4 ms·

That is exactly something I'd play hours of! I love roguelikes, and have always wanted to get into MUDs -- I've tried many -- but they never hold my attention l

That is exactly something I'd play hours of! I love roguelikes, and have always wanted to get into MUDs -- I've tried many -- but they never hold my attention long enough. Even tiled ASCII characters would be a huge boon; I think it's the fact that I can't easily imagine the entire game area through text. If I was able to at least "see" the squares around my character, I could better spatially orient myself. Almost every time I've quit a MUD has been because I got bored trying to pour through the docs/guides to figure out how I ended up somewhere. I imagine an ASCII multiplayer game is more complex when it comes to netcode though. Perhaps the reason so many MUDs have survived is because they don't require nearly as much server infrastructure to support?

thedirt0115 9y ago
You should check out Dwarf Fortress.
tlarkworthy 9y ago
I played a mod of rogue multiplayer and it was awful becuase the ticks were fixed in length. It felt like walking through treacle followed by very difficult combat with no time to browse ur inventory in the moment.
- versteegen 9y ago
  There have been a bunch of MMO roguelikes. Some of the major ones are Mangband and ToMENet (the latter is a fork of the former, made to closely resemble ToME3). There have been a few different attempts to solve the MMO turn-based problem. The most interesting IMO is interhack [1] (not to be confused with the interhack tool for nethack) which originally used "surreal time": depending on whether players were near it other it would switch between them taking turns within the same turn-based game, and running the game logic separately for each player so they didn't wait for each other. There's was a long writeup about it. It's a very complicated system. Never had an active playerbase. nhdaniels told me years later that he considered Surreal Time a failed experiment, and switched to something simpler, which still prevents players from having to wait for each other, but I don't know how it works. [1] http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=Interhack http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=I... Unfortunately the download for Interhack is gone, as is its original website.

thedirt0115 9y ago

You should check out Dwarf Fortress.

tlarkworthy 9y ago

I played a mod of rogue multiplayer and it was awful becuase the ticks were fixed in length. It felt like walking through treacle followed by very difficult combat with no time to browse ur inventory in the moment.

versteegen 9y ago
There have been a bunch of MMO roguelikes. Some of the major ones are Mangband and ToMENet (the latter is a fork of the former, made to closely resemble ToME3). There have been a few different attempts to solve the MMO turn-based problem. The most interesting IMO is interhack [1] (not to be confused with the interhack tool for nethack) which originally used "surreal time": depending on whether players were near it other it would switch between them taking turns within the same turn-based game, and running the game logic separately for each player so they didn't wait for each other. There's was a long writeup about it. It's a very complicated system. Never had an active playerbase. nhdaniels told me years later that he considered Surreal Time a failed experiment, and switched to something simpler, which still prevents players from having to wait for each other, but I don't know how it works. [1] http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=Interhack http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=I... Unfortunately the download for Interhack is gone, as is its original website.