I believe that was the one, and in my opinion that would change the interface, as players will interface with roads instead of coordinates.



I'm interested as well. I think a lot of people feel like they've started to repeat themselves, and it'd be easier to link to some central site dedicated to game concepts and designs.

Well, there's MudLab of course. And hasn't donky been updating a mud design wiki?

edit: but more to the point, I was wondering more about something like an invented transcript of a 3D game. A wiki page would be a nice way to collaboratively edit that I guess.

Using coordinates is largely unnecessary, and isn't what makes the interface confusing, so I don't believe this would help in any way. You can already move between landmarks by targeting them directly.

Is the interface confusing for players new to muds entirely? I actually think it's quite easy to use, but I haven't watched a new player try it out.

I think unless the interface is just plain badly done, a tutorial like Midkemia Online has would easily introduce the basics.

Yes, this is kind of what I was hoping to do with my wiki, which Idealiad linked to. One of the ideas was that there are a range of topics that just come up and get rediscussed, and links to previous discussion and summary of the conclusions drawn would be a valuable thing to point people who bring them up to. The newsgroups, MUD-Dev, the forums, Imaginary Realities, etc.

However, I linked to it here to refer to my Physmud page, not to get it in use. I have a lot of initial content to do, before it is ready. And it is unlikely I will have time to add that initial content any time soon.

It occurred to me that we already have a spot in MB for something that might work –

http://www.mudbytes.net/index.php?a=arti...

I've created a new articles category for 'mockups'. Should be clear enough but if anyone has questions let me know. I'll be working on the 3D one and anyone is welcome to join. Use the forum discussion thread to hash things out:

http://www.mudbytes.net/index.php?a=topi...

I don't have winding or spiraling paths though.


As Tonitrus pointed out, players rarely use coordinates anyway. They either navigate with 'north', 'east', etc, or they 'target' a creature (to follow) or location.


Well I can't ask those who don't hang around, but of those I've asked it's the experienced mudders who seem to have the most trouble. Those who haven't played other muds usually say they find it intuitive (but of course one could pose the question: intuitive compared to what, if they've not played any other muds?).


I'm in the process of adding a 'what' command rather like we discussed in the other thread, and it does include some movement stuff, so I'm hoping it'll help out here as well.

I got that in reply to my email. I have no idea where to get these BULLET archives either, so I might just leave it for now.

An old friend of mine used to work at Southampton University. I sent him a message today about the SBBS, and he spoke to another friend of his who also used to work there (and who is interested in mud history), but sadly neither of them knew anything about it. It was worth a try though!

I noticed ADP was back some weeks ago, and discovered I still had my character there. There were several staff working away on it, including Noximist, and they hinted at big plans for the future. I even had a brief discussion with a couple of the staff about GUIs, although they dismissed it as being too much work - but I got the impression they had a lot of things going on.

And now…it's gone again. I assume that was the old ADP and not ADP:NW? Are they shifting over to the other version? Or did they just lose interest again? Or something else? Anyone know?

If it's of any relevance:

Nov. 14th, 2008.

That was nearly 2 years ago though - ADP was running only a few weeks ago, Noximist and Abetka were back and working on it, and if ADP:NW was really that far along it could be they're switching over (or have switched over) to the new engine.

I guess I'll have to track down Noximist and ask her.

I think that was the Old World, but inspiration to get ADP going again happens every year or two ;). The NW has so much content and had so much work go into it, it's hard to not want to. If I could make heads or tails of the 300k lines of code or so, I'd give it a shot, but there's some crippling bugs in some pretty major systems.

There also tends to be two sides of the restart. One that's happy with the gameplay and wants the content finished, or trimmed to not look unfinished, and the other wants to keep the content but revamp the gameplay

Reminds me a bit of my old Last City mud, although that was only around 180K lines. Had some nice features though, I found a copy in my archives and tried to give someone a demo a couple of years ago, but it was so buggy it kept crashing every few minutes.

Still, with gdb and valgrind you should be able to work your way through it. It might not be a quick or enjoyable job, but if you take it one step at a time it should be possible to get the mud stable enough to be playable.

Well, see, the problem is, a whole bunch of the code is written on top of this custom C++ scripting engine. The engine is definitely function-complete, but the documentation and bug hunting is not so. Removing all the scripted code is also a lot of work as it pretty much runs all commands, combat and probably a dozen other modules I'm forgetting. It could be done though. I am one of the few people who's actually been taught how to use the scripting engine.

The NW is stable, and crashing is usually not a problem. But there's some really odd bugs that make the game unplayable. Like the random 2 billion XP bonus bug ;).

Sounds like a feature to me. :biggrin:

Of all of the bugs we inadvertently set loose on the NW, the billion-exp bug was the one that generated the fewest player-written bug reports. I can't imagine why…

I've already responded on Facebook, but will post here, too; the amount of time it took me to create an account makes me want to get the most out of it.*

It was amazing to get ADP running again, and everyone was excited about the prospect of working together and finally opening the MUD to the public. Reality is a bit of a buzzkill, though, and I think the staff was overwhelmed by the number of changes we wanted to make. It's easy to implement incremental improvements and occasional system overhauls; over the span of years, ideas and desires shift constantly. If you're editing a game every day, it falls in line with those changes, but if you decide to return to a codebase you last saw six or seven years ago, you see so many things you no longer like. My concern is not for the quality or stability of code that's in there - I'm confident that we could have it patched up and ready to roll in a couple of months, especially since a bunch of us have become much better coders since we last worked on it. The main sticking point is that we wanted to hack it to shreds and then build it back up like some kind of programmatic bone marrow transplant, and that's a daunting prospect.

And in retrospect, devoting 1,000 or so lines of code to a sculpting system so neurotically detailed that maybe three people in the world would actually enjoy using it was probably not a wise decision…

That said, the MUD is back up now, and I do have some ideas for its future. We'll see if anyone else does. ;)


* I had to transcribe no fewer than ten captchas before MudBytes felt that I'd done a good enough job. Does this mean I'm a replicant? I've been wondering about that for a while now…

As one of ADP:NW's failed builders, maybe this is my chance to clean my guilty conscience ;D.

Your area is probably still there! Anyways, for those who don't know but care, the NW is at mudbytes.net 7005, and the Old World runs on 3083