I've been sporadically brainstorming about what I want NIFE 3 to have. This process has finally finished, so now I can start to build out system assets for it.
Why NIFE 3? And what happened to NIFE 1?
NIFE 1 was like 90% complete.. but the 10% of it that weren't done were deep flaws that would have severely impacted the games here. In my interests of making a very modular system I forgot that people would actually have to host it.
NIFE 2 was where I offloaded some of the cooler features of NIFE, like the mafia role database, and NIFE 3 was always going to be the automation update. At the time I had no idea how either of those systems would work.. but I have a really solid experience level now.
NIFE 3's Purpose
NIFE 3 is meant to be 99% automated. As a host, your job is to create content and import interesting systems (or write your own if you feel particularly savvy) and leave the details of managing the game to NIFE. You can manually steer if you want to, but if you go inactive NIFE takes over where you left off.
NIFE 3 preserves things between games. If you come up with a really cool mafia role and it gets written in, then future players can import that role and it will maintain the same automation/interaction.
Some cool features of NIFE 3
NPC's that post and that you can interact with directly.
A very easy language called GNARL (Gnarly NIFE Automation Rendering Language) that you can use to make anything you can imagine
The ability for there to be more games running at once than just mafia and adventure (I want to make it one of GTX0's main features).
I've left a lot of things off this post. NIFE 3 is ultimately something that I will not be able to predict how people will use it.
