It would be interesting if you could change your looks so that people who have met you before can't recognize you without taking a really close look or you reveal who you are.

For this the game needs equipment for shaving and cutting hair, clothes that obscure your face, facepaint...

Just force a captcha on login and after every so long in high activity or something.

Not very annoying at all. 4chan requires a captcha every time you submit a post! I suggested entering one every time you log in and every period of time while active so that they can't just log the bot in and forget about it.

That would be if there ever was a bot problem to deal with anyway.

I suppose you're right. I never thought of that.

Well the idea basic idea of a captcha is it is something that a human can do but a bot cannot.

It could by replaced by a plain text question for example, but repeated use might be an issue.

Instead of captcha, you have to chat with a player and convince him you're a human.

About the bot thing: The game will require quite heavy moderation one way or another - you don't have to be a bot to be annoying, being a really bad roleplayer or just not giving sh** about proper grammar or spelling is probably equally bad. A few things I have in mind that would hopefully keep bots and jerks to a minimum:

• Moderation, combined with automated alerts (if someone behaves in a way that suggests you're a bot (chat frequence, repetitive messages, keywords) or a douchebag (keywords, letter/non-letter ratio, etc.), you'll appear on a list somewhere, and me or another moderator would investigate the incident and deal out punishments where appropriate)

• Peer moderation: giving players the opportunity to flag other characters' behaviour as against the rules or questionable, or maybe even voting players out (but then, this could be abused to get rid of characters that make your life hard)

• High subscription threshold - I'm thinking some sort of invite system, hand-checked applications, e-mail verification, IP filters, but probably not a CAPTCHA ('cause you can always rent a bunch of Indians or Bulgarians or people from wherever labour is really cheap to solve them for you). In other words, I'll try to make subscribing hard enough so you can't just create a new account when you're banned, but not so hard as to drive people away.

• Kingdom Of Loathing has a really neat grammar and spelling test which you must pass before you are allowed to enter the chat. Maybe I'll do something similar.

• Have the game dynamics sort things out by themselves. In CantrII, this often works really well: people who misbehave are ignored or punished in-game, without any moderation. A character who behaves like a jerk gets the jerk treatment, up to the point that an angry mob kills them within a few days' time.

Age limit: I'm thinking not a hard limit, but from a certain age on, the chance of dying increases, in a way that makes it very unlikely for people to reach ages above, say 100 years.

For notes, my thoughts are that first of all, the way you have an unlimited amount of paper on you isn't realistic; I'll probably make it so that writing a note requires paper, which shouldn't be too hard to make, yet hard enough to form at least a bit of a threshold - e.g. you need a tub and some wood to make paper, and maybe as an alternative be able to write notes on dried animal skin, making it feasible in most locations (there should be either animals or wood or both in most locations). And the second thought is that you should always be able to destroy any note - in CantrII, the main reason why there are so incredibly many notes is that the only way of destroying them (that I know of at least) is to bury them with a dead body.

On a different notice, I have a very rudimentary pre-beta version online.
Those fearless enough to try it may request an account by PM. I don't have an invite system in place yet, but I can create the accounts manually. Don't expect too much of it though: The features that I have implemented so far are:

• logging in and out

• creating characters (up to 5 per player as of now)

• travelling between locations on foot

• talking

• dynamically naming characters and locations

• picking up and dropping items

• a little map of your current location and its surroundings

I'll keep adding features whenever I find the time, and suggestions of all kinds are extremely welcome.

Oh, and: The current version doesn't seem to work well in IE <= 7, mostly because I haven't taken the time to add extra workarounds for its incompatibilities yet. I have successfully tested it in Firefox, Chrome and Opera though, so I expect most other browsers to work just fine.

"Götterdammers"

Don't forget clay!

Shouldn't it be more efficient to make a single HTTP request with all the results you need to update instead of 4 at a time? I imagine that it should improve the user experience slightly. That said, I'm not entirely sure how much is updated. It seems that if I want to see my progress while walking that I have to update manually.

Also, is it by design that you can only use a single character at a time (can't use multiple tabs)?

At my j0rb, every Web application that we build stores the "current" state in the session (I don't design them). From the very beginning, it seemed really strange to me. It basically cripples every site if you want to multitask. You can only ever work with a single subject of information at a time. I don't know about you, but personally I find that I like to do more than that with most systems. For example, you might be in the middle of something with one "subject" and then need to make a simple fix for another. Rather than saving an incomplete state or throwing away your progress, it makes sense to me to open a second tab and do the minor change without affecting the first.

It just seems contrary to how the Web works to me. The client decides what they are doing at any given time, not the server. The server just makes sure that the client's actions are valid and carries them out. I guess that's just a perfect world.

I'm not necessarily saying that this game requires (or even benefits from) the ability to use multiple tabs at a time, but I don't see any reason why it should be restricted by it. I suppose somebody with a slow Internet connection might appreciate the ability to manipulate one character, submit the change, and switch to another while that one slowly updates.

On a side note, is it normal for picked up items to be grouped by when you picked up them? I picked up potatoes at my spawn point and again at my first destination. In my inventory, they appear separate, which seems odd to me. Perhaps a "bag of potatoes" would make sense. I'm not saying this needs to be changed (I'm not a regular for this type of game). I'm just inquiring.

You are absolutely right in pretty much every regard. The reason the current character ID is stored in the session rather than a hidden field or the URI is that I originally thought of it as part of your login. I'm pretty certain I'll change this behaviour somewhere down the road, but for now, I have other priorities - getting rid of actual bugs in the current functionality, adding the rest of the core features necessary for some real role playing, etc.

-- edit ---
Actually, I just fixed that one. Current character ID is now passed through the URI exclusively, so far seems to work pretty well. Let me know if there are any issues.
-- /edit --

They are not supposed to be separate. Inventories should automatically merge all items of the same type when adding them (except for non-splittable ones like tools or weapons, of which there are none yet). I'll look into it.

The unit system is quite advanced really. Every unit type refers to a base unit, but it also has a unit weight. For milk, this means that one unit of milk is 1 ml, and weighs a bit more than 1 g. However, each unit type also has a list of allowed prefixes, for example the mass unit type can be kg, g, mg, µg, pg, depending on the quantity at hand. Each item type can additionally specify a base exponent offset: For milk, this is -3, making the integral unit for milk millilitres rather than litres, although the unit type itself uses litres. This will allow me things like trading very rare resources like gold or diamonds in milligrams, while using larger units (grams, or even kilograms) for things like rocks, timber, etc.

Small amounts of milk will be displayed in ml, larger amounts in dl, yet larger ones in l or even hl. When you pick up or drop items however, the quantity is represented in whole base units.\

For coins, when I implement them (not sure exactly how, the cantr system certainly is too cumbersome to deal with, but I do want to allow different kinds of coins; have to think this through yet), they will behave in a similar fashion. I imagine the inventory list would then read something like:

Iron Coins (Frufundium Mint): 14
Iron Coins (Westfield Bank): 32
Gold Coins (Frufundium Mint): 3

...that is, somehow grouped by material AND authority. A really neat thing would be if you could, just for your own convenience, define relative values of coins, and the inventory would show you the total amount of each currency - this is more of a nice-to-have though, so I won't do it too soon.

First things first; what I'm planning on implementing next are:

• pointing (at other characters and locations)

• simple projects (gathering resources and producing items)

• food, eating, and hunger

• death from starvation

I think I also need to take another look at the spawn point function; so far, there is only one location with more than one character.