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Post by facm on Jun 7, 2009 12:16:23 GMT -5
Marcos and I talked a while ago about setting up some private online game just for all of us to mess around in. We'd talked about ideas and options, but we never really came to a conclusion of what we should do. I've been busy lately, but I figure I can start a conversation and check up on feedback when I get the chance to. The first point of order is 'What do we want to set up?' So far, we had these points in mind: -We wanted an online, persistent game [So we can all see what other people do and interact with it] -We wanted a unique experience [Something you couldn't just do by logging into WoW] -We wanted a friends-only environment [to give the game a more personal feel. This has the secondary benefit of keeping out greifers] The points are all well and good, but they didn't really get us any closer on what we wanted to run. There's a few game types we looked at, but we couldn't decide what to do. We though about: -MUD [Multi-User Dungeon. Set up a world, some monsters, etc, etc, and go explore it.] TinyMUD seems to be the origin of LOTS of variants, so I can't really link to a single good example. -MOO [MUD, Object Oriented. Similar to a MUD, but focused on social action. Usually set up to let users create the world around them in some way.] LambdaMOO is the most popular of these still going. -Multiplayer Roguelike [Probably the easiest to set up and customize, but won't easily allow for players to create a world. They can customize monsters/items/etc, but randomly generated dungeon levels don't make for most of what we though of earlier. MAngband has a public server, if you're interested in looking at one. *NEW* Mod-a-game: Lots of games have mod tools. Let's take one, and write it all our way. Battle for Wesnoth www.wesnoth.org/ is a good, free game we could do this with. We also talked a little bit about if we wanted to adapt an existing program for us or if we wanted to write our own from scratch. I don't have lots of free time right now, and those with programming skills are pretty few amongst us, so it would probably be best to find a setup we like and then just adapt it to our needs. i would like to hear all of your opinions about this. Comments and questions are welcome, as is other input. Even if your opinion is 'I don't care, I'd rather play WoW', I'd like to hear it.
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Post by DEATH PONY on Jun 7, 2009 12:48:39 GMT -5
We really would appreciate some feedback on this. Here are some links wikipedia links for those whom didn't surf the internet enough in the early 90s to discover what a MUD or a Roguelike is/are. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roguelikeen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi_User_Dungeonen.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOOHere are some examples of games (Mostly heard or read about, since many of these died out before anybody got a chance to play them) that existed in this format, that reading about got us interested in taking on this project. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scepter_of_gothen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neverwinter_Nights_(AOL_game)en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swords_of_Chaosen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordor:_The_Depths_of_Dejenolen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angband_(video_game)www.mangband.org/ <- Click Drake's blue MAngband text, Redundant link is redundant. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meridian_59The idea here is that playing these is all well and good, but the experience hat could be gained by just playing these old games with a group of friends would be more akin to a similar experience that one could obtain from playing WoW with a group of friends, just that in this case it'd feel more retro. This is why we wanted to get into something a bit more. Scepter of Goth with it's live Dungeon Masters and almost textbook use of the Wish spell from D&D, in a way that simply cannot be programmed (You ask a DM or "God", he considers the situation, then programs in a solution, be it a golden castle for you filled with ice cream or whatever). This could also serve as a sandbox for us to run gaming experiences similar to tabletop over the internet, with a little more convenience of scripting, using the computer to a fuller potential. We want to make something unique and personal for all of us, how do you think this should work? EDIT: Oh Hey, Marcos, apparently you listed the MAngband website too, just after Drake did. I read it, but somehow missed that Drake already had a link. HUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUR.
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Vince Draken
Apprentice
Samurai/Pirate
You are one ugly...son...of...a...
Posts: 57
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Post by Vince Draken on Jun 7, 2009 17:12:02 GMT -5
I'm endorsing this project in full after conversing with Drake about it. The project is sound and between the two of them I think we could have something we could be a part of, that would not only be interesting, but as sadistically as it sounds we could really have our asses ripped apart by the love child of their minds in the funniest, be it unexpected, manner imaginable. That being said my suggestions for games range from what we know.
Most people know Neverwinter Nights and have at least watched it played in not actually played it themselves. This is an introductory piece, but far from trying something new. I'd be willing to give just about any of the games a whack at for this. I'm intrigued by the MOO more than anything because of what it offers, that being said I would like to offer the questioning stances to everyone else.
PS: I'd be nice for this because interacting with someone in real time would A. Be Nice, and B. World of Warcraft comes and goes in the taste as people play. Some let it go completely and then come back. Aside from this losing contact with people like I've seen would really suck with these people seeing as the current bunch of you asshats to leave were effectively the closest I had in BG. So fer Chist sake's let's here the opinion of the rest of y'all.
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Post by Rainbow Rage on Jun 8, 2009 10:22:41 GMT -5
This does sound pretty interesting, but how it seems we don't have a definite aim at the moment, is that what is the current decision at the moment? I did play a few MUDs back in the day, and am familiar with the concept.
I know Drake outlined the first order of business, but what's our consensus?
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Post by facm on Jun 8, 2009 16:48:35 GMT -5
The main point of this thread was to figure out what the majority of people here would be interested in, and give them a few examples if they aren't aware of what we were talking about. Once we figure out what people are most interested in playing, then we could work on concepts for what our game would be about.
Total tallies are:
MOO-Pete MUD-Brett(?) Roguelike-none
I can't speak for Marcos, but I'm pretty agnostic to what we run, as long as people play it. I can see cool things to do in a MUD, a MOO, or a hosted roguelike, and I like all 3 styles of game from what I've played of them.
I think what we need to figure out should be, in more-or-less order, is: -What game system to run? [MUD/MOO/Roguelike/other] -What is our general setting? [Fantasy/Scifi/modern/other] -How will community involvement take place? [scheduled events? get-togethers? private chat room? others?] -How will users create content? [directly in-game? submit to the maintainers? other systems possible? and would this require users to patch a client?] -Where is it being hosted and by who [The tentative answer here is 'on my fileserver', assuming that I configure it to take an external connection properly. But this still requires us to figure everything else out, so there's time]
Some of these are partially answered by others [ex: if our game server doesn't support in-game editing, that leaves submitting items to the maintainers as the main option], but I wanted to get feedback on the idea to make sure that people would be interested before just going and starting something.
If it's of any interest to anyone, I've been looking at using FBMUCK for a MOO engine, MAGMA 3.04 as a MUD engine[mostly because it's the only one I've found that comes with a Visual Studio project pre-made], and MAngband as a roguelike server. The first 2 give me an engine with at best a default world to show it works, and would require the world to actually be written and inserted before it actually became ours. Roguelikes are randomly generated dungeon crawls, so we wouldn't so much create that world as we would things within it.
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Post by facm on Jun 10, 2009 17:35:00 GMT -5
Here's a couple of quick setting ideas. Feeback on them?
MUD: -The setting is a secret, quasi-government warehouse. It's purpose is to [more or less] safely store all the dangerous, supernatural, or simply unearthly weird objects, beings, and things that shouldn't be out free but may become useful to someone at some point. Players could be guards, or possibly subjects kept captive. This would be a light-hearted game, so don't expect a ton of heavy drama if we ran this.
MOO: -The previous world has ended. The primordial forces of creation [the players] are reawakening, their task as always to create and form the multiverse. They know nothing of the former world they created, except that it once existed and is now gone. As they form the new world, can they find out why the previous world reached complete oblivion, and could they stop it this time if they did? Each player would take 1 particular facet of a universe [possibly elements, or perhaps concepts if an expanded set of elements ran us out of characters to play], and would work on 2 places: the material plain, expanding their element/concept's presense there in harmony with the rest, and their own outer plane, created solely to their whim by their own force to suit their desires.
Again, feedback requested of any kind.
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Post by Rainbow Rage on Jun 11, 2009 6:46:58 GMT -5
That MOO idea seems pretty cool, I like plots like that... but with more zombies.
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Post by Burnout on Jun 11, 2009 11:43:16 GMT -5
MOO Sounds Kinda Cool, But maybe Run It closer to the Idea of Planeswalkers From MTG, That would solve the Character Limitations - You can Ask Brett on the Concept of a Planeswalker if you never plaid MTG.
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Post by facm on Jun 11, 2009 17:08:15 GMT -5
To expand on my MOO concept:
The player limitations were meant to make each character unique, and to guide people on what influence they'd have on the world. For example, if the first player is the force of Water, he'd go and make lots of 'rooms' [the game engine would refer to them as rooms, but they don't necessarily have to have a definite size] full of water, essentially endless ocean. The next player might be Earth, and would create islands and continents, and so on for other forces. This is the original concept, but it gets limited quickly by both classical elements, due to the number of them, and by words of power, which would be much more effective if there was some autonomous units that actually reacted to the words.
The plainswalker concept fixes up those issues, because any players has it within their domain to create just about anything, and this won't necessarily need any little autonomous things to make the most of it. The downside with that is then we may not have any way to enforce good behavior in-game. It's easy to say 'you aren't supposed to create waterfalls, you're the god of fire', but it's much harder to keep one player from entirely rewriting another's plane with an in-character reason. There may be some kind of permissions system on who can edit rooms within the engine, but that's yet to really be investigated.
It's probably also worth pointing out that there's probably no combat system by default in a MOO, where a MUD would likely have a combat system in place but no way for players to create zones easily in-game.
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Post by facm on Jun 14, 2009 12:33:51 GMT -5
Another option, one not considered before: There are a lot of games with mod tools available. Some of these are also freeware. If we wanted to go towards an environment with actual graphics, we could look towards something like Battle for Wesnoth. Wesnoth is an turn-based strategy game, strongly based on a Genesis game named Warsong in the USA. It's open source, so it's free to play and the source code is available as well. The game itself comes with tools to develop your own campaigns, missions, etc, and you don't need programming skills to use them, though being able to write simple scrips will probably help you out with more advanced tricks A really good map editor. You can make your own campaigns, but this requires editing files by hand, as there's no good up-to-date utilities to do that with. One particularly cool tangent on this path is something we couldn't do on a personal game: The maintainers of Wesnoth occasionally take user-made campaigns and add them into the official game. I would assume that this requires the campaign to be of both very high quality and has to fit in somewhere within the established canon for Wesnoth. The installer for Windows is ~200MB, but it's free, so give it a shot and play a level or 2 to see if you like it. There's probably other games out there that'll let us do the same thing, if you find one you like feel free to mention it. EDIT: Mistook the Map Editor for being a Campaign Editor.
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Post by facm on Dec 1, 2009 18:36:33 GMT -5
*pays 1 black, taps, targets this thread* Resurrecting this, because we're talking about the idea again. Simplifying down the idea, do the players want: A: A new, intersting, personalized environment to engage in combat. B: A new, interesting, personalized environment to create settings and tell stories in C: A new, interesting, personalized environment that does a bit of both? D: Aion, stop trying to get us to play your shitty text-based games FACM. They invented graphics cards for a reason.
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Post by facm on Dec 4, 2009 12:29:26 GMT -5
Ok, I think I found an engine I like. www.ackmud.net/Things I like: -Combat looks to have some sense of balance, in the sense that macroing '/cast fireball' 100 times won't work. -Online editing capability, so stuff can be added to the game on the fly. -The source code is available for the engine. It's in plain C, and is actually pretty easy to read. This would make it pretty flexible for any changes we wanted to do. Things I don't like -Level and Class based. Probably makes combat much easier, but this will feel to me like we're not going to start out as epic planeswalkers or what have you, and I'd prefer for a story like that if everyone's going to be creating parts of the world. -Game includes templates for Vampires and Werewolves.....somehow. They're there, but it's not terribly clear how that works. They're also pretty close to direct copies from the World of Darkness games, at least in terminology if not direct abilities. I'm not entirely sure I want these in our game, but it there's a way for them to fit in, then perhaps I can let it go. Anyone else want to provide some input/feedback on the engine or potential setting ideas?
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Post by facm on Jan 2, 2010 22:21:48 GMT -5
NEWS! I've finally started on a project. It's not a multiplayer project as I had originally expected, though. It's a module for a roguelike. Check out Tales of Middle Earth [ToME] at www.t-o-m-e.net/main.php?tome_current=0 . There's an alpha release of version 3.0.0, and I've started on a module for that. It looks pretty easy to modify, so it's going to be my engine for this project. So far, I've not added anything yet. I'm mostly removing Middle Earth references while learning the language. I have a Wave on Google Wave for noting down ideas. If you want to help, let me know and i can add you to the wave (or possibly invite you in)
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