I’m pretty new to Multi-User Dungeons so i’m not sure this question makes sense. It seems like every MUD engine i’ve seen that mentions a day/night cycle makes no mention of localized time, or it being day in one part of a large world and night in another part at the same time.
I’m considering trying to make my own MUD, and this (along with localized weather) is something i’d want it to have. If no engine supports this, how hard should i expect it to be to make this work in an existing engine?
Is there anything else i should know, since i currently don’t have much experience in anything more complicated than Inform6?
I… can’t say I have any experience with MUD engines in particular…
… but in theory, it does not seem impossible, or even that difficult?
Basically, just have a preset world space that is cordoned off into strips, bands, and that functions as essentially an overlay layer.
Split it into 24 slices, give each slice an offset from “UTC” … every time the … “UTC” of this world rolls over another hour, iterate each local time zone between… sunrise, morning, midday, evening, sunset, night.
Something like that basic framework.
Hell, you could also vary the length of days, of each of those ‘lighting condition states’ by latitude, with another set of strips, and then use both of them together to come up with some kind of ‘season’ offset.
To maintain your own sanity, if trying to travel long distances or something, just convert everything to ‘UTC’ time, then calc travel time, then calc back to local time once you’ve arrived.
… And be wary of crossing the ‘international date line’.
Localized weather is… well, it can be as simple as just having like, another grid splitting up the world into weather regions, and then you have something like a ‘climatic zone index’ that you assign to each grid square, and each climatic zone has its own lookup table of possible weather states, which have some weight value associated, and then just every hour or 6 hours or day or w/e, you randomly roll for a new weather state.
You could also get much more complicated if you want to simulate things like moving pressure systems that interact with significant terrain elevations, moving humidity patterns, ocean temperature circulation patterns, wind speed, etc…
I… am assuming this is either 2d or just like ascii character based?
MUDs are texted based.
… Is DwarfFortress technically a MUD, or no?
No, because Dwarf Fortress isn’t multi-user and doesn’t fit into the same genre. It’s neither Multi-User or a “Dungeon”/“Dimension” that is implied with the name MUD.
A MUD is a living precursor to the modern massively-multiplayer RPG, but instead of graphics on a screen you read text descriptions.
Dwarf Fortress is a management simulation game that uses ascii characters to represent things.
Ooooh ok.
So, maybe this is a bit of a stretch…
But would the modern, open source, Fallout Online, which basically takes FO1/2, rebuilds them libre from the ground up, and makes them multiplayer… would that maybr be closer to a MUD, like a ‘Graphical’ MUD, with sprites instead of ASCII?
I’ve not actually ever played DF, but I have seen that nowadays, there are… basically ways you can translate all the ASCII into sprites or tilesets.
https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Graphics
I get that the MU is multi user, I’ve just also never actually played DF, did not realize it had not network able capacity, derp.
Or you could maybe even say that with like, PokeMMO, which roughly smashes all the GBA era pokemon games into a massive online framework… thats a sort of ‘graphical’ MUD?
Yeah as I said, I’m too young to have ever played an actual MUD, thank you for clarifying!
No problem! Obviously the OP can chime in if their game idea is different.
It’s complicated because MUD sounds like such a general term, but over time it became synonymous with something more niche: text-based games that in some way resemble the earliest multiplayer online game: MUD; also known as Essex MUD.
The main key to me is “text-based,” most of them didn’t use any type of character art like you’d see in Dwarf Fortress or nethack. The majority of what you do in an MUD is read sentences someone wrote of your current location or what you’re doing. It’s a lot like dungeons and dragons or interactive fiction.
You’re totally right though, in the most general sense, a lot of online games could fit into the general “Multi-user D-” term; in the early days of graphical MMOs, people called games like Ultima and EverQuest “graphical MUDs” for lack of a better way to describe them. Now we have “massively multiplayer online” to help.
So in the broadest sense, Fallout Online is a Multi-User something, but probably doesn’t fit with most people’s idea of a MUD.
Ok ok!
So… Caves of Qud.
That game seems very much like a MUD to me… what I think of as the general style and kind of gameplay… but it is not MultiUser, its a bit fancier than totally text based… but it does very much do a whole lot of basically ‘deep world simulation’.
I did actually play a tiny bit of Everquest, waaaay back in the day, maybe thats where I’m remembering the ‘graphical MUD’ term from?
Christ, was that before RuneScape even existed?
Oi, lol.
Yep, a multiplayer Caves of Qud sounds about right! People don’t tend to make complex graphical UIs on top of MUDs, because the MUD creator is more worried about other things. But the clients often have mapping or other features.
MUDs are also more friendly to play for blind people than a lot of games since they’re based on text.
Incredibly, EverQuest came out two years before RuneScape!
If you’re curious about MUDs at all, my favorite one from the mid-nineties (Alter Aeon) is still being run by players who love the game and seem like good people. I still play sometimes, it provides a different kind of gaming experience than the games we’ve discussed.
The two main differences in what I consider a MUD vs a Dwarf Fortress / Caves of Qud would be that the mud is first person and has a textual description, where DF is third person and uses ASCII to represent things in space. So to describe a Dwarf next to a Goblin in a small room, DF would display:
#### #D.# #G.# ####While a mud would display:
You are in a small room. A dwarf stands next to a goblin.