Usurper Board

Hi Usurper community =)

Usurper has always been my favourite door game. I had many fun times dialling up to my local BBS and hacking away; I've even played a running game at several LAN days.

Recently, I came across the web based (MySQL / PHP) LoRD clone called LotGD (G for Green, heh), and had a stroke of motivation. I'd like to know what you think about the creation of a web based Usurper! Any start would be a while off for me, I just wanted to see if we had your grace to create a \"shameless rip-off\" of your great game - for instance if you are happy that we base the name around \"Usurper\" etc.

Anything we did create would be GPL'ed. That said, would you consider disclosing the Usurper source, or at least any parts that would be relevant to creating a faithful clone?

Cheers,
dr_nailz

I've made some meagre beginnings to this project.

The name is Supplanter, and it will be something of a tech demo in new web development concepts.

The first stage is to create a development system to make it easy for devs to work on the code, so you might not see the beginnings of the game code for a while yet.

You'll find any future information about Supplanter at http://tom.clift.name/ .

dr_nailz wrote:I've made some meagre beginnings to this project.

The name is Supplanter, and it will be something of a tech demo in new web development concepts.

The first stage is to create a development system to make it easy for devs to work on the code, so you might not see the beginnings of the game code for a while yet.

You'll find any future information about Supplanter at http://tom.clift.name/ .

So did you actually pay for that third level domain? heh

Well yeah, that's my site (and my name). I guess if it ever gets popular it can have its own domain.

.name domains come with a nice second level email address attached too, as in first@last.name . The actual second level .name domains are not available for registration.

I've long thought about the same thing, but I'm a poor coder.

I even considered just taking the LotGD code and doing a total conversion on it.

Well I've made a decent start to the project, which now has a home at Gna!, but I still haven't really heard what people think about this. Do you think it's a good idea? Do you think it's not right to remake Usurper? I'd love to heard what you think, either here or by IM (PM me for my details).

Just not realy sure Why?
I meen... why remake Usurper when it already working great to play online with doors and now also with gameserv.
All OS have some sort of telnet client.. So all should be able to access usurper everywhere..

So I dont realy see a reason why.

Mainly to offer a richer experience - stuff that just isn't possible over Telnet. Also because it will be completely open, and I hope to attract a modding community like at LotGD. So if someone wants to change something to suit the type of server they want to create, they can. I also hope that due to the way I'm designing it, it can be the base for other web-based games (i.e. for total conversions).

I don't see much difference in your end-result and many of the web based MUD systems. They are often open sourced, and very adaptable.
Most MUD systems are a lot more complex than Usurper was ever or ever will be, a totally different game.

So maybe my question to you would be is, Is what you want to do is clone usurper or a clone of a typical MUD system?

As far what Jakob's opinion on this is, I can not even start to guess.

You may want to explore more about MUD & MOO at the following websites. I have no afiliation with them but found them with a quick search on Google.com
MUD history can be found at http://www.livinginternet.com/d/di_major.htm
One of the older MUD sites is at http://www.british-legends.com/

I've played quite a few MUDs and tabletop RPGs before, but Usurper always just had something that seemed to me to fit. Good or evil is just so simple, maybe too simple for some people, but just right for a hack'n'slash.

As I've said, I want to create two streams to the project: a clone of Usurper (providing this is OK with Jakob), and a game based in the Usurper world. The former is mainly to make sure the basics are set, and everything is technically possible (or more like technically achievable by myself), but also as reverence to the original.

Some of the things I've been thinking about adding include (just to give an idea of why I'm excited): drag-and-drop inventory system, visual representation of the character and equipment (ala Diablo), character avatars, semi-realtime online player battles (using timers for turn completion), and anything else that we can take advantage of through html & javascript.

dr_nailz wrote:I've played quite a few MUDs and tabletop RPGs before, but Usurper always just had something that seemed to me to fit. Good or evil is just so simple, maybe too simple for some people, but just right for a hack'n'slash.

I understand and somewhat agree with you there. I just could never get too enthused about the other forms of hack'n'slash either. Prior to Usurper I enjoyed Rogue, EAMON and those such adventuring.

dr_nailz wrote:As I've said, I want to create two streams to the project: a clone of Usurper (providing this is OK with Jakob), and a game based in the Usurper world. The former is mainly to make sure the basics are set, and everything is technically possible (or more like technically achievable by myself), but also as reverence to the original.

I haven't seen any indication from Jakob on this, and that would have to be his to say. He does monitor the messages here, and that is partly why I delayed in responding to this particular message.

dr_nailz wrote:Some of the things I've been thinking about adding include (just to give an idea of why I'm excited): drag-and-drop inventory system, visual representation of the character and equipment (ala Diablo), character avatars, semi-realtime online player battles (using timers for turn completion), and anything else that we can take advantage of through html & javascript.

There were a couple of BBS doors done in the 1995 to 97 period that did some of that, but the only one that even came close to getting me interested, had a really bad habit of destroying HD file structures ever so often. Since I have semi-retired, most of my efforts envolve grandkids, gardening and music.

dr_nailz wrote: The first stage is to create a development system to make it easy for devs to work on the code, so you might not see the beginnings of the game code for a while yet.

CVS. Countless proffessional quality operating systems, software, and libraries are managed through CVS. And with the soon to be released OpenCVS(.org), using CVS has never been so free.

When usurpers gnu is released, I know its going into my repository. My group is composed of about a dozen developers.

I may not touch the origional very much, I will begin porting it to a cross-platform language immediatly as a threaded stand-alone telnet server so no BBS software or dropfile madness is required.

I've already written an ANSI windowing library (like curses, but only ANSI) and also a telnet server for this. I've begun merging the two and I am restructuring code in preperation to import the *game* of usurpers.

I'll shut up for now until it is actualy released, however.

dingo wrote:CVS.

Oh I didn't mean making a VCS! I meant making the codebase modular so that it is easy for developers not to get in each others' way. i.e. the 'Inventory' module and the 'Equipment' module. At the moment, they are Rails Engines.