Devils Silence is an highly addictive Player-versus-Player (PvP) Multi-User Dungeon (MUD) based on a heavily modified ROT codebase. The MUD itself launched in January, 1997 featuring many diverse and unique systems that appealed to the traditional hack and slash player who also enjoys Player-versus-Player gameplay. Devil's Silence is also one of the few oldschool MUD's still standing and hosts a robust mature player base that's as dedicated to the game as the staff is over the years.

Details

Address - devilsilence.org : 5000 (173.255.194.117)
Web: www.devilsilence.org
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/groups/devilsile...

Features

Our game has the following features:

* 36 unique races and racial feats
* 14 unique classes and specialized abilities
* Over 100 unique areas and thousands of items
* Fast leveling system for casual playing
* Player housing and housing upgrades
* Auction system with enhanced item features
* Banking system for all players and clans
* Hundreds of help-files archived and indexed
* Helpful staff and player community

We also offer the follow PvP features:

* Player ranking system
* Player statistics system
* Player logging system
* Clan system and Clan War system
* Bounty system
* Partial-Looting system
* Death protection system
* Balanced classes and races for solo and grouped battles

We offer the following staff/host features:

* Dedicated Virtual Private Server (VPS) located in Texas, USA
* Supported web portal, wiki, forums and additional online resources
* Experience staff and veteran players to the codebase and game
* Outstanding player support and community building enforcement

In addition, we have a very newbie-friendly Facebook group made up of our veteran players that hosts informative updates on the game like who is online, what changes are happening from the staff and even nifty resources like maps as seen below:




To help show our player base, we took this recent shot just the other night of our players online and enjoying the game after many years of dedication to our wonderful, but small, community of PvP'ers:

Tip: Don't use JPGs for images of text.

Looks fine in the original. It's the Mudbytes forum software not using the original resolution of the image.

http://sphotos.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-snc7...

I can't really tell a difference. The larger problem to me is the color scheme of dark on dark colors. :)

My personal preference obviously. I hate brightness!

Well, for me it's not personal preference as I literally can't read some of the text. I don't have great eyes. For example the blue text at the bottom of the screen I cannot read at all. The blue and black text on black background is even worse in the who list.

Anyone else have that same issue with these colors or is it just me?

It looked pretty blurry to me, but yeah dark blue on black is always near impossible to read.

I try to never use dark blue on my MUD.

We only use it for certain words, not informative text like quest dialog etc. But, that's just preference again. Nothing to do with the actual topic once again Zeno. However, I do appreciate the bumpage! :wink:

Very difficult to read, but Imma play it anyways.

Well, I gave it a solid try. I found the players and staff to be very helpful but I couldn't enjoy the game. The first room I encountered had a description that pointed me toward non-existent exits and the help files gave inaccurate information. After being granted the protection of a "bitch" and watching the "ass-hair" of my character grow to astronomical lengths in order to entangle my enemies, I had to log off. The game seems riddled with toilet humor and must be designed for a young crowd. I might have enjoyed it when I was twelve but I wouldn't recommend that any parents let their children play. Best of luck with your game.

Wait, what?!

I played a medieval fantasy mud briefly that when players killed each other the crier would proclaim on public channels that so and so was "gunned down in a drive by". Needless to say, I played very briefly.

I think the legibility of the darker shades on black background can vary by client. I know that I was able to read dark blue on black in the past on zmud, but currently I'm using mudlet on a mac and I find the dark blue to be nearly impossible to read.

As a follow up to the "don't use jpg for text" comment made earlier, I would recommend using png for images of text.

It's not hard to lighten up the dark blue a bit in your client. If I was having such a problem, that's what I would do anyhow, and would generally solve the problem across all MUDs regardless of their color usage.

I still have no idea why MUDs don't just let users pick their own colors for various events and text.

Maybe because A. it's 100x easier to do that in the client than on the server B. there are many things more important than making every ounce of color customizable, e. g. everything else about the game.

Only in the world of MUDs you get to choose your own client (many of which allow you to change the colors of every event) yet many people (present company excluded) would walk away from a game they like just because some colors do not conform to their feng shui.

By contrast, all other games A. don't let you choose your client. B. don't let you turn their green orcs into zebra-striped orcs.

I'm not saying people shouldn't complain or get bogged down in trivial stuff they can solve quicker than complaining about it. I mean, we wouldn't be people if we didn't.

Why most/some ?

I give possibility to change many colors

Your current color setup is:
normal color : norm prompt color : norm
room color : blue desc color : b_white
exits color : cyan people color : yellow
objects color : red fights color : yellow
damage color : red tells color : magenta
ooc color : cyan say color : yellow
imm color : white hero color : white
info color : b_red shout color : green
imp color : white senior color : cyan
ic color : norm snoop color : null
group color : blue were color : red
vamp color : red slay color : red
psi color : red

To change colors, type 'color <type> <color>'
<TYPES> normal prompt room desc exits people objects fights tells ooc say
imm hero info shout imp senior ic snoop group were vamp slay
psi

I think interface concerns map less literally than that. I'd say it's a little less about the color of orcs in a graphical game and more fundamental to playing the game.

I bought a game called Orcs Must Die!(sic exclamation mark) because I heard nice things about it. Paid actual money that I earned through work I had done. Imagine my consternation to discover that this shooter did not have an in-game way to invert vertical mouse look. I searched on forums and found a potentially workable config file hack.

I thought it over. The game was well recommended, I'd paid money for it…on the other hand, getting used to non-mouse-inversion would be awkward and frustrating, and would be made all the more frustrating by the fact that I'd paid money for an unsatisfactory interface experience. So, I walked away. Not worth the aggravation.

I think hosed up colors on a mud are a lot more like broken interface on a shooter. It strongly interferes with the readability and hence the functionality of your interaction.

I think it's a lot more like that than "ew wrong color orcs".

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net

PS I herd OMD! got patched to include invert-mouse. I'll check it out again sometime.

Oh? It's incredibly difficult to customize colors based on events and information types in the client because you have to parse everything.

Besides, this is trivial server-side.


Color is well-known to be very important in processing information. It's not hard to fix server-side, and the payoffs are considerable. This isn't just an unimportant feature; when text is your only medium to information, color is very important in identifying things quickly.

Some of the most important features for me are those concerning the UI.

1) An appropriate color combination that allows for me to quickly identify enemies, items, and events and lets me differentiate between various forms of communication.
2) Well designed output from information commands such as score, who, stats, or whatever the MUD employs to tell me about myself and others.
3) Combat output that I can process and respond to in an amount of time appropriate for the speed of combat. (The faster it goes, the more succinct the information should be)

Color plays a vital role for me in all three of those areas. I've been known to log in to a MUD, type score, type who, and log off never to return. With so many MUDs available, I can afford to be picky.