The dragon awaits.. [Tales of Akash Online delayed]

I hope this blog post finds you well. I have been on a coding binge and even had a couple of weeks off due to some family stuff.

So as you may have read from various sites I've been working real hard on my new MUD/dungeon crawler RPG Tales of Akash 9. It was supposed to be an online game but due to technical complexities I'm looking to release it as a shared screen/single-player experience instead. The game was set to be released this August but for now there's no release date.

The connection would've been based on SSH which stands for Secure Shell. It is an encrypted protocol that offers CLI (Command Line Interface) for remote computers using OpenSSH or similar software. Well, my game was based on Tcl/Tk GUI which I couldn't get working via SSH. I could get some stuff running like the explorer command which starts the familiar file system window in Windows but that's about it.

The technology is based on something called X11 Forwarding and using an X server on the client side to intercept the window a client requested. I read some VcXSrv logs and apparently the X server needs something called Hyper-V which is a virtual machine and this wasn't supported on my Windows 10 laptop. I was setting up a playtest for a couple of friends when I encountered this problem.

But, the good news is I somewhat got into Tarot upon visiting a store specializing in mysticism. I'm fairly new to it but it has Minor and Major Arcana cards. It looks like a normal deck of cards and is actually considered one in some European countries, aside that people have been using it for fortune telling. The Minor Arcana has 4 suits; Cups, Pentacles, Wands and Swords. Each suit as 14 cards, starting from Ace, all the way from 2 to 10 and ending in Page, Queen, Knight and King. The Major Arcana has 22 cards, and represents archetypes.

So I bought a deck and implemented it as a feature in the game. These cards brought a lot of depth to the game mechanic as I made it so that:

• Cups boost healing

• Pentacles give more gold drops

• Wands have a chance of rolling for items

• Swords boost attacks

For some reason I never got the Major Arcana working but they would've boosted attacks. The game engine is pretty similar to the predecessor, with the code optimized for multiplayer. This took me a week or so of coding 8 hours a day. Unfortunately the pieces of Major Arcana code were grayed out in VSCode and PyLance said the code is structurally unreachable, whatever that means. Oh well, it was still very enjoyable to play!

But, I've also been making some new music. Unfortunately I can't officially release it due to copyright issues but it's good therapy in contrast to writing code.

I hope the season has been well.

-ef

PS. I'm releasing the game files here for your viewing in case someone comes up with a solution. Feel free to ask any questions. You need a code editor program such as VSCode to edit the .py modules and access the login/signup app. If you wish to play single-player the credentials for the test account are :

username : test

password : test

Tales of Akash 9 ver 1.0.2 (84,4Mb)

PPS. I forgot to mention about some host-side scripts which are more or less crucial.. you need to run mobhealth.py in the background if you wish to enter the complete instance again. To edit the interval which returns health edit line 3 in the module. Line 15 modifies the number of users multiplied by a number. If you are running this in a kiosk or something bot.py takes care of the automated messages sent to the chat and they can be modified in the bot.txt file. Happy hunting!

PPPS. The game got a quick fix as there was a bug with the weapon modifiers.. I figured this out while writing a rather complete guidebook about the game in this blog so stay tuned!