On Mon, Aug 20, 2001 at 10:19:37AM +0200, Stefan Matthias Aust wrote:
At 16:00 19.08.01 -0400, Kevin Fisher wrote:
There is a project that aims to create a free Ultima Online/Everquest-like server called World Forge (www.worldforge.org).
I just browsed though the provided documentation. The screen shots look great and it's interesting that there ATLAS protocol is a classless SELF-like object system but I couldn't find enough details to guess the current project state and/or the features.
Most of the real discussion goes on in their newsgroups...I occasionally stick my head in there to see how the project is progressing.
They seem to move in experimental stages, releasing specialized test servers to test some new concept or another. I think they just finished with a test server that had a small "economy" experiment where you would play the role of a pig farmer. :)
IMHO, the real work isn't setting up a client/server protocol but to come up with a flexible world object model, interesting, easy to learn rules which still allow great flexibility and finally with a rich game world that doesn't become boring after a few hours.
MUD - to answer the other email - is a Multi User Dungeon (often also Dimension). Something like a text adventure combined with a chat program which can be played by multiple players simultaneous. One unique feature of MUDs is that players can help to create, extend and flesh out the world buy using a simple (unfortunately often C-like) in-game language.
They have a number of clients written in a variety of languages...
Well, it looks like "variety" means C or C++ :-)
Oh? I thought I saw a Python client there at one time...the clients seem to live and die by the season though, so it could have been abandoned for something else. :) The "stock" client they do their tests on is an isometric engine..I haven't tried the 3D clients.
I think the "goal" is to have a server that can have it's world rendered isometric (UO style) or 3D (Everquest-style).
...or even textual like in nethack.
Well, you can always use the AAlib if you want ascii graphics. I still remember that demo of Quake using AAlib...fragging in ASCII is..um..unique. :)
It might be an interesting project to create a client in Squeak...
But it look like to get at least some documentation, one has to read the source and extract the information. That's IMHO a large barrier to start...
You may want to check their newsserver for documentation information. I know at one time they did have the protocol written down..perhaps the web site has fallen behind?