EQ Diku

March 9, 2007 Tipa 2 comments

EQ and its related games (pretty much every modern MMO) have long been dismissed as nothing but “DikuMUDs with a graphical interface slapped on top of them”.

I’ve been playing with the DikuMUD code over the last few days to get a feel for world building and to add a feature (what I call “rally troops” but is really a way of multi-boxing several characters in a group)… and I had a thought (yes, just one. I treasure them, though). Why not make EQ… into a DikuMUD?

So here is the EQ1 zone of (of course) West Karana… in DikuMUD form… no mobs or objects yet.

I don’t think I’ll continue with DikuMUD. Though it’s easy to modify and create worlds with it, an object-oriented, database-centric approach would be far more powerful (allowing for hot patches and user-created objects), and move easier into the graphical realm.

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Written by Meclin about 3 years ago.

Yes, the dikumud (and another of other code-based text engines from the heyday of mud’s, moo’s, mush’s, etc) birthed the graphical mmorg–two of the originial EQ creators played TorilMud (aka Sojourn) in the early nineties and borrowed liberally from that world to create EverQuest (there was talk of litigation, but of course it was all based on Forgotten Realms anyway).

I liked the DikuMud engine and the imaginative side of playing a text-only game, and held out for years on the premise that “paying to pay on the internet is wrong.” But the visual side of mmorgs today make an important step in gaming viable and almost interesting–grinding. Whether its rep, xp, gold, or any other repetative step, at least you have something to look at besides the scrolling text on the screen.

Lastly, I still recall being pysched that I had found an “ANSI-enabled” telnet application to play a mud with–flashing colored text? It was like being there!
Written by Tipa about 3 years ago.

Back in the “old days”, I dabbled in MUDs (LambadMOO and PernMUSH mainly), but my love was the roguelikes. The games I was writing for myself were real-time roguelikes, and I contributed to the vast NetHack game…

I liked text, sure, but I was in love with “…@.#” – go go, hi-res graphics :P

In the future, people will spend as much time in virtual worlds as real ones. Depending on how far you stretch the metaphor to include social spaces (like MySpace or AIM), maybe they already do. MMOs are just the first, crude step. When the REAL virtual spaces come out, playing an MMO will be like reading Chaucer. Quaint.

For a time, we gamers had this realm to ourselves — it was too geeky or unrewarding to the vast masses. That’s changing and what’s more, they’ll leapfrog PAST gaming into something entirely new that will truly transfigure the way we live.

Second Life is way more a signpost to the future than World of Warcraft. And the first space to make that leap will have users in the hundreds of millions, distributed among every connected computer in the land.

Quite a ways from our “You are next to a small white house. There is a mailbox here.”

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