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Issue #3 -- March 2002 -- 68 Pages
[Click on article titles to see a summary]
Contents
COLUMNS
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By Terri Perkins
Surprisingly, to date, I cannot find any information on customer service
for games being ranked by any reputable sources. There is no “Best MMORG
Customer Support Program ”award.
There are only a large number of players who, increasingly, are networking
and sharing their views about programs via the Internet. The MMORPG industry
as a whole has not provided the customer service their players deserve. On
the other hand, the consumers have not been willing to shell out the additional
dough it requires to make an outstanding program run.
This article contains information valuable all MUDs, from the small to the
massively multiplayer.
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By Kathy Pulver
Fifty rules all admins should follow.
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By Michelle Thompson
The Tuatha De Danaan are the beautiful people. Men and women both have fair,
delicate skin. Many of them sport freckles (also known as faerie kisses).
Their golden-blond or strawberry-blond hair flows down their back. The men
of The Tuatha approach the size of giants. Shawls or cloaks of brightly dyed,
coarse wool rest on their shoulders. Brooches at the shoulders hold cloaks
shut. The brooches reflect the Tuatha De Danaan's skill in craftsmanship.
Women wear ankle length, flowing robes or gowns. Men wear knee length tunics
of coarse, dyed fabric. The men are fond of bright hats, especially red ones.
For battle, they forgo the hats and dye their hair a vibrant red. Designs are
painting on their faces with the same dye.
A D&D style scenario ready to build into your MUD.
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By Bacchus De'Vine
A thousand ports to build on, and not a builder among them. At least it does
seem that way sometimes if you have ever looked on The MUD Connectors
positions board or even gone looking for a place to build on your own.
It doesn’t take long to find a MUD willing to hire you, no matter your
background or skills.
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By Laura Ellis
Deep within the bowels of the earth is another world. A world of dark magicks
and darker souls. A realm of black beasts and unholy terror. Crawling from
their prison within this dark plane, a new race has escaped to the sunlit
lands above.
Add this new race to your MUD.
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By Derek Snider
Many a great debate has erupted over the decision whether to use C or C++
when starting a project.
This article will introduce the C programmer to the advantages of using
C++, including some interesting examples of things you can do.
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By John Bellone
An introduction of how to set foot on the road to becoming a MUD programmer.
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By Sean Conner
Another view on starting out as a newbie coder.
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By Kevin London
Part 2, saving players and the start of rooms.
This is the second part in a series that will take you through the steps of
building your very own mud completely from scratch. In the first part of
this series, we created the ability for players to login and talk with each
other. That first step has to deal with sockets and networking protocols that
can quickly get very complex for beginning programmers. Luckily, now that is
done, we will be sticking C++ code that you are more likely to be familiar
with. As we go through the steps of this lesson, it will become apparent that
we didn't choose a very good class system for communication. This is something
that happens with all programs.
You layout your basic outline and design, begin coding, and realize that
something won't work or it would be easier if you changed the classes that
you are using currently. In fact, we will be making some changes in this
series to make the mud compatible with MSVC++. I have moved to using MSVC++
for my development of the mud because I know a lot of people that use C++,
use Microsoft platforms.
But for you linux/unix users out there, fear not, I won't be using
Microsoft specific API™s without providing a Linux alternative. Next, lets
concentrate on the code.
The first decision one must make when writing new parts for their mud is of
course what do I want to add? In this case, we want to add player files and
area files. Let's start with the player files. Since it makes sense that
players be a class, we will start with what we want to add to the class.
We want players to be able to login and not have to create a new character
each time they login. This means we will need to store a name, password
associated with the player, and what state they currently are in the login
portion of the game. We will also need to be able to load and save the player,
check the password and insert the character into some global double link-list.
We need the link-list for sending characters in the world messages, among
other things...
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By Kevin London
As a coder for Realms of Despair and a developer of the SMAUG code base,
I run into how to maintain both sets of code. We currently use one set of
source files for the SMAUG base and Realms of Despair code. There are things
that we don't wish to release in the SMAUG base code or simply don't make
sense to release, as they are RoD specific.
This article introduces you to using #ifdef to add conditional compilation
to your code, and also includes a utility to strip out unwanted #ifdef
statement blocks when distributing your code.
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By Richard Woolcock
Character Recognition is a concept that has been discussed many times over
the years, yet few MUDs have actually implemented it, and most of those that
have seem to barely scratch the surface of the possibilities such a feature
offers. In this article I shall discuss some of many ways in which this
system can be used, and also provide a basic framework of C code for a
codebase-independent solution.
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By Kathy Pulver
Thirteen guidelines all players should follow.
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By Melissa Cameron
Many of the mobs in text-based games are deadly enough that even the strongest
and best-equipped character in the game cannot bring them down alone. So in
game play, as in real life, it pays to have colleagues to help you out.
As in any relationship, there are rules of etiquette that should be followed
in order to keep a running group happy with the results of the battle.
For those new to the world of running mobs, here are a few guidelines to
follow...
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By Tim Hong
How to Explore the Final Mud-Frontier...
Another area, new mud-territory. New lands to explore and conquer. Whether
due to an academic thirst for knowledge or finding out the easiest route
towards riches, exploration is an integral part of any MUD skill-set. It's
something everyone should learn early on in his or her MUDing career.
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By Cyril
(Or, How to be Lazy *AND* Efficient)
When I started playing MUDs, my typing speed was probably 25 wpm. After
playing for a few months, it was over 65. Then I discovered triggers...
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By MiRSCH
First Impressions - do not underestimate their importance
The Art of Role-play
This article is meant as an introduction to the art of text-based role-play
as well as a tool for the more seasoned player who might benefit from a
different point of view. For the purposes of this piece, I thought I would
focus on the commonly overlooked, but infinitely important, aspect of
description.
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By John Bellone
Role-playing doesn't stop at developing your character or thinking up various
details that explains where your character comes from, the mannerisms he/she
has... it goes way beyond that. For role-playing to succeed, it needs to be
backed with plots.
FEATURES
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By Eric L. Rhea
Last year, Wizards of the Coast (WotC) produced a tangible offline product
for the very popular and successful game: Diablo II. This, I would argue, is
one of the few attempts to take a successful online game and bring it offline.
There has been to date a DiabloII core rules book and no less than three
expansion books.
This idea of taking aspects of a successful digital game and bringing them
offline is highly notable. When I spoke of this idea to a friend, her response
was one worth repeating here: "Why not?"
What exactly am I going on about? I am saying that there are in existence a
number of reasonably successful online MUDs that might find a degree of
success offline too. The essence of this is what we'll be discussing today.
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By Brett Davis
The first chapter in a fantasy adventure.
Reviews
DEPARTMENTS
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By Derek Snider
You may notice that this issue has changed somewhat compared to the first
two issues. This is thanks to Stephen Fox, who has contributed a lot of
great design ideas as well as many hours of hard work laying out this issue.
We have also grown by about twenty pages -- an increase of over 20 percent!
Things are starting to look up, and we owe everyone who has contributed to
this project a huge "thank-you". We couldn't have done this without you.
We would also like to be able to showcase more artwork. If you are an
artist, and would like to be published, we are always looking for good
quality fantasy artwork.
I'm going to be taking the March issue with me to GDC 2002 (Game Developer’s
Conference) where I hope to give it some exposure to the "big guys", and
also gain some valuable information from the tutorials, roundtables and
lectures to put into upcoming issues.
I’ve also been trying to form strong affiliations with every section of the
MUD community. We need more input from the MUSH/MOO/MUCK communities to
make this magazine a little more well rounded. Please do not be afraid to
contact me regarding this.
As a community we need to stick together. This magazine plays a part in
bringing us the recognition we deserve.
Many of us are (or were) players of role-playing games like Dungeons and
Dragons®. As many MUDs are based on these types of games, the
communities have very much in common -- friends getting together to pretend
they are someone else, going on an adventure and socializing along the way.
These games require an imagination and great deal of patience to play. They
aren't for everyone, but if we want to encourage new people to try them out,
we have to make it appealing, and the more help we can give them to get off
to a good start the better.
By educating our (potential) players we not only improve the quality of
their experience, we also improve the quality of the MUD player base as a
whole. First impressions are important, and MUDs that give a poor
impression of MUDding hurt us all.
A concept I've been tossing around inside my head, is to make available a
package to download which includes a hand-holding installation with plenty
of help files, documentation, a MUD client as well as possibly an offline
single-player introduction to your MUD which lets the totally new player
experience some of your game before having to deal with other players.
I've had several requests from people for an offline version of my MUD, and
never taken the idea too seriously... but why not? There is a huge amount
of depth in some of the areas in many MUDs that gets ignored by a high
percentage of the players because they are too busy rushing around with
other players, playing with "brief mode" on, even automating their playing
to collect gold or brew potions while they are off eating dinner.
A single-player version of your MUD may seem like a step backwards into the
old text-adventure days of Infocom® games, but you have a lot more
control over your player’s experience, and one of the biggest reasons people
aren’t playing single-player text-adventure games anymore is because people
haven't been making them anymore.
Scott Adams (creator of Adventureland, a text-adventure game written for the
TRS-80 model I in 1978) released a new text-adventure game on August 20th,
2000. He has also ported many of his old classics to the Palm Pilot, and
Java.
While I somehow doubt text-adventure games are going to make a huge
comeback, making your game more accessible is never a bad thing... even if
that includes an offline sample of what can be found online.
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By Ceirsei
Some time ago, my mother expressed her concern that I had what she called
'an internet problem'. My somewhat distracted response was 'yes, but ADSL
is too expensive at the moment'.
Unfortunately what she was referring to was the stage that most
people go through when their loved ones start spending a lot of time online
- 'internet paranoia'. Articles were produced with questionnaires - 'How to
tell if you're addicted to the Internet'. To her dismay, I took them and
came up negative, luckily able to define a mud as something other than a
chat room. The questionnaires seem to be ill informed and biased towards
the semi-hysterical flood of the 'my husband had an affair online' tabloids.
A lot has been written about the nature of addiction. There are
theories that suggest that some personalities are just more prone to
addiction of some kind or another.
Personally, I don't agree with that, though I'm glad that a lot of
research is being done. Its good to keep psychologists busy so that they
don't have time to rewrite their Internet addiction questionnaires.
Whether there is a psychological of physiological tendency for
addiction, there are many people who spend an awful lot of time online in
multiplayer computer games, sometimes to the detriment of what is referred
to as 'real life'. The question that must be asked is why? Not
psychological or physiological, but what reasons are articulated by people
who spend such a large amount of time communicating solely through the
Internet.
Motivations for each person are different. Thankfully, the world is
made up of individuals with their own complex structures of thinking. The
only basis I have for consideration is my own experience, and from talking
to people about what drives this unswerving devotion to a bunch of pixels.
For me, the desire to log onto a mud is driven by three basic
influences: Identity, Duty, and Passion.
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By Emile Néron & Jean-Francois Soucy
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