Developing RPG

Scott A Crosby crosby at qwes.math.cmu.edu
Mon Jul 30 08:03:55 UTC 2001


On Mon, 30 Jul 2001 G.J.Tielemans at dinkel.utwente.nl wrote:

> In 1986 I saw a program called Tombs of Arkenstone, demonstrated by a very
> enthousiatic Bob Hart, who told us about an avarage primary school classroom
> with lots of children who hate reading, history, etc...
> Then he introduced a very simple adventure-game-editor (running on a
> BBC-computer form Acorn)
> It was simple to create rooms/caverns connected through corridors.
> You could add the descriptions of the rooms and corridors.
> You could place persons and objects inside these rooms, again: adding the
> descriptions...

What you're describing is really a graph where nodes include multimedia
information.

--

THe program you're describing is a MUCK, MUSH, MUX. Most have that, and
also support email, differing descriptions players, etc. Many allow anyone
to write code, descriptions, objects, containers, etc.

Some have been going continiously for 6 years and currently handle 10,000
players, 40,000 rooms/objects, with over 500 concurrent users. (They're
textbased. There does exist a GUI MUCK, its free, but windows-only,
closed-source) There are also the myriad MMORPG games.

One of my wanna-do-someday projects has been to build a MU** with a GOOD
infrasstructure. Most are designed by well-meaning undergrads, you can
guess what they're like to program. (One of the servers I"m most familar
with will get ARRAY's, local variables, and HASH TABLES in the next major
rewrite, though its been used in production for 5-8 years. In this case,
the language is FORTH.)

As RAM has gotten cheap enough, you don't need to be diskbased anymore.
You can afford to have everything in RAM, which is a godsend!

So, I've done some very tentative planning for one such MU** server in
squeak. Finally, a real programming language! I was also thinking GUI, but
decided that I didn't know squeak's GUI infrastructure well enough to
chaance it, also, I didn't want to bite off more than I could chew.

BTW, MUD's have more sophisticated programming systems, but they're also
not intended to be publically usable, programming is reserved only for the
admins.

--

Another instance of this is the web. Make web pages describing parts of
it, possibly including scanned in crayon drawings. People link to other
pages describing other parts of it.


Scott






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