Origin

[WarmFluffyUK]

Do you remember the old text based adventure games? You know the ones that you had to type N, S, E or W to move etc. Well they kinda died out as people didn't like using the keyboard, being replaced with graphical adventures. But these days we all use chat and forums, and I don't really like chat rooms, so it kinda got me a thinking:

What if I wrote a chat space that instead of being based on rooms, it was in a world. To go to a different location you traversed the world. Also I could expand on that idea people who are bored of just chatting could carry out tasks that advanced their abilities in the game and also opened up new areas in the world.

I had started to design all this and had a small world up and running, everything in the world is an object, including you. Every object has a parent object, so if you were in the local tavern, then that is your parent object. The taverns parent object is the general location, and the locations parent object is the country and so on. Gosh, did I just type all that. Anyway, I got put off and scrapped the project when World of Warcraft came along and did all that but in 3D.. Typical. Anyway, I have learned soo much in web dev recently that I am re-writing it all again, I started last week and am presently playing with ideas.

And why did I bother mentioning all this? Well I was wondering if anyone out there is a little bit bored and would help me with one or two things. I specifically need content, such as location ideas and descriptions, story ideas and possible task ideas. I have enough on my plate right now coding it all and I never was a Dungeons and Dragons type lady.

If anyone would like to help, please send me a PM or contact me on MSN:clare@berzerk.co.uk.

:blink:

 

[Mudi]

Sounds like old MUDs. I used to play around with those, I'm writing a custom one for fun at the moment. Might be able to help you out

I'm writing my code in Java because it was originally a project for a uni class that required me to use Java, but I decided to abandon it as far as that class goes... but a bunch of Java code remained, so heh

 

[WarmFluffyUK]

Sounds like old MUDs. I used to play around with those, I'm writing a custom one for fun at the moment. Might be able to help you out

I'm writing my code in Java because it was originally a project for a uni class that required me to use Java, but I decided to abandon it as far as that class goes... but a bunch of Java code remained, so heh

Sounds kewl . I'm writing mine in PHP, MySQL and javascript. Basically the browser window has a hidden frame that updates silently (Even in IE), that then launches the javascript function that sends the output to the main chat frame. It all worked really well too! I can't wait to get the engine up and running again!

 

[PokeParadox]

If you want bit of inspiration, google "Second Life" I guess it shares a lot of ideas of what you want to do.
I heard about a while ago but tired it yesterday, dunno what I make of it really, but yah might be good inspirationally.

 

[Feeg]

There's a heap of research into many aspects of MUDs. Social, technological, whatever else..

They're really accessible, since all you need is a telnet client, and since you work in raw text over the telnet protocol, they're fairly good for high latency network connections.

Honestly, you could probably learn a lot from various ongoing research. Raph Koster comes to mind as someone to google for, along wih the Mud-DEV mailing list if the archives are up at the moment (otherwise, subscribe to the newsletter anyway, it's got a lot of interesing stuff in discussion at any one point in time..)

I've been an administrator/coder on a fairly busy post-apocalypse themed mud for years, using the LPC programming language. It's similar to what you describe in your ideas. For example:

everything is an object
containers are objects which can contain other objects
rooms are containers with multiple exits into other rooms
people are living containers
clothes are objects which can be worn by people objects
etc etc.

I've been playing with a mud server written from scratch in my spare time using MySQL to contain and describe the relationships between objecs in the world. I've been using Java, but PHP could work too. (A bit slower perhaps, but you're using a www interface anyway.. so that might not matter to you.)

Drop me a PM if you want links or anything for research purposes. If you haven't checked any MUDs out yet, I think you'd be wise to for inspiration on such a similar project.

 

[WarmFluffyUK]

There's a heap of research into many aspects of MUDs. Social, technological, whatever else..

They're really accessible, since all you need is a telnet client, and since you work in raw text over the telnet protocol, they're fairly good for high latency network connections.

Honestly, you could probably learn a lot from various ongoing research. Raph Koster comes to mind as someone to google for, along wih the Mud-DEV mailing list if the archives are up at the moment (otherwise, subscribe to the newsletter anyway, it's got a lot of interesing stuff in discussion at any one point in time..)

I've been an administrator/coder on a fairly busy post-apocalypse themed mud for years, using the LPC programming language. It's similar to what you describe in your ideas. For example:

everything is an object
containers are objects which can contain other objects
rooms are containers with multiple exits into other rooms
people are living containers
clothes are objects which can be worn by people objects
etc etc.

I've been playing with a mud server written from scratch in my spare time using MySQL to contain and describe the relationships between objecs in the world. I've been using Java, but PHP could work too. (A bit slower perhaps, but you're using a www interface anyway.. so that might not matter to you.)

Drop me a PM if you want links or anything for research purposes. If you haven't checked any MUDs out yet, I think you'd be wise to for inspiration on such a similar project.

All that sounds exactly what I am writing at the moment

I'm doing it as a pet project really, just playing etc. The structure and coding side of it is quite simple as I have previously written a version of Origin before, and I still have my previously written PHP and Javascript functions to call upon. But what I actually need is to sit down and write the world. I may even write some tools so the world and all objects in that world, including the quests can be maintained online by an administrator. This will also allow edit/creation of the various bots that inhabit the world, one of which is the master bot called GOD, it will be a kind of robot admin that will try to police swearing etc... Which does mean I am going to write a server side application to run Origin's bots and environments too. For me the joy of putting all this together is a lot of fun . I may even dedicate my 2nd server to it!

I have no idea if anyone will ever wonder around Origin for real, but the fact that I will have created it and to see it running will be good enough for me

If I get stuck with anything I may very well drop you a line, thanks for the offer :wub:

 

[Nova]

Like Habbo Hotel, but with loads more scope?

I like it.

 

[Gruntfuggly]

Reminds me of when I used to play Shades on Prestel - exactly as you describe. You could play it as an adventure game (N,E, inv, get sword, etc.) and fight the other characters (painfully hard using a 1200/75 modem) or you could just hang around in safe areas and talk to people. The game used to reset every half an hour or so, so there would be a mad panic immediately after where everybody would steam around collecting the treasure. Shit - that's going back a few years. Great times though...

 

[WarmFluffyUK]

Reminds me of when I used to play Shades on Prestel - exactly as you describe. You could play it as an adventure game (N,E, inv, get sword, etc.) and fight the other characters (painfully hard using a 1200/75 modem) or you could just hang around in safe areas and talk to people. The game used to reset every half an hour or so, so there would be a mad panic immediately after where everybody would steam around collecting the treasure. Shit - that's going back a few years. Great times though...

LOL Sounds like a lot of fun. I'm not planning on having any resets though. My one problem is what happens to all the items you are carrying when you log off? If you are carrying a quest item, then nobody else will be able to complete the quest. I might have it return quest items back to their original owners or locations. Other items that will freely be available such as weapons and gold will remain in your inventory for when you log on next time.

There will be a dungeon too for people who have been bad. Users thrown in there by GOD will not be able to leave for a specified amount of time, nor will they have any chat abilities. The rest of us may visit and throw things at them for a laugh.

I'm also thinking about including a sort of ethereal mobile phone thing, so you can contact others in Origin who are far away from you. At least then you can arrange to meet up in a certain location to trade and chat. People you meet in the game can be added to your ethereal phone buddy list

 

[PokeParadox]

I'm liking the sound of this, I must say

 

[sam fisher]

Reminds me of when I used to play Shades on Prestel - exactly as you describe. You could play it as an adventure game (N,E, inv, get sword, etc.) and fight the other characters (painfully hard using a 1200/75 modem) or you could just hang around in safe areas and talk to people. The game used to reset every half an hour or so, so there would be a mad panic immediately after where everybody would steam around collecting the treasure. Shit - that's going back a few years. Great times though...

LOL Sounds like a lot of fun. I'm not planning on having any resets though. My one problem is what happens to all the items you are carrying when you log off? If you are carrying a quest item, then nobody else will be able to complete the quest. I might have it return quest items back to their original owners or locations. Other items that will freely be available such as weapons and gold will remain in your inventory for when you log on next time.

There will be a dungeon too for people who have been bad. Users thrown in there by GOD will not be able to leave for a specified amount of time, nor will they have any chat abilities. The rest of us may visit and throw things at them for a laugh.

I'm also thinking about including a sort of ethereal mobile phone thing, so you can contact others in Origin who are far away from you. At least then you can arrange to meet up in a certain location to trade and chat. People you meet in the game can be added to your ethereal phone buddy list

Can I be God!

 

[Mudi]

I've been god in one of these before. And we also had a dungeon, except I think it was called "The Corner" or something. Heh.

 

[Feeg]

LOL Sounds like a lot of fun. I'm not planning on having any resets though. My one problem is what happens to all the items you are carrying when you log off? If you are carrying a quest item, then nobody else will be able to complete the quest. I might have it return quest items back to their original owners or locations. Other items that will freely be available such as weapons and gold will remain in your inventory for when you log on next time.

One way would be to create a sort of master template for those important items, then instance them per player. Lots of the big MMORPGs also instance quests and entire areas, but for a smaller scale game all you really need to do is have an object or structure populated with the details of the object (like its description, and what kind of "thing" it is.. sword, amulet, slice of pizza.. whatever) and you create a new one for each player that earns it, adding it to their inventory, and use the presence of that object to trigger quest events or unlock parts of the game.

Or you could think outside the box a bit.. maybe make every quest item a sort of puzzle piece which fits together with others to create one of a number of bigger quest items.. that way people can trade items to try to build keys to unlock puzzles. Dead/disused character accounts would obviously need some way to return these important items into the world after a certain period of time to keep it getting deadlocked after a few days/weeks/whatever.

Hmm. I actually like that latter idea. Might try building a test game with that sort of mechanic.

 

[WarmFluffyUK]

At the moment, and I'm sure you already know, everything in the world is an object in a single table with classes such as: Player, room, building, Area, Country, Object, Weapon, Door and so forth. This obviously defines the role of the object. There's also a separate boolean field called quest that designates if this item is a quest item. I can use this field to return objects to their original location when the player leaves. There's also a Classes table that defines all my classes, and what actions they can be used with.

I have another table that pairs one object with another, the effect that will happen when they are paired and and what action must be used to activate the effect. Actions can be things like "Walking into an area while you have the object on you", "Using one object on another", "Giving one object to another" and so forth.

All the above is probably pretty darned obvious really, basic database, but it's a very simplified version of how the system works.

 

[Feeg]

All the above is probably pretty darned obvious really, basic database, but it's a very simplified version of how the system works.

Yeah, that pretty much describes my core implementation of my pet MUD project actually. I've got an objects master table, a relations table (in, on, etc) and an exit relations table for easily linking locations to each other. There's a few other bits and pieces for usernames/passwords and system wide messages, like the login process and global messages.

Keeping it simple is good, because it tends to be a tad faster. On the other hand, observing good database design principles makes it marginally easier to expand the scope of your database.

Drop me a URL if you put it up on a web accessible server any time, I'm curious as to how you're doing the interface, handling/displaying real time events like people moving through rooms and stuff.

 

[Gruntfuggly]

My one problem is what happens to all the items you are carrying when you log off? If you are carrying a quest item, then nobody else will be able to complete the quest. I might have it return quest items back to their original owners or locations. Other items that will freely be available such as weapons and gold will remain in your inventory for when you log on next time.

The way it worked in Shades was that anything you had when you logged out (or were killed) would be dropped in your current location. So the first thing you'd do when you were killed would be to peg it back to that location to try and get your stuff before somebody else grabbed it. It was always quite funny when you came across a whole stash of stuff in one location because you'd know what would have happened, but you'd take all the stuff anyway. Next thing you'd know there would be shouts of 'who took my stuff!'...

As to your phone idea - I think it was pretty standard in MUD's that you could 'shout' to everybody playing the game, or 'speak' to the people in your current location...

 

[Feeg]

As to your phone idea - I think it was pretty standard in MUD's that you could 'shout' to everybody playing the game, or 'speak' to the people in your current location...

Most that I've played have had a few types of communication:

area - 'say' visible to everyone in the room, 'whisper' visible to one person in the room, 'shout' visible to everyone in the local area

global - 'tell' sends a message to a specific person anywhere in the world, 'mail' sends mail to a person or people who don't need to be logged in, channels like 'gossip' and 'newbie' were used for mud-wide public chat to the people who chose to listen to those channels

A lot of MUDs have been made just to work as very fancy (usually themed) chat spaces, with a large subset giving world building and item creation tools to everyone to play with, which is probably how Second Life was born.

 

[WarmFluffyUK]

Drop me a URL if you put it up on a web accessible server any time, I'm curious as to how you're doing the interface, handling/displaying real time events like people moving through rooms and stuff.

Okely Dokely, as soon as I get the environment to a running state, I will send you the URL. I'm playing with the interface right now, but I might take this weekend off as I have been coding all week in work and in the evening in my own time. It really brains you sometimes :blink:

 

[Gruntfuggly]

Can you send it to me to? Although I am away for a week on saturday, it sounds really interesting...

 

[WarmFluffyUK]

Can you send it to me to? Although I am away for a week on saturday, it sounds really interesting...

Of course, but it's gonna be a while, I have a long way to go before it's running.