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?
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.