[MUD-Dev] A flamewar startingpoint.)

[Miroslav Silovic]

Ola Fosheim Grøstad <olag at ifi.uio.no> writes:

> What I am thinking of is to go back look at simple, ugly and FUN games
> from the past and try to see if some of these concepts could be done
> in a way that won't suffer too badly from lag. Then one build a new

Two words: Laser Squad! :)

action points: 42> turn left 
action points: 41> turn left 
action points: 40> turn left
action points: 39> forward
You see Command Droid 4 squares from you.
action points: 33> turn left
action points: 32> turn left
action points: 31> equip grenade
action points: 24> prime grenade time 1
action points: 16> throw grenade under Droid
action points: 9> turn right
action points: 8> turn right
action points: 7> backward
action points: 1> end turn
You hear a loud explosion to your left. The shockwave carries you a step.
You see battered Command Droid coming from the corner. You do not have
enough action points to fire back.
Droid hits you with droid laser. Your armor is pierced!
Droid hits you with droid laser. Your armor is pierced!
You are dead.

I mean, if a good old C64 could do this WITH GRAPHICS, and with pretty
good AI for the oponent, well... I'm almost ashamed we can't do better
(remember, they did it with 6510 assembler!)

Action points limited what you could do in a single turn - they were
there to track the ammount of time each fighter had. In addition to
that, the heavier your armour, the fewer AP you got - which severely
limited what you could do with class 4 (the heaviest) armor.

> enjoyable platform for muds, with reduced bandwith and everything
> (What would fit in a C64 won't burn too much bandwidth :^).  I'm not
> so convinced that commercial MUDs have to be so flashy, at least not
> with the current competition.  After all, a MUD should be enjoyable

True. But it'd be nice if they could be at least as flashy as the
old games.

Lords of Midnight graphics engine, anyone? :)

> for more than a week or two.  Communication and contents is more
> important in the long run, right?  Maybe funny graphics, puns and
> soforth is more important than smooth animations?

MUSHes have communication and content with no flash whatsoever. I
agree, in that the only MUDs, to my knowledge, that managed to pack
enough kick to the flashy combat to compete with even average c64
games are BattleTech MUSHes. Network lag was severe problem for them,
though (since you *had* to react in less than 1 second). Server lag,
however, turned out to be neglectable. I have to add that they were a
big disappointment to at least some of their authors (I know some of
them personally) since their main goal, roleplaying in a
conflict-heavy environment, totally failed in favor of shoot-em-up.

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