Ulf: don\'t be stupid.

tbenny: you got a good sytem, but the real world doesn\'t have layers and cubes! it doesn\'t have polygons either, but poly\'s work for everything else int the game, so why not this.
also: if one level collapses, what hold up all the levels above it? and a dynamic system allows one part of the mine to collapse without all the other parts going with it. ALso, you would only have to dl the mine if you actually entered it. otherwise all you would see is a hole in the rock. no bandwidth problem. Some good ideas with the real economy and all. Keep it up.

Note that a game is fundamentally different from reality: prople will stop playing if it becomes boring. a 9-5 job as a sales clerk is what most people have anyway, so unless your liflong dream is to be a sales clerk, a merchant/trader type proffesion is out of the question. yes, it will obviosly be possible to talk to a person and have them sell your stuff, or to hire yourself out cheaper than the NPCs, but the worker class has to be several times larger than the boss class (not class as in game rules, but class as in economic class) in the real world, you can post a classified ad and find a mcdude to fill a mcjob, why not in planeshift? (no offense to McDOnald\'s employees....)

Truly interesting idea. I agree with blackrose; weapon crafting should be done in stages, producing hilt,blade,etc. seperatly and welding them together. Even a finished weapon should still be moddable by an experienced enough weaponsmith,that is cut apart and re-forged, with extra stuff added, like a magical gem, wieght on the end(adds damage but requires extra strength), or even something like extra blade designed to flick out like a cobra. Weapon design should be essentially unimited, each new piece added to a weapon affecting every other piece(light gem canceling dark gem)(adding a weight to the end of a thin blade increases breakablility ridiculously).
 Shouldn\'t be too hard to code a rule based system involving weapon components.

Debian Linux , all the way I never had any probems installing it, or any programs. ran RedHat for a while, though
I keep a copy of winxp in the closet for some LAN parties.

It would be interesting  to implement... but prayer points?!? what kind of god keeps track of points? none that I have heard of. Instead, have \"favor\", kind of like prayerpoints, except it would be a phrase instead of a number(like \"you are a prized avatar of laanx\" or \"talad hates your guts\") and blessing/ curses etc being bestowed/inflicted on you when you prayed or angered a god.
 say you offended some god(and it would have to be something really bad) and they sent a demon to beat you to a pulp. different blessings would go with different gods according to thier style, and different types of worship would please each god. sort of like in the roguelike rpgs...(crud that was forever ago)
anythingimplemented has to be unique we can\'t have another magic system with prayer instead of spells, and prayer points instead of magic points: it\'s got to be unique. Think outside the box, but inside what\'s possible, computationwise(and devwise)

just set it up so that building can be built, and npcs hired as shopkeepers, and I myself will set up a trading post for the miners.

 Your idea with layers and cubes  is pretty confining: why not just do dynamic terrain in full 3-d? and with a level collapsing, wouldn\'t only the part with an excess of tunnels  collapse? it would be cooler to do a realistic simulation of how the tunnels would fall, and run it so that everything fell  realistically. of course that is probably processor intesive, so a fall would only need to be simulated about once a day or when there is a nearby explosion (note that in a real mine, collapse usually doesn\'t occour immidiatly, it usually requires a shock to trigger it. Also, collapses generally produce enough of a shock to trigger other collapses, so it would not be unrealistic for them to occour all at once. I doubt, though, that the devs are going to do this, because it will likely be quite a bit of trouble to integrate an engineering library into planeshift, even with such  great, motivated devs.

Terrain should be dynamic, so that anyone with appropriate skills and equipment can just start digging a new tunnel someplace, whther there is ore there or not. The other application of this would be building forts out of dirt, hollowing out caves for houses, etc. Mining skill would be used primarily to locate veins of ore, so you know where to dig. Mining skill would also increase your speed of diggingand cutting through rock. of course, selling mining permits would be entirley up to the person who own the land the mine is on, and thier ability to kick violating players off of it. using rent-a-cops  Everything you said, tbenny, would happen automatically, given some very generic rules about the planeshift world.(own territory, veins of minerals, which can be exausted, dynamic terrain, hirable npcs, ability to build buildings)

None of this stuff is exactly easy to implement, and I wish good luck to devs, who have come so far, but still have far to go

It doesn\'t have to be werewolves and vamps, it could be any mutation, caused by a mutagenic substance(certain potions, some animal bites, certain spells, even buildup of magical energy.) mutations would not have to be major, just minor things like +1 strength, -1 dexterity, spit poison, cure random mutation, noisy motion[-1 stealth], bad eyesight[visual filter on the screen to make things blurry in the distance], , or random polymorph. there are hundereds of things you could do, and they would not all have to be random either. you could have a potion of mutate infravision, or a potion of cure specific mutation(used to get rid of something like -1 intelligence while maintaning spit poison) cure all mutation...... you get the picture.

a were mutation would be induced by
a bite from such a creature.

Under The Moon is right, =very few things are original, just combined in original ways. Even so, I think we should avoid things that are too cliche, like dragons, vamps and werewolves. but even those things can be used, but they must be used carefully. after all, JRR Tolkien created a masterful work (the Silmarilion, the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings)using the rather cliched orcs, goblins, elves, wizards, and dragons.

All I\'m saying is that devs need to be careful when(or if) they put soething overused in planeshift. it could be disasterous.

The mutations idea came from dungeon crawl, a single player rpg, made with ascii graphics. http://www.dungeoncrawl.org