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Old 02-25-2007, 08:12 PM   #1
Delerak
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Anyone have any crazy idea's of what the future holds for text-based gaming?

Are we going to someday be able to walk around with a pair of glasses that scroll a MUD and be able to think what we want to input into the terminal?

What about fiber optics and the speed at which computers are responding to voice communicated commands. Perhaps the future is a slew of strategy-based MUDs will you command armies with your voice, and the fastest on the draw wins the battles.

What do you think the future is for text-based gaming?

-D
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Old 02-25-2007, 09:34 PM   #2
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I wish I could remember the name of the movie. But the general idea was that you had a brain worm - a quasi-electronic device stuck in your head, that connected you to the computer. Of course it also kept track of your thoughts, and dreams, and could even control them or manipulate them, heh. But I still think the idea of using the power of your own mind to play a mud is intriguing.
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Old 02-25-2007, 11:59 PM   #3
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Old 02-26-2007, 01:42 AM   #4
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The matrix, Ghost in the shell? hehe.

The future of mudding.. I don't know. Most people I know consider mudding a lower form of gaming than 3D games. So perhaps to satisfy all of them a perfect engine will be made that can seemlessly integrate a text based and 3D enviroment.
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Old 02-26-2007, 03:47 AM   #5
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Johnny Mnemonic was very well done. For the year it was made they were talking about all sorts of stuff that hadn't been created yet. Like 80 GB hard-drives, which was in Johnnys brain.
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Old 02-26-2007, 05:28 AM   #6
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Old 02-26-2007, 12:54 PM   #7
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Erdos wrote:
<i>
Sounds more like generic future of computing, to me. When such technologies get developed, it'll probably be done by someone outside the MUD community as a generic keyboard-replacing tool, rather than by a MUD coder.
</i>

Yeah, that seems likely.

<i>

Artificial intelligence could be a big thing for MUDs eventually. Imagine if 20% of the playerbase consisted of AI, and it was so well done that the only way you could tell was that those players mysteriously refused to go to reunions or even talk on the phone.
</i>

This is likely to go the same way (developed outside MUDs, used by MUDers), though the sort of Turing-capable AI you're talking about is not exactly around the corner. AI of that magnitude is also surely going to be frightfully expensive in terms of CPU cycles and memory, so even if we as a species do develop Turing AI, it's not going to run on your average mud server for a long time after it's first developed, much less run well enough to support whole populations of Turing AI-based NPCs.

Online Alchemy is one of the companies I'm aware of working in this space (), but they're not working to create "true" (Turing) AI, just a good enough simulation. They're also not really aiming at massively multiplayer platforms because of the server cost.

--matt
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Old 02-26-2007, 11:08 PM   #8
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These are some of the things I'd like to see in the future:

I think that one of the biggest problems with MUDs is that they aren't that fun without the people. Imagine your favourite MUD without the goal of interacting with other people - no guilds, no PvP, no chat even. Most of them would be pretty boring, running over and over through the same rooms, fighting enemies with two modes: wander and fight to the death. And as you play through this single player MUD, you can't leave a single mark on the world. Early MUDs had a lot of reason for this - not a lot of processing power or memory. Now, it's completely doable and would be a wonderful thing for almost any MUD. The big guns like Aardwolf or Achaea might have some troubles with this due to the size of their playerbases, but even then I think it's doable.

Going back to the AI idea, I think that mobs should interact more with the environment, each other and the player. It would be amazing to have a forest where the deer run away when they see a player, wolves hunt rabbits and the local goblin tribe viciously fights off the occasional wayward (NPC) orc that wanders into their domain. If the player catches a goblin guard unawares, he sounds an alarm and runs back to his lair to get more help to come after the intruder.

Another thing that I think would be a nice direction for MUDs to go in would be to interface more with the web. Telnet is great for real time interaction, but for larger scale things a web interface could be a great compliment. I have this vision of a MUD where within the game you manage adventuring and the normal MUD stuff, and through the web you can manage clans and guilds as well as even managing cities and wars.
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Old 02-26-2007, 11:59 PM   #9
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Old 02-27-2007, 11:10 AM   #10
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Mobs/NPCs interacting with mobs/NPCs doesn't get you much, IMHO. If it doesn't involve the players it's a game playing itself.

The biggest problem for text-based games is a dwindling audience. The kids who used to play MUDS now play WoW. If it's not graphic it's a second citizen in the gaming world. And, really, MUD hobbyists can't compete with the mega gaming companies, their financial resources and armies of designers and programmers. Make no mistake. It is a competition. As sad as it is to say, the text genre of online games is slowly dying.  There will always be MUDs out there. A few of them may even flourish. But unless Blizzard or someone decides to devote significant resources to a text game, you'll never see another major text-based game. Just my opinion, of course.

Now, to stay on topic...

Online  games, and especially MUDs, are about the players. The people you meet and the friends you make are what keep you in games, not web-based bells and whistles. A game has to have well-designed and interesting mechanics, but in my opinion, if we want the text genre of online games to live, we need to design and build games with THE goal of player collaboration. As it is, players walk their characters out to some area where they perform an activity that advances their level and skills. It's a solitary grind that separates players instead of bringing them together. The future of text-based games has to be about making advancement and conquest a group activity.

I think we in the MUD development community need to step back and take a look at what makes MMORPGs popular other than their graphical interfaces. One thing that made EQ wildly successful was the group hunts it necessitated. Groups of friends would set up times to get their PCs together to go killing. There are lots of other ideas and concepts incorporated into MMORPGs that can also be applied to MUDS, and I think it's important that we recognize and embrace them.

So, what is the future of text-based games? In my mind, the next generation of MUDs incorporates goal-oriented mechanics that allow PCs to learn anything simply by doing it. None of the "repping" point-gain that you see in learn-by-doing systems these days, but layers of abilities learned by using what you know. Each advancement activity is a mini-quest all it's own, where success requires multiple characters possessed of varied abilities and talents. Every facet of the game is multi-layered, creating interdependence among the characters. I think most of these things already exist. They just need to be taken to another level.

The future MUD will be accessible through a client that, when launched, teleports you to a multi-room "club" (complete with bar and other amenities) where you can chat OOC with other players. There's one board listing the drinks you can order and another listing the characters in the game.  Several arches, portals and doorways lead out of the room: One to character creation. One to the game message boards. One to in-house mail. One to an interactive game manual. One to player-created and administrated guild/house/clan areas. One to a room full of player website links. And one to the game, of course. The object is communication.
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Old 02-27-2007, 02:42 PM   #11
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I actually had a crazy idea myself. What does a text client need to do "really"?

1. Describe the general environment.
2. What you can see in the immediate area.
3. Let you interact with those things.
4. Tell you what directions you can move in.

Now.. Imagine a 3D text environment that figured, server side, what you could see in the near distance, which "generic" description to pull up for the terrain, etc., what was close enough to touch and which, as you approached walls, etc, changed the exit list to show that you can't pass through the wall. Someone on the mud I play at is working on just this idea. However... What makes that different than a MMO? Not much, since you could easilly drop a full CG system over top of it, replacing the generic text for the room, which tells you about the mountains, etc. with actual mountains, and so on. There is some suggestion that this is virtually what EQ did when they designed their system.

The future of text games might, if done right, be an environment that you could "choose" whether to use the text system, or the graphical system. Would be interesting to try it at least.

Nearly anything else you might do, is already in MMOs to one extent or another. With some exceptions. It would be a lot easier in text to burn down most of a city, then have it rebuilt, complete with new NPCs and stores, with a few specific types always appearing (an idea I am working on for an area, where actually solving one of the quests unleashes a major war, which then must have its perpetrators fought off, hopefully with the master behind it finally defeated and peace restored. Not going to make that easy though. lol) Doing that in a graphical system would require a lot of generic building designs, a much more limited number of possible shops, etc. Though, if you didn't mind it being somewhat generic... the items for sale wouldn't be as big a deal. Even things like EQ have names + a few basic icons, instead of one for every named item.
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Old 02-27-2007, 03:42 PM   #12
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Old 02-27-2007, 09:32 PM   #13
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Malifax, I'd have to disagree with you on the game playing itself comment. Ambiance adds to the scene and increases immersion, and I think it's these details that really create a sense of depth. I can't think of a single video game outside of the racing genre where weather has any effect on the player, and yet it's included to create a sense of scene and paint a picture. Imagine what having a town where the NPCs went to work, went to stores to buy food and other things, went home and ate dinner with their families and went to sleep in their house at night. Although chances are this wouldn't have any effect on the players gameplay wise, I think that it would be incredible at getting the players interested in the world.

In the end, MUDs can't try to be graphical MMORPGs. Even the sum population of all of Iron Realm's very popular games combined isn't a drop in the bucket compared to major MMORPGs. Although this is a curse in terms of mainstream appeal, it's also a great opportunity. No longer are you making a game to appeal to 1 million people, you're creating one to appeal to 50. To do that you have to create something that these McMMO games can't offer. You can't have a million people trying to leave their mark on the game all at once, but you can sure as hell have 50.
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Old 02-28-2007, 09:48 AM   #14
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The thing I find  about the majority of players is that they don't pay a lot of attention to ambience. Heck, even room descriptions go unread a majority of the time. They MIGHT get read once, but after that they're pretty much ignored. I don't see how bots interacting with bots is different. It's cool to see the first time, but beyond that, if the bots don't offer players something to further their goals or SOME kind of interaction I don't think players will pay any attention. To me, the time it would take to implement interacting bots would be better spent adding a new class, skills, spells or other feature systems that directly involve the players.

MUDs will never equal MMORPG, but that doesn't mean we in the MUD community can't learn from MMORPGs and emulate some of their features in our text games. The text genre is dying. Second Life is the new "MUD." Unless a new text game offers something provokative and appealing, it's not going to attract a decent player base. Will any MUD ever attract 6 mil players? No. But I don't think an average in-game presence of 40 and daily peak of 100-150 is out of the question.
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Old 02-28-2007, 02:58 PM   #15
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Old 03-01-2007, 09:02 AM   #16
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I agree wholeheartedly with the idea of interactive bots. We have them in Inferno and they're great for imparting information and spinning off large auto-quests. As I said, player interaction with gaming worlds is the key. MMO developers have gotten this concept. I'm not sure if it's a case that MUD developers haven't or they just haven't moved into that space. I don't think it's an issue of laziness. MUD developers just don't have the resources and manpower available to the big companies that dev MMOs. If you had a team 20 desigigners and a couple dozen full-time coders, you could build a MUD where every object in the game spawned an auto-quest. As it is, and the same goes with most MUD builders, it's just not possible. In this vein, I'm more than willing to help form/join a team of designers and coders aimed at building a REAL next generation MUD. I have lots of time to put into it. f a bunch of us collaborated we could do something big.I just don't think there's much interest.
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Old 03-01-2007, 03:12 PM   #17
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Yeah. For muds that have fixed staff and no volunteer coders, that is likely the case. The problem is, its not just there that you see generic stuff with some mobs glued onto them. I admit that since better quality control and new staff took over where I play things have gotten better, but there is **still** too many cases of, "Here are a bunch of rooms. I put monsters in them. One has a key you need to open the locked boxes in the other room. Go kill stuff. You will win a quest point if you find the key and open the box." Yawn!!

Mind you, part of the problem is that complex interaction wasn't built in to start with, so examples are lacking in how to do it, but still, some people are managing to make the rest look silly already and they are barely doing anything more interesting than the previous bunch. A lot of them get in, start coding, find out it is harder than they thought and just decide to finish without doing any of the interesting stuff they planned too, which is hardly helpful either.
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Old 03-01-2007, 04:24 PM   #18
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Old 03-01-2007, 08:31 PM   #19
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I'd love to see music/sound integrate more into MUDs.
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Old 03-02-2007, 12:24 AM   #20
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Speaking more to the client side, one thing I've always wanted in my muds but never found was real encapsulation of text, meaning that when I send 'help combat' to the mud it sends me back the combat help file -as- a mini combat help file. Also take combat itself -- the mud sends that as a 'combat stream', and so on.

You have a rudimentary form of this already with client spawn windows, where you can capture tells, channel talk, etc., but it could be taken to the next level such that you would have a contiguous record of your help requests, your combat, and everything else you wanted to define as a separate stream. Of course the actual game play would still take place in a main window if you so wshed.

Moving along, to access this information your client could be an actual '3D' client, such that you are playing the mud within a mud so to speak -- the main game window is front and center, but when you want to look at the help stream, you just 'rotate left', instead of having to either position many sub windows on your 2d computer screen, or alt or control tab through different windows. With 3D text you can also zoom in and out -- and heck, even have a friend playing in the same 'room' as you, and you can check out their game play window, even if you're in Illinois and they're in Iran.
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