Hi everyone,
Although our new project is as yet unnamed, we're calling it the Chrysalis Project for the time being. I think the best part of having a project to work on is having a cool code name for it :)
I have just finished setting up a basic blog. There's nothing on it yet (and don't expect there to be for a little while... the next three weeks are pretty hectic both for Parvi and for me), but if you would like to follow the blog for the new project, then check out the following link:
http://chrysalisgames.blogspot.com/
With that, we turn this blog over to Nate and DR-related discussion.
<3
Sido
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
The New Project: An Explanation
Hello everyone!
As of today, Parviane and I have officially stepped away from active management and development of Dark Risings. I want to thank everyone who came forward with kind words over the last week. It's been wonderful to hear that so many of you enjoy the changes we've made to the game, and I hope you continue to enjoy them for a long time to come. We feel great about leaving DR in the very creative and capable hands of our admin Nate and the rest of the imm team. I have full confidence in their abilities, and I am definitely looking forward to seeing the direction they decide to take with DR. Good luck and best wishes!
I know there has been a lot of speculation about why we have chosen to retain rights to DR rather than just leave as most IMPs who step away from the position have done. I appreciate those of you who have taken the time to ask me about it rather than, as others have done, simply bashing us on public forums, knowing we will not respond there. I'd like to try to explain our decision, for anyone who is interested in reading more about it.
Aside from the endless cosmetic changes (such as helpfiles and building, which Nate and the team can do) DR right now is as good as Parvi and I can make it. However, DR is a ten-year old mud, based on ten-year-old code and ten-year-old game design. More and more, it's becoming clear to me that although I don't want to run a text-based version of WoW (which is NOT a role playing game) the fundamental setup of Dark Risings not only enables but encourages this. As a result, we have things happening which, as a game designer, I find extremely frustrating.
For example, many DR players seem to feel that the best way to create a character is to powerlevel to 50 as fast as possible, then spend 3 weeks spamming skills to save an extra 20 or 30 hp, then spend another week spamming gold runs. By the time they are ready to actually play the game (and not just spend hours doing the same thing over and over) they are already a higher level than 90% of the game is intended for. So we get complaints about how boring levelling is, how boring spamming is, how hard it is to get gold, how boring it is to explore areas since they don't give anything good, and so on. This is how the game has always been, and it's proven impossible to convince the majority of players that it should be done differently. It seems like players prefer to play DR in boring ways (and prefer to complain about the game being boring) to trying a different way of playing it.
Personally, I don't like playing games which require (or encourage) excessive mindless repetition, and I don't like running them, either. I think players should explore as they level, finding all sorts of useful equipment and other items which can help them fight, and which they can sell off as they find more, gradually padding their bank accounts. I think they should use their trains, skills, and spells as they get them, because they make an extreme difference in both how easy mobs are to kill, and how fun it is to kill them. This is the kind of game I want to build, and have been building at Dark Risings since I first became a builder almost seven years ago.
However, most Dark Risings players are fundamentally opposed to this kind of game play. I think the "min-max" statsmongering mentality has become so entrenched in the game itself that trying to root it out now would cause not only widespread player unhappiness, since so many people are used to doing it, but would also require code changes so massive that a pwipe would be inevitable. I love Dark Risings: its history, its longevity, its mythology, and its players. It is an established mud with some excellent code and storylines which stretch back over a decade, with no breaks or gaps where the mud was inactive. I think that forcing a pwipe on a mud this old would be fundamentally wrong.
I still want to be working on a very different kind of game, though, and I sure don't have time to work on two muds at once. Therefore, what Parvi and I are doing are splitting the game into two sections: one, Dark Risings, is the game we HAVE built, and which I hope will continue to run for another ten years; the other, as yet unnamed, is the mud we WILL build, using all the things I love about Dark Risings as well all the great code Parviane has written specifically for DR. We are not simply building DR2; the MUD we intend to make will be fundamentally different from DR in many, many, many ways. But certainly, we will be using what we have built on DR; without it, we would have to start from scratch and, in all likelihood, never it get off the ground. It takes far less time to gut a mud and rewrite than it does to start from nothing.
I don't think it's selfish to keep what we have built so that we can continue to build on it. I think it would be a lot more selfish for us to erase ten years' worth of characters so that we could do that. To my knowledge, no other past implementors have gone on to build or even play other muds, and that is pretty significant. We may yet release DR code and our rights to it. That just won't be happening right now, because unlike past owners, we are still USING it. I feel that my last four years as an IMP combined with Parvi's last three as a coder give us the right to do that.
I would love to discuss this more with anyone who would like to comment on it, and I will continue to post updates here as they occur. Once we decide on a name for the new mud, I will create a new blog for it, as well.
Thanks again to everyone who made imming on DR a pleasure. I look forward to seeing you on DR, and having the chance to play with you as a mort!
<3
Sido
As of today, Parviane and I have officially stepped away from active management and development of Dark Risings. I want to thank everyone who came forward with kind words over the last week. It's been wonderful to hear that so many of you enjoy the changes we've made to the game, and I hope you continue to enjoy them for a long time to come. We feel great about leaving DR in the very creative and capable hands of our admin Nate and the rest of the imm team. I have full confidence in their abilities, and I am definitely looking forward to seeing the direction they decide to take with DR. Good luck and best wishes!
I know there has been a lot of speculation about why we have chosen to retain rights to DR rather than just leave as most IMPs who step away from the position have done. I appreciate those of you who have taken the time to ask me about it rather than, as others have done, simply bashing us on public forums, knowing we will not respond there. I'd like to try to explain our decision, for anyone who is interested in reading more about it.
Aside from the endless cosmetic changes (such as helpfiles and building, which Nate and the team can do) DR right now is as good as Parvi and I can make it. However, DR is a ten-year old mud, based on ten-year-old code and ten-year-old game design. More and more, it's becoming clear to me that although I don't want to run a text-based version of WoW (which is NOT a role playing game) the fundamental setup of Dark Risings not only enables but encourages this. As a result, we have things happening which, as a game designer, I find extremely frustrating.
For example, many DR players seem to feel that the best way to create a character is to powerlevel to 50 as fast as possible, then spend 3 weeks spamming skills to save an extra 20 or 30 hp, then spend another week spamming gold runs. By the time they are ready to actually play the game (and not just spend hours doing the same thing over and over) they are already a higher level than 90% of the game is intended for. So we get complaints about how boring levelling is, how boring spamming is, how hard it is to get gold, how boring it is to explore areas since they don't give anything good, and so on. This is how the game has always been, and it's proven impossible to convince the majority of players that it should be done differently. It seems like players prefer to play DR in boring ways (and prefer to complain about the game being boring) to trying a different way of playing it.
Personally, I don't like playing games which require (or encourage) excessive mindless repetition, and I don't like running them, either. I think players should explore as they level, finding all sorts of useful equipment and other items which can help them fight, and which they can sell off as they find more, gradually padding their bank accounts. I think they should use their trains, skills, and spells as they get them, because they make an extreme difference in both how easy mobs are to kill, and how fun it is to kill them. This is the kind of game I want to build, and have been building at Dark Risings since I first became a builder almost seven years ago.
However, most Dark Risings players are fundamentally opposed to this kind of game play. I think the "min-max" statsmongering mentality has become so entrenched in the game itself that trying to root it out now would cause not only widespread player unhappiness, since so many people are used to doing it, but would also require code changes so massive that a pwipe would be inevitable. I love Dark Risings: its history, its longevity, its mythology, and its players. It is an established mud with some excellent code and storylines which stretch back over a decade, with no breaks or gaps where the mud was inactive. I think that forcing a pwipe on a mud this old would be fundamentally wrong.
I still want to be working on a very different kind of game, though, and I sure don't have time to work on two muds at once. Therefore, what Parvi and I are doing are splitting the game into two sections: one, Dark Risings, is the game we HAVE built, and which I hope will continue to run for another ten years; the other, as yet unnamed, is the mud we WILL build, using all the things I love about Dark Risings as well all the great code Parviane has written specifically for DR. We are not simply building DR2; the MUD we intend to make will be fundamentally different from DR in many, many, many ways. But certainly, we will be using what we have built on DR; without it, we would have to start from scratch and, in all likelihood, never it get off the ground. It takes far less time to gut a mud and rewrite than it does to start from nothing.
I don't think it's selfish to keep what we have built so that we can continue to build on it. I think it would be a lot more selfish for us to erase ten years' worth of characters so that we could do that. To my knowledge, no other past implementors have gone on to build or even play other muds, and that is pretty significant. We may yet release DR code and our rights to it. That just won't be happening right now, because unlike past owners, we are still USING it. I feel that my last four years as an IMP combined with Parvi's last three as a coder give us the right to do that.
I would love to discuss this more with anyone who would like to comment on it, and I will continue to post updates here as they occur. Once we decide on a name for the new mud, I will create a new blog for it, as well.
Thanks again to everyone who made imming on DR a pleasure. I look forward to seeing you on DR, and having the chance to play with you as a mort!
<3
Sido
Monday, June 15, 2009
Lag Issues
Although people have always been complaining about lag that originates in their connections, we've started experiencing server-side lag issues in the game in the last few months. While connection-related lag is something you all can feasibly fix (by changing ISPs, fiddling with their wireless connections, upgrading in-home wiring, et cetera), mitigating server-side lag is something beyond your control; it will happen no matter how good your connection is. Fortunately, server-side lag affects all players equally, and you won't find your character dead if a server-side lag spike happens while you're in a fight.
For the sake of appeasing any fears related to this increase in lag, here is some useful information:
For those of you who are interested in the technical details, this server-side lag is due to the server on which we run being momentarily overloaded, an effect similar to when you run too many programs on your computer and you get the hourglass icon for a few seconds. Dark Risings runs on the same server as a number of other muds, and if one of them reboots, experiences some nasty bug which causes them to go rogue, or does anything which momentarily strains the server as a whole, we can feel the effects of that in the form of a lag spike.
Unfortunately, these server-side lag issues are something we will all have to just put up with for the time being. Dedicated hosting solutions cost between 3x and 4x as much as our current hosting, and our current costs are already about as much as we can afford without relying on some sort of revenue (donations, fees, et cetera). However, there is light at the end of the tunnel--our server is due to receive a hardware upgrade in the coming months. If this upgrade will include moving to a SMP (multicore) platform, the server-side lag spikes should go away almost completely.
For the sake of appeasing any fears related to this increase in lag, here is some useful information:
- If you come out of the lag spike and a bunch of text (eg battle spam) dumps out on your screen all at once, the lag is due to your connection. If you come out of the lag spike and only one more round of battle spam happens though, it was a server-side problem.
- Server-side lag locks up the whole game, including battle, mobs, pk, and everything else. If you're in PK and there is some server-side lag, your opponent feels it just as bad as you do--the tables will not be turned on you. Connection-related lag, though, can be fatal.
- Similarly, you aren't going to die if you're fighting the hydra and the server locks up momentarily. The fight itself locks up, so the hydra isn't hitting you while your screen is frozen; the hydra is frozen up too. While it can be unnerving to have your screen freeze up mid-fight, if the problem is on the server side, the fight will resume as normal when everything unfreezes. There will be no catching up on battle as there would've been if the lag was due to your connection.
For those of you who are interested in the technical details, this server-side lag is due to the server on which we run being momentarily overloaded, an effect similar to when you run too many programs on your computer and you get the hourglass icon for a few seconds. Dark Risings runs on the same server as a number of other muds, and if one of them reboots, experiences some nasty bug which causes them to go rogue, or does anything which momentarily strains the server as a whole, we can feel the effects of that in the form of a lag spike.
Unfortunately, these server-side lag issues are something we will all have to just put up with for the time being. Dedicated hosting solutions cost between 3x and 4x as much as our current hosting, and our current costs are already about as much as we can afford without relying on some sort of revenue (donations, fees, et cetera). However, there is light at the end of the tunnel--our server is due to receive a hardware upgrade in the coming months. If this upgrade will include moving to a SMP (multicore) platform, the server-side lag spikes should go away almost completely.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)