Project Spooky

Toz · January 2018

I suspect I will live to regret this.

Some of you have run CATS in the past, and I know of at least one person who absolutely did wonderful things with it and pushed towards high mid tier, even adapting it to other classes and working it into their curing system. There has also been a re-occuring complaint that there are issues with Source, that coding is too hard, and that the barrier of knowledge to combat entry is too high.

With that in mind, I'm going to go ahead and announce this project so I've got people watching, that will help to make sure I keep on task and actually get it released Soon(tm).

Introducing Project Spooky
What is it?
Spooky is a skeleton (get it?) curing and offense system. It will function similarly to CATS in how it ships - you'll strap in, and it'll do...only the basics. It will, however, be created with an eye towards making it easy to learn to code in, using some function calls to abstract the odd logic of programming. I don't yet know the how on a good portion, but I envision you writing, instead of if this aff and that aff but not this aff and this aff or that aff, complete with all the annoying little ()s and such to specify the boolean logic, you could call spooky.doTheyHave("paralysis asleep prone", "slickness anorexia", "disrupt") to select if they have paralysis AND asleep AND prone, while slick OR anorexic, and NOT disrupted. The specifics will, as I go, get polished out.

Additionally, and in contrast to CATS, it will also have a curing component that ties in and manages FirstAid. It will allow for priority settings depending on class (or just priority modes in general), have functions to help you interrupt your offense to cure out of bad situations (calling spooky.panic(), a function I just made up, would check aff conditions vs actions you specify to handle that), manage pipes, etc.

None of these deeper functionalities will be programmed in. The tools to do so will, however, be in and standardized - you like to code? Snag Spooky, hammer out a basic offense and some curing/parry prios, give it to your whole guild. Now they can 1v1 just like you.

Hate coding? Play with Spooky like building blocks instead.

What do I need?
Nothing, really. If I need lines or whatever I have people for that.

What do I want?
If you have feature requests or general questions, feel free to toss them here and I'll see what I can do. Spooky will NOT ship with an offense and will NOT ship with a defense except the bare basics. Spooky will also NOT track YOUR class affs out of the box - I'll include Carnifex aff tracking as a demo and try to get either in-client helps or a wiki or something for people to have a manual.

What does it cost?
Firstborns are loud, gold is heavy, and I don't really want worshippers. So if I actually finish the thing, it'll be free.

Support? Bothering me for updates/fixes/custom work? Even if you pay me?
If you ask me for help installing the thing, fine. If you bother me for:
- Custom offense work
- Custom defense work
- Random bug fixes more than once, or after I'm done with developing and happy with the skeleton
- To steal my code for your own system to sell
- Help because x got you killed and my system should really do y instead

I will find you, and I will pk you. Especially since you just told me exactly how your system is exploding, so I already know what to do to you to win.

Feel free to feature request away, I'll try to check this thread and gauge if there's an interest. If there's not an interest, feel free to tell me so - I sure don't want to write a system that only one person winds up using. It won't even be the system I use, just something I'm developing in what (little) spare time I have.

You're welcome.

EDIT: @Rijetta yelled at me. Two people did super good with CATS after getting it.