Wednesday 1 September 2010

Roguelike MUD progress

I finally found some more time to work on my roguelike MUD project. Tonight I managed to get proper multi-player support in, so that concurrently logged in players have their view of the game updated as other game objects change position. Up to this point the players mostly shared the world representation, and had separate state defining what was in it.


While the changes required are more or less fine, some didn't fit well into the existing game framework. I need to put some thought into cleaning those up.

Achievable next steps should hopefully be:

  1. Cleaning up the bugs.
    - Fix the incorrect menu related message that appears in the top telnet window shown in the screenshot.
    - When a player quits the game, the display of other observing players does not update to reflect it.
    - When an object moves, observing players are defined as those who have visited the tile the object moved to and currently have it on their display. Instead only observing players who have the object in their field of vision should see the movement.
  2. Polish the field of vision support.
    - The tiles that are in the field of vision should be distinct from those that are not (Smart Kobold uses this approach to good effect).
  3. Widen the corridors so players can pass each other.
  4. Add entities controlled by AI that move around of their own volition.
Really, in this day and age a game like this should be browser based (like 91). But getting side tracked into a non-game related endeavour to implement an equivalent canvas based display with a AJAX or COMET connection to the backend server, is something I have no time for just now.

Next post: Roguelike MUD progress #2

3 comments:

  1. Very cool... I've been wanting to do this in the browser for a while, but just no time now a days :/

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  2. The 91 guy commented that he would consider open sourcing his code on reddit, when he announced it there. That would be a good kickstart for anyone wanting to do the same.

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  3. I remember the countless hours I played in BatMUD while telling my battle-mate Apocalipsis about coding something like this. It was 1990...

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