Hacker News Reader

Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

Awesome.

Why didn't MUDs ever go rogue-like ... with simple 2D tile-graphics?

I think a few tried and failed, but wondering why that was. Seemed like everyone jumped to Everquest(crack) when it hit the scene, we seem to have skipped the 2D.

View on HN

Some probably could, some of them probably wouldn't translate super well 1:1 and you'd lose part of the game in the transition.

I also think one of the great parts of developing a MUD as a developer is that you don't need to be good at graphics. Just code and writing.

Modern day MUDs contain a large portion of blind/sight-impaired people so moving towards a graphic based game might turn away most of your players. As it's pretty much the only kind of multiplayer game you can play as a blind person.

There's the "BYOND engine". It started out as a scripting language for creating MUDs, but then grew to have 2d tile graphics.

That is exactly something I'd play hours of! I love roguelikes, and have always wanted to get into MUDs -- I've tried many -- but they never hold my attention long enough.

Even tiled ASCII characters would be a huge boon; I think it's the fact that I can't easily imagine the entire game area through text. If I was able to at least "see" the squares around my character, I could better spatially orient myself. Almost every time I've quit a MUD has been because I got bored trying to pour through the docs/guides to figure out how I ended up somewhere.

I imagine an ASCII multiplayer game is more complex when it comes to netcode though. Perhaps the reason so many MUDs have survived is because they don't require nearly as much server infrastructure to support?

You should check out Dwarf Fortress.

I played a mod of rogue multiplayer and it was awful becuase the ticks were fixed in length. It felt like walking through treacle followed by very difficult combat with no time to browse ur inventory in the moment.

There have been a bunch of MMO roguelikes. Some of the major ones are Mangband and ToMENet (the latter is a fork of the former, made to closely resemble ToME3). There have been a few different attempts to solve the MMO turn-based problem. The most interesting IMO is interhack [1] (not to be confused with the interhack tool for nethack) which originally used "surreal time": depending on whether players were near it other it would switch between them taking turns within the same turn-based game, and running the game logic separately for each player so they didn't wait for each other. There's was a long writeup about it. It's a very complicated system. Never had an active playerbase. nhdaniels told me years later that he considered Surreal Time a failed experiment, and switched to something simpler, which still prevents players from having to wait for each other, but I don't know how it works.

[1] http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=I...

Unfortunately the download for Interhack is gone, as is its original website.

EmpireMUD has a rogue-like top-down 2D ASCII tile interface as I recall. That's the world map on which you can construct features of your empire. It's not played that much, but I wouldn't call it a failure since it is still going and still has players and developers.

Discworld MUD has this when you venture outside the main cities and end up in the wilderness. It's a huge world, look at these player made maps: http://dw.daftjunk.com/

> Why didn't MUDs ever go rogue-like ... with simple 2D tile-graphics?

That's not to say that there is still room for something like this! There are heaps of great indie games on Steam that are lightweight and deep.

If you don't mind graphics, I'd recommend checking out Streets of Rogue and Death Road to Canada, though they are not RPGs per-se and more Roguelites.

If you want something a bit more hardcore I'd check out Caves of Qud, still haven't managed to figure that one out.

Also, see Rimworld, an accessible Dwarf Fortress like game.

I play rogue likes but never use tiles.

Some of the simpler muds worked quite well with the zMUD automapper[1] which would try to parse the room descriptions and build/navigate the map.

I remember trying to get it working for Discworld, but the richness of the world descriptions (which varied depending on weather, light level, and all sorts of other factors), along with spontaneous info messages, made it very hard to extract reliably.

My complete lack of knowledge about parsing & text processing probably didn't help matters, and I learned a lot building triggers and other (mostly tolerated) automation back in the day.

One particular feature/challenge I remember was the UU library, which in order to navigate around, switched from cardinal directions (go east; go west; ...) to relative (turn left; forward; forward; turn right), so you had to keep track of your rotation. Combined with deviously constructed routes, it didn't take much to get hopelessly lost, which as the entire point I think :)

A lot of that subtlety would be lost in a simple tiled map, as would all the (often extremely verbose and entertaining) world descriptions.

Add that to the fact that almost all were player/volunteer-built worlds, and graphical art is a much harder field to dabble in than text, probably explains why graphics-first waited until commercial developments like EQ.

[1] http://www.oocities.org/timessquare/dungeon/6091/automap1.gi...

Well, I tried to do that a little with one of my side projects, Chasm Lords. It was a multiplayer roguelike with some MUD inspiration. Problem is this is such a small niche (people who like MUDs and roguelikes!) that I struggled to find and retain players, so I let the SSL certificate expire and now the game doesn't load. :)

It was a fun experiment though, I learned a lot about websockets and networked game programming!

We played MUDs through BBSs. It was a different experience than the internet. Everything was text. You dialed up someone’s house and created an account to join a community which gave you access to a specific set of resources. The people playing the game with you were usually people in your area code.

Upgrading from ASCII to graphics would mean kicking out all your friends with older modems, those with poor phone lines, those without Win 3.1, etc.

Also, time was valuable. You only got so many minutes per day on a BBS before you would get disconnected. You wouldn’t want to waste your time waiting for images to load.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com