This distro is a total rewrite. The 095 stuff was all moved to old and new systems are being designed to help support both types of shards: OSI emulation and new world (where the designers do their own thing).
To get a quick understanding of how much flexibility is going into this distro compared to the previous ones... just compare the .info command in this distro to the older ones.
The idea is to make versatile systems that use smaller scripts that go into them and as a result can be more easily shared between shards which would strengthen the POL community.
As it stands, too many shards are off "doing their own thing" (isolationist) and are missing out on a lot of the collective knowledge that exists around here.
The primary flexibility systems (currently) are:
BrainAI
TimedScripts
SpawnSystem
Brain AI - Shards can easily share nerve scripts to make NPCs accomplish things. It doesn't make a difference if you're doing an OSI clone or a custom world, it just matters how the nerves plugged into an npc work.
TimedScripts - Makes a script run on a mobile for a certain amount of time. This is a rewrite of my old poison watcher system. The idea is to make smaller scripts that control direct effects, and have this system worry about when to start/stop it and save durations.
SpawnSystem - This spawner breaks spawning into smaller engine scripts that manage the actual spawning. The idea here is that shards can more easily share spawning methods and can easily do-so by sharing engine scripts. All the spawn system does is manage when those engines get started up and leave the engine to stop on its own (at the end of its creation run or what ever it is that the engine does).
Ill explain other packages later on in another post and edit this one as more stuff comes to mind!
