27 Jan, 2013, roguewombat wrote in the 21st comment:
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I won't make any snap commitments, but just thought I'd add that I am a web developer by day and could be up for getting something going.
27 Jan, 2013, Idealiad wrote in the 22nd comment:
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Well, we've got that backup and it looks like a bit is in the Internet Archive. I'd be willing to make a go of it. Scandum, do you still have the domain?
27 Jan, 2013, Scandum wrote in the 23rd comment:
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I don't own the domain. I've asked the guy who owns the server if a transfer / redirect and a newer backup are worth his time and effort. A newer backup would require some cleanup due to spam bots, and you'll definitely need good captcha support.

Would you be interested in a DNS transfer Idealiad? I can put the two of you in touch if that's the case.
27 Jan, 2013, Idealiad wrote in the 24th comment:
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Cool, sent you a PM Scandum.
28 Jan, 2013, Kaz wrote in the 25th comment:
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Ugh, I've got notes in my documentation linking to Mudpedia for ANSI-color tables and such. It'd be a boon to have that back online.
28 Jan, 2013, Scandum wrote in the 26th comment:
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I think it should come back up eventually, but Mudpedia was pretty much a dead project as I lost interest and few people seemed interested in adding content. Maybe that would improve if someone less abrasive than myself takes over.
28 Jan, 2013, Markov_AU wrote in the 27th comment:
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*rolling off topic*( My favorite game of this Genre has always been the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy game from Infocomm
Scandum said:
roguewombat said:
However, there are things I'm interested in trying without having to worry about the trappings of a codebase as vast (and as … quirky?) as Rom's, without worrying about balancing huge worlds, skill sets, and economies, even without worrying about creating a persistent game designed to be played in perpetuity. If these sorts of experiments have been discussed and executed elsewhere, feel free to link me away, but I'd love to hear thoughts here if they haven't.

You may want to look into interactive fiction. The games have a clear beginning and ending, and are typically single player. I think there are online version of Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork out there, from an adventure perspective the games are more interactive and challenging than your typical MUD.

This approach could be mimicked for MUDs in an adventure / puzzle solving / quest setting. I think there's a definite niche for a Prince of Persia (Sands of Time) style codebase. Some TinyMUD derivatives may do something along these lines, but they are so flexible, like PLMuds, that they typically lack proper game mechanics as everything ends up getting hacked together.
31 Jan, 2013, Idealiad wrote in the 28th comment:
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So I've talked with the Mudpedia site host. As Scandum noted it'll be coming back. It'll take a little while as the host is in the middle of a move and updating the system. When it comes back I'll start off-site backups.
15 Feb, 2013, roguewombat wrote in the 29th comment:
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Back to the original topic, I actually had an idea laying in bed last night that I wanted to write down. I had the hardest time remembering it this morning (gotta write those down when they hit!), but I finally recovered it. So… here's the idea:

In a small game world, players can jump between parallel versions of the world by tracing time back to some inflection point and moving their consciousness to an alternate history. Their character exists on another timeline, and puzzles involve flipping between these, perhaps to solve mysteries from the past that caused these points of divergence in the first place. Players wouldn't actually be time traveling, in the sense that they'd go back in time to change the present. They would basically experience multiple versions of the same present reality.

I don't know what sort of mysteries the backstory would include - but it seems like a fun idea to try out!
:cool:
15 Feb, 2013, Idealiad wrote in the 30th comment:
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Wow, that is kind of a crazy idea. How many players per game world are you imagining?
15 Feb, 2013, roguewombat wrote in the 31st comment:
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No clue, really. I guess it just depends on how long it takes to play the game through. I can't imagine it having a long end game, but if this were part of a larger game, I'm sure you could figure something out that involved continuous new parallel worlds, the ability to influence the past / future more proactively, or maybe even some sneaky indirect PK. :evil:
15 Feb, 2013, Nathan wrote in the 32nd comment:
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I think such a notion would probably set an upper limit on number of players, at least initially, to help control the possible endings. You might also have to limit time travel or have a maximum number of concurrent timelines.

A your character born
B someone dies / E they don't die, thanks to you?
C funeral (B) or you visit them in the hospital (E)
D someone tries to kill you / G they don't succeed in killing you
F you're dead, new character? (D) or G your life is great / H the killer goes after your buddy (G)
H your buddy is killed
I you're dead or you have a new character (F) or your buddy died(H)

A—–B—–C—–D—–F—–I
E—–^ G—–^ ^
H——–^

That gets murky fast…

You'd very quickly have some issues. You might need to place bounds on time travelling such as unchangeable events that occur regardless (e.g. someone dies, but it doesn't need to happen the same way – which way might affect your actions). So kind of like multiplayer interactive fiction. Maybe a limit on the number of branches in depth from the "main"/"original" timeline. A way to travel back to the initial timeline (would that wipe out new ones if only you are in/have been in them?)?
15 Feb, 2013, Runter wrote in the 33rd comment:
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If it's just a storyline point, then fine, lots of games have done it. If you really want to have branching state that can rewrite history, it's a pipedream. You'd need to be able to with certainty compute the actions of players. Even with a single player game it's neigh impossible.
15 Feb, 2013, KaVir wrote in the 34th comment:
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I've considered creating a simple concept mud that could be played purely through a graphical interface - the sort of thing you could comfortably play on a smartphone. There are various different options I've thought about, but one I keep coming back to is the zombie apocalypse themed mud I mentioned here, designed around two main concepts:

1) Procedurally generated (but persistent) city.

2) Zombie behaviour modelled on Sugarscape.

The city could be assembled a little bit like the modular board in Zombies!!!, with different locations where you could collect specific gear, food, ammo, etc. The zombies would have just a few traits such as metabolism (move faster but need more flesh), moan (the louder they moan the more zombies will hear them and zero in) and senses (how far away they can sense flesh). Human NPCs could have traits of their own, perhaps speed, courage and curiosity.

Then you just generate a city, drop in a bunch of humans and zombies, and you've got a simple zombie apocalypse simulator. Players can then enter the game as humans and interact with it (and each other) in whatever way they wish. I envision it having a somewhat Roguelike feel, but with a strong sense that you're part of a world that goes on without you.

Obvious disclaimer: The devil is in the detail, there'd need to be a lot of tweaking and balancing, design decisions about long-term play (probably server resets), etc, etc, etc. This is really just an overview of the basic concept.
15 Feb, 2013, Nathan wrote in the 35th comment:
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Come to think of it, this notion isn't entirely dissimilar to assassin's creed, except that in this case it's the world your character lives in not a "virtual" one,

Runter said:
If it's just a storyline point, then fine, lots of games have done it. If you really want to have branching state that can rewrite history, it's a pipedream. You'd need to be able to with certainty compute the actions of players. Even with a single player game it's neigh impossible.


It's probably not entirely a pipedream, but I suspect some heavy limitations on actions being necessary to make it simpler to handle. Seems like the kind of thing you need to write a small compact single player version of, and then expand it to a few players. If you can get that to work in a limited sense, then start working on more multiplayer. Maybe if you had conditions that would cause timelines to merge and bleed through into each other and then had rules on what events had greater influence that would help.

I think it's safe to say that's excessively complicated…
15 Feb, 2013, Idealiad wrote in the 36th comment:
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I don't think the original concept proposes allowing rewriting of history, so it's not that bad ;D.

No doubt you'd need an extremely dynamic system. A point of state a player experiences on timeline x will be the result of all prior actions on that timeline. Though I suppose it depends on how dynamic you allow your model world to be; many muds don't really allow the player to affect the game world in a significant way given repops and static descriptions.
19 Feb, 2013, roguewombat wrote in the 37th comment:
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Yeah, fwiw, I wasn't imagining split timelines with player time travel allowing them to intersect other players' timelines at different points. More just the idea that the gameworld itself is relatively small, but that players can revisit X number of alternate versions of the world by somehow switching their consciousness to an "alternate them." I thought about it a little further and figured that from any given reality, you can retrace history back to inflection points, and as you discover them, through an ability or gameworld interaction, you can transport your consciousness to the alternate reality that symbolizes a "what if" scenario - what if the rebels lost, what if the election failed, what if that magic wasn't discovered, etc.

So the idea is each present version of the gameworld exposes different inflection points to the players, perhaps ultimately leading to the solution of a giant mystery in the gameworld or something. I haven't thought that much about it, really.
;)
19 Feb, 2013, roguewombat wrote in the 38th comment:
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Oh, and while playing AU this evening, I had another concept idea. This would fall under encouraging player interaction as opposed to building the game meta-narrative. Basically, it would be interesting to develop a "Klout" type score for tracking player interactions. Klout measures your interactions with other users of Twitter / Facebook / LinkedIn / etc. and determines how much influence you have over conversations in those social networks. Similarly, in game, you should be able to track a player's interactions with other players and assign them an engagement score.

Your Klout might go up if you engage in a Twitter conversation generating a variety of @ replies; in game, your engagement might go up if you engage in a channel or room conversation lasting X number of messages. Your Klout might go up if someone "Likes" your status on Facebook; in game, your engagement might go up if someone thanks your character for some kind of assistance.

The idea would be to foster player interaction by providing in game rewards for engaging behavior. If there are 100 people on a MUD, but I never interact with them, why don't I just go back to my pet stock Rom server and run around living the glory days in a world I control? But if there are 3 people on the MUD and I interact with them every time I'm on, I'm going to feel much more engaged. If you can substantiate a working hypothesis that engaged players equal more players / more revenue (if you're commercial), then why not actually track and reward players for helping create an engaging environment in game?

Granted, it could be hard to track some of these things. Not everyone is going to use a "thank" social or use a player name "thank you Guion" for you to increment their engagement score. It may be you have to provide subtle reminders / create commands to assist in tracking engagement. Or maybe you do the organic stuff to the best of your ability but still have a manual way for characters to give other players props (kinda like the +K system available within Klout itself).

Has anyone seen such systems in the wild?
19 Feb, 2013, Nathan wrote in the 39th comment:
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Ideally you'd have some kind of algorithm doing that in the background, if players have to use an interface for it then it becomes clunky. If you need a manual player dependent method it needs some kind of in-character reason for existence. If you do some rp enforcement on certain methods of communication then you might be able to write code to scan the input and assess something from it. Engage players in thanking other players while in-character and then you can measure who is appreciated. Kind of like how some players thank people in graphical multiplayer for saving their rear end (fps, TF2, etc), but with a more rp oriented source. If you have a reputation system, then you could have a general reputation with other people.

Basically this would only really work in a roleplay/social oriented game.
19 Feb, 2013, Telgar wrote in the 40th comment:
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Roguewombat, you should try playing the pieces of interactive fiction "All Things Devours" and "Jigsaw".
20.0/42