MUD Development Digest

[Dr. Cat]

> From:  "Koster, Raph" <rkoster at origin.ea.com>
> 
> Ultima I used a redefined B&W character set at 80x24 for all 
> graphics,including the "3d" dungeon view, which was very simple. The 
> space sections were overhead view, with an asterisk for a star, and 
> little ship icons... Space got left out of all subsequent Ultimas, and 
> Richard now says he was "putting the kitchen sink in" and now knows 
> better. :)

This might be uninteresting to many of the list-members, but I have a 
personal obsession with being the "historian of computer FRPGs", so when 
I see a minor factual inaccuracy I have a knee-jerk compulsion to speak 
up.  I did write an article for the Journal of Computer Game Design many 
years ago but the early history of them.  If I could ever find a copy in 
machine readable form, it might be worth putting up in some obscure 
corner of the web somewhere.

I worked on the remake of Ultima I in 1987, so I know it pretty well.  I 
also bought the original version when it first came out and played it all 
the way through - back in 1981 I think.  The Apple II family didn't have 
hardware redefinable character sets, like the later Atari 800 and 
Commodore 64 did.  Some companies provided software character generators 
that ran in the "hi-res" graphics mode, but Richard wasn't using one of 
those.  The wildenress display used "tiles" that were twice as tall and 
twices as wide as a text character, giving the ability to put around 
20x16 tiles on the screen.  Maybe less than 16 vertically, I forget 
whether he used the Apple's hardware 4 line text window.  The remake had 
a little less because of the addition of fancy blue and white borders, as 
used in Ultima 3 and 4.  The towns and castles used smaller shapes to get 
more detail and maneuvering room on-screen, and matched the 40x24 
dimensions of an Apple text screen.  The dungeons weren't drawn with 
bitmap shapes at all, they were done entirely with line-drawings, with 
correct perspective calculated in interpreted BASIC with floating point 
(handled in software by ROM code Bill Gates and Paul Allen may even have 
gotten their hands dirty working on) running on a 1MHz 8 bit processor.
In the remake this code was rewritten in assembly language by yours 
truly.  Ah, those were the days...

Sorry if I'm boring the list with this stuff, I'm just obsessed with the 
details.  Like when people think that MUD at the University of Essex was 
the first widely accessible online multiplayer CRPG.  When I know that it 
was the early games on the Plato network, based out of the Univrsity of 
Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.  They had games like Moria, Oubliette, and 
later Avatar not long after Dungeons and Dragons itself came out.  They 
could also claim to be the first *graphical* online multiplayer CRPGs, 
something MUD certainly isn't in the comptetion for, nor anything else 
I'm personally aware of until almost a decade later when Habitat showed up.
Wizardry was a blatant imitator of Avatar, even down to using the exact 
same spell names that Avatar had.  (Which its author once publically 
tried to claim was a "coincidence".)

Anyway I'll end this digression here, and I promise next time I post to 
the list it'll be about something more relevant, like my unusual approach 
to designing my server's scripting lnguage or something.

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   Dr. Cat / Dragon's Eye Productions       ||       Free alpha test:
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  Furcadia - a new graphic mud for PCs!     ||  Let your imagination soar!
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