You'd think there'd be more space based muds out there.. but all I seem to find is medevil swords and stones! and the only few space based ones, seem best done in MOOs.. why is that, and where is all the good space muds man!

I'd imagine it's directly proportionate to the interests of those who decide to open new muds versus those who decide to open new moos. I know in my case, while I do enjoy reading and watching SciFi from time to time, I'd have no real interest in setting up a mud based on it, so it only makes sense that my mud would be focused on Medival/Fantasy instead. It also helps sway the majority of genre for muds that most of the mud codebases out there are already geared, stock, toward medival/fantasy. :wink:

Its much, much easier to customize a moo.

Having worked in moos for a while and ran my own for a short time, I am confident in saying that they're the most customizable base I've ran into. You can rework every system entirely from inside the moo with very little coding knowledge. Its very, very flexible. It is, however, also very time consuming as you pretty much have to rework every system from scratch as there are so few precoded.

Its much easier to maintain a unique enviroment unlike other muds in a moo. When you log on to a Dikumud, you can tell its a dikumud and it really is very geared to medieval/fantasy. A well developped moo, however, can be made to barely resemble its base. You can code commands/skills/item types/rooms/character types/anything from inside the moo very quickly, without the need to compile. The systems are simple, yet flexible.

That is why moo lends itself well to muds of a unique type. They lack many things, but are very, very customizable.

Building a space mud from most major bases would suck. You'd pretty much havne to start from scratch, which is very time consuming.

Yea but theres only been two I've enjoyed to a point, made by the same group of people then they broke up and a clone was created. SC and GWSE, my favorite being GWSE made by squidsoft, which broke up because they sucked as hosts anyway, they all cheated at their own game. So they took the games down, and group A, which is still squidsoft promised to reopen after major rewrite of the game, never gonna happen cause they are all to busy playing SL, and then group B started Badgersoft.net which is making a not so much space orientent game, its more focused towards ground based playing from last I checked. Then a third group made of players from SC started Toastsoft with their clone of SC called Miriani

You ought to look at the ColdC server (http://cold.org). It's combines features of Cool (MOO2) and MOO, plus the language has more features, builtin datatypes and functions. Unlike MOO, most everything including networking and security are moved into the corelib. In that respect the difference between Cold and MOO is analogous to the difference between the LPs, DGD and MudOS. DGD is another good server if you prefer LPC over MOOcode or ColdC.

Some of the commercial muds are running DGD and Cold, Castle Marrach runs on DGD and The Eternal City runs on Cold.

I've already tried my hand at MOOs, I enjoy playing them but making them is something else… Specially to the extent as the games I've played.

I've never played on a space scifi theme mud.

I always thought that the biggest reason so many muds are
sword and sandals style is that it's just easier to develop that way.

For one thing, it's the historical default, so there's that…your
new codebase will probably start out as an old hackenslasher.

But aside from that, you wind up, I *think*, with design problems
right from square one. The way I envision a spacemud involves stuff
like FTL travel and ray guns…both of which are not immediately obvious
how to implement in the standard "north south east west, player and monster
in the same room" paradigm.

For example, say I'm a stormtrooper mob. You're a rebel scout, and
you shoot me with your blaster. I fall over dead.

Was that fun?

Perhaps even less fun: you walk into the room, I spot you, and for once
in the randomized skill check I actually score my first hit on a player in
the 1,000 times I've been loaded. So now you fall over dead.

Was that fun?

With "melee" combat you can swing and miss, duck, etc. Blasters generate
the Greedo effect. Whoever is fastest on the keyboard wins (pace George Lucas and his
damnable histfictional revisionism).

So how do spacemuds deal with this lack of fun? Last I heard they do it
just as if the blasters were swords. "Stormtrooper hits you hard! You hit stormtrooper!
Stormtooper misses you!"

Which, IMO, completely ruins the illusion of the theme.

How do you foresee handling this?

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net

toastsoft.net go play miriani, they have FTL stun guns, starship battles, many many starships, many things to do with starships. its however the not so fun game. GWSE had everything… you could own planets… galaxies… it was fantastic… And just because its in the future doesn't always mean guns… In gwse there was swords, shields, guns, psionics… gerenades… it was all just a matter of how much was gonna hit and where. If I did swords vs guns, guns would have a greater chance of hitting further away, where up close swords would be more effective, then its getting up close, or running away. So… how to do this? make each room have a grid of so many "spaces" in which can be moved around, or room to room combat. So from room to room it'd be, You fire west towards so and so. Then the target gets a shot comes flying at you from the east, then you do hit or miss, and both players recieve it, then the player knows to either head east or run away, if player moves east, then the percent to hit is lower do to the fact the player is now moving.

Edit: However the problem is that in order to do a space themed mud, with space ships, the universe would need to be HUGE, and i wouldn't know a way to do this. In the moos they can generate and destroy rooms on the fly, but these games I'm taking about, GWSE and SC were close to like 16 gigs or so from what I was told.

Interesting. What would you do to differentiate between moving west *in* a room, and
moving west to *leave* the room?

As to large worlds, there are various solutions. If you're really going to have a mud
with millions of possible objects (rooms, weapons, etc) that will be interrelated
somehow, it's not crazy to look into an external database to hold all the information.
Such a scheme would have the added advantage of possibly making your mud
"persistent", such that things don't reset to "original state" just because you rebooted.

Another solution is to only load into memory data *as you need it*. LP drivers started
out with this philosophy, so that you could in theory have a mud that was 40 megs in
size if you loaded everything, but since players only ever saw a tiny percentage of the
mud at any time, only the objects they interacted with were loaded into memory,
making that 50 meg mud have a footprint of, say 4 megs, instead. Objects unused for a
few hours would usually either get swapped out of memory and into disk, or
flushed from memory entirely.

-Crat

That depends entirely on your setting. In Star Wars (which I would personally describe as 'science fantasy' rather than 'science fiction') Han Solo may have taken down Greedo with one shot, but look at how many Stormtrooper blasts Han Solo managed to survive by ducking or running out of the way! Even ignoring the jedi and their magical blaster-blocking swords, you still end up with characters who can survive numerous blaster attacks (represented as near-misses).

Some settings get around the issue in other ways, such as the Holtzman shields of Dune that render firearms ineffective (and lasguns suicidal). In other settings its not uncommon to encounter things like cybernetic modifications or high-tech armour that allows the individual to survive powerful energy attacks.

Still yet another approach would be the gurps style of having body armor that absorbs so many points of damage and deflects so many points of damage such that someone suitably armored could withstand several direct lethal strikes before being incapacitated, let alone killed, in fact, that's largely what the armor class combined with the hit points of D&D and most muds are presumed to be factoring in. Let's be honest, even in a mud or a D&D game, let alone real life, someone unarmored and untrained is certainly going to find even a sword quite lethal in a single strike dealt by someone who is trained in its use.

well if I had an ingame grid system then moving west only work till you go to the edge of the room, then you'd have to be at one of the locations that allows an exit, make kinda like a map for each room… like so and so is a street, a space over is sidewalk, and a space over from that is a wall, and 2 spaces north is an opening in the wall to allow entrance to a shop.

You could fake the same thing in a traditional game by just saying that X actual room is 1/4 of the real room, and that by moving west until you can't means you simply hit the wall of that room. Keep each description relatively the same so you can 'see' what else is in the room, and place exits accordingly.

It would feel about the same really.

While technically not a "space" game, GZ was futuristic with guns, airstrikes, tanks, explosives, etc.

Basically armor absorbs damage (rather than preventing hits), weapons have a rate of fire which is the # of rounds in a given combat round. Some slow weapons only fired once every 2 or 3 combat rounds (If memory serves, this was handled w/ a negative rps value). Each firearm has a damage multiplier and the ammo has the base damage (Except for energy weapons like the phaser or blaster that don't use ammo).

Anyway, absorb worked per-hit, so the minigun with 6 hits per round has a wide swing between a heavily armored person and a lightly armored person. While something like the electron cannon wasn't effected much (not alot of difference between 3 hit kills and 4 hit kills).

Explosive based combat was handled in a variety of ways. There was "booming" ala… pulling all your explosives and running at a target, hopefully timing the explosion for when you're in range. (Actually the most effective form of combat on GZ). Then you have damage control, that is, pulling your explosives when you're close to dying (so you're killer might be killed in the blast, or your equipment destroyed). You can lay mines, and seed them with additional explosives (none of the mines can kill someone at full health by themselves, although some provide secondary effects like poison gas or fire that could finish them off… An all purpose mine that stuns you after setting the room on fire was nasty).

Airstrikes were difficult to manage, but a very effective tool for stopping a well equipped opponent. Generally these are executed one of 3 ways, you can by looking at the map in your base, attempt a coordinated airstrike against a random opponent (the map doesn't show who they are, just what team). You can use the airstrike on the enemy base hoping for a kill (this worked well when the game had alot of players), you can use the airstrike to clear droids and auto-turrets placed by the enemy. And you can use airstrikes to set off explosives.

Tanks are extremely powerful, but difficult to control, generally requiring at least 2 players to work effectively (although I once wrote a bot that did pretty well at tanking). Basically, there are 4 aspects to the tank, the turret direction, the shield direction, the gun, and the driver. Originally you could switch between any position to control the tank, but for a while the tank required 3 people to use. GZ2 before it went down allowed the "driver" to handle all 4 (a poor move imho, making tanks extremely easy to use)

Finally there are melee weapons, which do MUCH more damage than ranged weapons, but obviously were difficult to use with the 0 room range.

In any case, GZ was a very well balanced mud for most of it's lifespan. Toward the end of GZ2, they made weapons do more damage and armor harder to find. The result was that most engagements were over before you could react… someone with good equipment killed unequipped people too fast. It's my belief this was a key factor in the collapse of GZ.

I've been slowly working (when I find time) on a new GZ codebase, the old DIKU one is a pain to work with. Portions of this code have been submitted here (ala the event timer and ranged search code). To handle ranged combat, explosive shrapnel, explosion noise, arrival messages, throwing objects, and a variety of other requirements for the GZ style of ranged combat, the BFS simply finds acceptable rooms and passes them to a callback object which does the work.

As for space-ships, the player doesn't actually have to be in a "room". You could change easily drop players in "ships" into a utility room, and generate everything they see based on what's happening with the "spaceship". By storing a sparce-map of where things are located in the "galaxy" you can keep the memory requirements low.

but for a space system, you'd need to be able to allow players to leave the ship, maybe walk on the haul of the said ship, space walk through space, and then these little factors get harder and harder, like say player a dumps so much of like diamond into space, how long should it stay there? should it ever be removed? Could I add asteroids and meteroites to fly through space? how would stars effect day and night on a planet, how would I determine the orbit around a star for a planet, or the orbit for the moons around a planet… How would I seperate galaxies, and planets. If I had over 100 planets most being of large size so a good 1000+ rooms plus on each, I'd have to store like ocean data, and land data for every room on that planet, or atleast the shape of the features, and then use like an example and then shores are 1/2 of the data and like ocean depths are x10 the data or something. If I started a space game, I'd try to spend so much time trying to make it feel real, that it wouldn't. I mean I'd want to be able to launch from a planet and fly around in the planets atmo having battles in atmo, and then take off right into space, and have space battles, or atmo to ground battles, or atmo to space battles. I'd want the chance if your not paying attention to that comit coming in and hits your ship, damage of all kinds, or hell if the comit hit a planet, whats that gonna do to the data for that planet? Could it change the landscape? how hard is that gonna be to maintain? How much resources is this gonna take up. And all I can come up with is to much for what I have heh.

Just start coding something. At least you'll have code done, rather than wondering
how much work XYZ will be. Start coding, and then you'll know how much work you're looking at,
and based on your coding habits, you'll start figuring out your own strategies for how
to accomplish what you can with what you have.

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net

None of this is very hard, and honestly, I've seen many muds do these things. What's the difference between say… a smaug killing you for swimming underwater without aquabreath and leaving a ship without your space suit? Or dumping ore in space and having it "removed" and ground-rot? I've implemented systems where the celestial bodies that are up effected the light levels creating a dynamic day/night cycle.

How much resources will it use? That depends largely on how detailed you want it. Using a sparce map as I suggested earlier you could probably get away with a fraction of a percent of what it would cost otherwise. There are other tricks, like a friend is using a noise generator to create elevation maps, and then calculating where rivers/bodies of water would be, dropping in vegetation etc. That would use up less space for a huge map than say… a room for each location. Something like Samson's wilderness code could be a viable solution as well.

A good 1000+ rooms is a large sized planet?

I'll readily grant that 100,000+ rooms is a large mud, but… maybe if the planets are not very detailed ???

If they use planets like 'areas' then 1k rooms wouldn't be too bad.
It all depends on how it's laid out. I have one area that's the usual 100 rooms, but feels quite large due to it's layout. I guess it depends on movement as well, if it's restricted to like 'port cities' and such.. hard to say. Sounds fun though :)

That's true enough. If each planet is really only developed as far as a few locales or a major city and then add in some exit distances to make it feel even bigger along with room descriptions that make most places feel extra roomy, ~1000 vnums could seem quite spacious. Guess I'm too used to thinking in terms of typical vnum usage where even 50-100 vnums might not be very much and the whole game world (or thousands of vnums) is only one planet, possibly only one continent. *shrug*