The image isn’t loading 🤔

I do any special text formatting with bbcode, it’s very flexible though it can look ugly (custom bbcode tags can help with that)

Anyone else have any progress to share?

Not much, but I explored custom fonts a bit.

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Not sure if you'll see the image, seems the host is having some issue now. Didn't notice right away as it was cached for me.

I wish color font were easier (via FontForge, or instead using 1-command to bundle SVGs into an OTF file).

Then again, I also prefer textmesh which does not support color font either (even though the vertex color shader itself does, maybe someone better can/has figured out some sort of per-glyph color map).

So it still gets something else to do the work for you without paying for it?

Because people weren’t complaining about the world ending with “asset flip” games for a decade?

I hate the emojis being used in headings and descriptions, that screams AI itself to me. I know it likely isn't in this case, but ughh.. that's like one of the most obvious signs.

It costs money, so middling.

But the point isn't to prevent AI trainers from scraping it, it's to provide alternatives to artificially-generated assets.

What are the odds that this wasn’t all immediately added to AI training data?

Itchio link:
https://ci.itch.io/all-game-assets

Currently -50% off, costing 10 USD.

Nice game. Reminds me of Boson X

I appreciate your feedback!

There are a lot of similar games, but I don't recall any black-and-white ones. Thanks for your feedback!

Reminded me of a browser game I used to play but I couldn't find it again, closest I find is tunnel rush which is close but mine was fully black and white and simpler.

Yours is cool as well!

Love it. This is how you should enjoy coding

no, it runs directly in the browser

Managed to get a post in this week! Anyone else have any progress to share? This is the wip menu level for my cleaning game Goreticulture, I'm going to be doing playtests soon but I haven't yet figured out steam 😅

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.

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.

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.

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.

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, 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.

I used to play a modified circlemud 3.0

Iirc different "zones" could have different weather, though I can't remember if the they had different day night cycles, but even if they didn't that doesn't mean you can't make it work the way you want it to.

Not sure what you are planning but I may have a bunch of old zmud maps, and I have a spreadsheet and a .TXT document with a while bunch of items statted out that I would be willing to give to you. I might even be able to connect you with someone who last hosted/ran the one I played. Would have to see if they are still around

... Is DwarfFortress technically a MUD, or no?

MUDs are texted based.