[camlorn]

Crafting either needs to be fully scripted or fully coded--there's a ton of overhead getting code to communicate with scripts properly, sometimes--if I recall correctly, 4 dimensions is using dgscripts, which has a ton of little bugs (or so it did, last time I looked at it--it's been a while). Regardless, you end up with a lot of boilerplate code--almost identical bits of code everywhere--to allow your script to seemlessly call into the stuff your coder's doing. A system like you described above is much, much easier to code in the first place.

A big part of this is, yes, having an interested coder.

On one of my favorite muds, which I no longer play because the head/only coder (way over-protective of his sourcecode) basically abandoned it--everyone in the playerbase thinks he needs to release his codebase but he won't--you actually have full destructable environments. I've seen this before, but not to the degree that he did it--you can start anywhere on the worldmap, dig down, and you've got a mine. Each of the walls has a different deposit, and there's ways to see what's off in the distance (automagical see-through-the-wall, iirc--it's been a while). You can dig entire tunnel complexes, and everything, and can even dig down too far and fall out the bottom of the worldmap. The rest of it is rather standard crafting skills that raise through use,etc, except enchanting, wherein you find sort of enchanting tokens, and can charge them up and strip the bonuses to place on your items. The mining, to me, was the big selling point--the rest was very well done, but not overly original; the appeal was the "what comes next in the crafting tree" bit (You need to be able to make a good crafting tree for this to work). This was dark legacy btw, for the curious, and if he ever said he was going to be actively coding it again, I'd go back in a heartbeat--as it stands, there's a lot of unfinished bits all over.