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Post by BitterFlashback on Oct 3, 2014 11:54:30 GMT -5
On a whim i decided to pop over to black-sands.net to see what the word was. Apparently the word was "gone". it now redirects to a MUD engine site that appears to be run by the Black sands team.
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Post by Redacted on Oct 3, 2014 11:59:03 GMT -5
Yeah, futuremud has been in development for a while. They're trying to build a modular plug-n-play sort of mud code base written in C# if I'm not mistaken.
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Post by jcarter on Oct 3, 2014 14:30:11 GMT -5
that's japheth, who posts here from time to time |
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delerak
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Post by delerak on Oct 3, 2014 23:21:38 GMT -5
Noticed this a while ago just didn't have the desire to create its own thread for it. I guess they are working together on it. I think Case from SOI is also helping. I am less then optimistic.
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delerak
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"When you want to fool the world, tell the truth." - Otto Von Bismarck
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Post by delerak on Oct 3, 2014 23:21:48 GMT -5
God I'm such a cynic these days.  |
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japheth
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Post by japheth on Oct 4, 2014 19:06:21 GMT -5
Shade took Black Sands offline a couple of months ago, and at the time he said he would redirect to FutureMUD so he could make a post about it there (though I don't believe he ever did). It's a real shame, I quite enjoyed Black Sands. Unfortunately I think Black Sands is probably gone for good unless Shade redevelops that "MUD itch" while he's off enjoying real life. You never know.
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Post by BitterFlashback on Oct 4, 2014 20:01:15 GMT -5
Damn. Well thanks for answering, japheth. any idea what they are planning to put on FutureMUD when the engine is built? |
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japheth
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Post by japheth on Oct 4, 2014 20:56:27 GMT -5
Well if by "they" you mean the FutureMUD team (which is basically just me), I may or may not make an actual game. It was more of an effort to get an engine out there to replace the RPI Engine. I know of a few people who have MUD ideas that they want to build on FutureMUD but I can't say which ones will ever end up going ahead. Actually what I suspect will happen is that a lot of them will spring up when I end up releasing the engine, and the best ones will survive. There will probably be a glut of FutureMUDs. The support requirements for that from my end probably will eat up all my time for at least a little while after I release, hence why I am not planning my own MUD right away.
That being said, Shade is always welcome to remake Black Sands on the FutureMUD engine when it comes out. For that matter, so are the folk on this forum who want to make a new Dark Sun MUD. I'm a one man amateur team who does this in my spare time, so no promises on when it'll be ready, but I dare say I'm further along than you guys would be if you started from scratch.
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nobody
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Post by nobody on Oct 12, 2014 4:14:19 GMT -5
I never logged into Black Sands, but Shade put a lot of work into the Argila engine was it? Well, hammered it more than most I heard, and it was working at least. Was it missing much, codewise? I wonder if he'd be able to release his version if hes going to drop it for the FutureMUD engine. Shit, I'd pay server costs to have a look at what he'd done, and see if I could work with it to make something.
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japheth
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Post by japheth on Oct 13, 2014 0:34:45 GMT -5
Shade did a substantial amount of work on the engine, and a lot of it was never really utilised because the game never got a chance to explore the content he had planned. What ultimately tripped him up are the deep, complex and maddening memory issues with the RPI/Argila engine. His branch stems from one of the earliest Argila releases and predates any of the work on the memory systems, besides which, these were never satisfactorily resolved anyway (just look at how unstable Atonement and SOI were/are).
I know that this was a factor in Shade leaving the Black Sands project - it was one of the main factors behind me leaving SOI as well - when you end up spending 75% of your time fixing corruption and trying to get to the bottom of the latest nonsensical crashes, you lose a lot of enjoyment. You get a sense of pointlessness and frustration that really amplifies anything else negative about the project (such as dwindling playerbase and/or combative players or admins), and the writing is on the wall from that point on.
I would say that a real professional with a lot of experience in writing C programs who is also an exorcist and reclusive billionaire with nothing better to do could probably fix the RPI Engine's problems once and for all. Unfortunately, I think that its problems are probably deeper than anyone currently in the community has the skills to solve.
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daevic
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Post by daevic on Oct 30, 2014 18:07:10 GMT -5
Indeed friends BSM is down at the moment and will be until we have another coder. However, as I still have everything I've ever written for the game, all the rooms, objects, etc I still have the entire mud world, the history etc as it is all part of a novel/gameworld I have developed since I was a teen.
However, the issues you mention in terms of bringing it to life in a mud world are very real. Code-side the mud relied on Shade and only Shade did all the work on it, which is obviously going to exhaust anybody. All we really need to come alive again is a coder who wants to put it up and work with it. A lot of the end game plans would have coded in massive support for players to do nearly anything without imm intervention/support.
That said, I would definitely consider switching to a newer updated codebase if that made things easier to work with codeside. The only reason we chose the SOI engine is because it was free at the time, way ahead of the other options then, and was something Shade was familiar with.
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Post by lurklord on Nov 16, 2014 23:51:24 GMT -5
It was bound to happen sooner or later. Shade was diligent for soldiering through it this long.
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