[MUD-Dev2] [ANNOUNCE] Magic Study

[John Buehler]

For your amusement and hopefully not your consternation or frustration, I've
assembled a toy that permits you to operate as a mage in a small, enclosed
study.  It is a 3D environment with basic physical, thermal and light
simulations that have been coupled to the spells available to you as a mage.

While I'd love to point you at a single executable file, Magic Study comes
in the form of a 4.5MB Windows Installer with some hefty requirements.  You
must have the .NET Framework version 2.0 (22MB) on your system as well as
DirectX 9.0c (up to 37MB).  Feel free to try whatever DirectX you have, but
the .NET requirement is definite.  Magic Study is clearly PC-only.  My
apologies to you Mac and Linux folks.

You can find some additional information and the download itself through
http://www.twelvepenny.com/magic%20study.

Additional disclaimers would cover things like it being a quick and dirty
implementation.  Chewing gum and baling wire.  Sanity testing on a second
machine was not possible, unfortunately.  So I'm turning to you folks to see
if the thing actually works anywhere except my development machine.  Though
I spent tons of time fiddling with Direct3D, I certainly don't claim
expertise and it may be rather intolerant of your graphics hardware.  My
machine has ATI Radeon hardware that is about three years old.

The purposes of assembling Magic Study are several:

1. I wanted to combine simulation with the fantasy genre.  I've long been a
fan of simulation, and a magical simulation is at the core of where Magic
Study is intended to go.

2. I wanted to demonstrate some basic notion of alternate character views of
an environment.  In Magic Study, there are mundane, magical, thermal and
kinetic.  In an actual game, there would be any number of aspects of the
environment that would be interesting to a player through his character's
eyes.

3. I wanted to play around with some ideas about inherently enjoyable
activities.  We've just recently started calling them "intrinsically
rewarding".  The use of magic by the player in Magic Study is intended to
work along those lines.

4. I wanted to play around with the idea of having a magic system that was
different for each character.  Magic Study falls far short of my original
ideas, including only the "gibberish" form of spell evocation (unique words
can be generated for each character).  For this quick and dirty
implementation I didn't want to get into anything that required lots of time
for people to play with.  For a more in-depth implementation, I wanted to
make the discovery of new magical capabilities and learning the "physics" of
magic to be far more involved.  There are hints of that in the presence of
the three "factors" of control in mana streams.

Spoiler warning: Right now, those factors twiddle the appearance of the mana
stream.  In the future, I'd like to use them to determine how mana packs
into and can be arranged in spaces - and how it is subsequently accessible
to the mage for a variety of purposes.

5. I wanted to stimulate discussion on MUD-Dev about these areas.  Assuming
anyone can get the thing to work, I invite discussion of it from a game
design standpoint.  If you have questions or comments about the game that
you'd like to direct to me, please use my personal email or
MagicStudy at yahoo.com.  I don't want to pollute the MUD-Dev list with how-to
questions and feedback about installation and operation problems.

Note that this message is in the [ANNOUNCE] category.

JB