared to SBC are that it is StormFront-only, lacks 'skins', and has a much sparser look&feel without highliting and interactive menus. MTP is going to stay that way, so if you can't live with these limitations, wait for SBC to be updated (but please don't get impatient with Sahra, she's being very generous in giving me permission to do this in the first place). I wrote this script first and foremost for myself, so if nobody else finds it useful, I'm still perfectly happy. However, I promise to fix any bugs people may encounter using MTP, so please report them.

Usage is similar to SBC. Here are all of the major differences:

External changes

1. Added River's Rest, Kharam-Dzu (Teras Isle), Four Winds, and Pinefar as towns. Added Marshtown and the two Caravansaries as 'suburbs'.

2. Added dozens of new locations in existing towns (like AdG and Chronomage, and registrar/clerk/etc. for each town), and fixed many routing bugs.

3. Added hundreds of locations for almost every under-50 hunting area in the game (higher-level areas will come as our characters age). Yes, it's all scripted, from standing to swimming to getting to the Graveyard Ledge. This includes many bug fixes to existing routes.

4. Re-did town menus to make them consistent, to show the new hunting areas and in-town locations, and to show existing locations not advertised before.

5. Added -STOPS and -NOSTOPS command-line options to allow the user to turn off confirmation prompting when doing dangerous stuff during travel (like emptying hands). This now means that AFK cross-continent travel is possible (but not recommended unless you know your character is uber).

6. Fancy highliting, interactive menus, monster warnings, map hyperlinks, and movement skins have been removed, as well as Wizard support. Also removed the ability to toggle room descriptions; MTP requires them to always be on.

7. Fix bugs preventing the -S and -SA commands from working (they were broken in SBC 7.0b).

Internal changes

1. Re-architected logic to use the LOCATION verb to find out where you are to keep the script speedy in the face of enormous growth in match tables. (It's still slower in large towns like WL that in places like ZL, but that can't be avoided).

2. Re-architected how intercity routing is done for speed/space reasons.

3. MTP now deletes temporary variables before exiting so as not to clog up your variable list.

Updates

11/5/2006: Released v1.1.4 (attached). Fixed various bugs in Zul Logoth.

10/16/2006: Released v1.1.3 (attached). Fixed bug that prevented you from directly typing PINEFAR and SYLVARRAEND on the command-line to display locations in those towns.

10/13/2006: Released v1.1.2 (attached). Minor bug fixes.

10/10/2006: Released v1.1.1 (attached). Minor bug fixes.

10/7/2006: Released v1.1 (attached). Major optimization (no need to issue LOCATION verb again if you haven't manually moved from your current location), plus bug fixes and new locations. Added changelist log at beginning of script.

[StrayRogue]

If only it worked for the wizard.

[Merzbow]

If only it worked for the wizard.

The major thing preventing that is lack of user variables... which makes it impossible to use the many subroutines that now exist to stow/gird, standup, cast safely, etc. (The SBC 7.0b Wizard version never had the ability to stow/gird automatically). If Shaelun can fix the issues with Lich's SF script emulation, then it might be possible to run it under Lich. In fact, given that Lich is open-source, I may be able to fix the issues myself.

[sahra]

... though in a feature-reduced form. The original cascade strategy worked in Wiz, so the new one might, too, if we pound our heads on the table and come up with a "third hand" strategy for storing the final destination while routing across the backbone. Maybe there's some way we can use the command line for that.

[StrayRogue]

I would love you if you make it work for Lich.

[Drew2]

If someone cared enough to do it, converting their coding into Lich-type code wouldn't be an extremely hard task. They have all the mapping done for you, you just have to put it in Lich-ese.

And it would cut the code down to about a quarter of its size, I'm sure.

[Caede]

A better choice in Lich would be to work on extending the ;goto map database. I've already dumped pretty much all of my travel scripts in exchange for ;goto. Unfortunately the map database is fairly incomplete, except for Illistim and the Landing. I've been pondering using Wizard FE for a bit and just walking around to capture areas like Vaalor, Icemule, Pinefar, and various hunting spots with automap. Maybe the next time XXX runs out...

[Drew2]

I forgot of Shaelun's genius that is ;goto.

My mistake.

[Merzbow]

Released v1.1, attached to original post...

[Shaelun]

Since it was brought up, I thought I'd point out that Lich v3.44 runs MTP without a problem.