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Programmer interested in recreating Yserbius/Twinion

T

Tarquin

Active Members
#1
#1
Greetings to the entire Yserbius community, those loyal souls who still remember the mightiest MUD of a golden epoch in gaming,

Finding Yserbius.org was like finding a lost photo album of my childhood -- a floodtide of nostalgia and that warm fuzzy euphoria of returning to a simpler time accompanied the loading of the site's banner. I'm glad to see that the love of Yserbius and Twinion still burns brightly within the hearts of some.

But I digress: I'm an accomplished C++ programmer with some free time and a longing to see Y/T live again. I posted once about reverse-engineering the Y/T server-side structure but upon reading the discussion about reverse-engineering at the FauxINN forums, I'm thankfully dissuaded. The time a group of programmers would spend deciphering the packet structure used by Y/T and the TSN/INN server would enable a similar team to have almost rebuilt the game client and server in a modern context.

So... are there any takers? I'd love to crawl through the dungeons of Yserbius and Twinion once again and I've got some time to put into a coordinated development project. But I'm not going to do it alone. I've attempted too many projects alone in my past and there's always some hurdle that shuts a single programmer down from accomplishing the goal.

XenSoft is down at the time of this posting and FauxINN appears to have stagnated. I would have loved to help the FauxINN team but they appear to have somewhat faded from the scene and left no signs of active progress. I'm in complete support of the projects behind XenSoft and FauxINN and there's a large part of me that would like to see the Yserbius community have something to *do* besides posting in forums and chatting about the good old days. Why not recreate the good old days?

At a preliminary glance, we'd need about 4-5 programmers:
(1) programmer to design and document the packets and overall packet heirarchy of the new system; we'd probably use the UDP protocol as many MUDs do today

(1) programmer who works closely with the packet-guru and builds the server-side architecture, including a database interface for user accounts, player characters, items, etc. -- this person could be the same as the first programmer if they felt confident enough in their skills

(1) programmer who designs the client program, including all elements of the GUI such as text boxes, input boxes, scrollbar interfaces, etc. -- this could be a more lightweight position thanks to libraries like ClanLIB that provide existing GUI frameworks

(1) programmer to design and implement the GAME itself, including a level editor for crafting the Y/T world and all the gameplay logic; this person should have some experience with making games (commercial or not, beggars can't be choosers :p) and would work closely with the GUI programmer

(1) programmer to handle the rest of the trappings such as music/sound, installation packages, beta testing, etc.

As I said before, that's a very preliminary glance at the sort of coding team we'd need to pull this project off. But I'm willing and I can find a few other dedicated souls, this project could very well be a reality. There'd be much to discuss and even more to plan but it's not an impossibility. If you're interested in such an endeavor, please feel free to leave a reply here or PM me.

Cheers,
Tarquin
 
slohand

slohand

Yserbian
Staff member
#2
#2
hello

While I wont be able to help you with the actual coding of the program. I will help in any way possible. just let me know what I can do. I can set up a project management package here on the site that will allow you and your fellow programmers to work on and manage the files and notes and such so that everyone is on the same page. Thanks Slohand
 
Lord_Cie

Lord_Cie

Inactive Members
#4
#4
Is it possible to make one big mega game? Not just Yserbius, but perhaps adding Twinion and Cawdor into one big mega game. You can sort of combine them all, like Voltron!

 
F

Fionn

Message for Upgrade
#5
#5
I see you signed up anyway cie ;p

There is next to no difference between the games. Just the transitory maps and item sets and slightly different rules basically - lots of code reuse is possible.
 
Macros

Macros

Active Members
#6
#6
Glad to see other interested folks!

I'd stay away from UDP. Yserbius doesn't need the latency benefits of UDP and so would be easier to forgo creating your own reliable UDP implementation. Its pretty hard to make one of those that outperforms the decades of refinement TCP has incorporated, and the time is probably better spent elsewhere in the development.

TCP is more than up to the task for a Ys game.


Best Regards,
Macros
 
Macros

Macros

Active Members
#7
#7
There is no technical reason you could not roll up all 3 games into one.

But there may be game play issues. By the time your character gets to Cawdore it will be way off the difficulty curve in terms of level and skills.

While it still may be fun, it won't be the same as the original play.

It could possibly be worked around by creating personas for each character, which are different for each game part. So you are in one game world with one character, but it would have different stats and skills depending on which game it was playing.

That's probably not be a big deal to implement.

Recreating Cawdor would probably be pretty tough anyway as there is no offline client to ascertain the quests, maps and game play.

Best Regards,
Macros
 
Tiger

Tiger

Active Members
#8
#8
While thats an interesting idea, rolling them all into one, I think we need to focus on just one game at a time... As for the level curve.... Uhmmm... Think maybe Mac's right.... Although, If ya really want to, ya prolly could just up the anti abit in the later games...

But, then again, if we were to focus on all three.... It would kinda change the working storyline for YS2, that we've all pretty much got in mind...
 
B

Beamer

Inactive Members
#9
#9
You will have to remember that YS and FOT were quite a bit different. Both were stand alone games because you began each with a new character. Most importantly the difficulty and quests for FOT were built around the characters skill development, which was far different than YS's development. FOT was a much harder game to get through than YS because of this. I think you will find it pleanty hard just getting YS out the door and ready to play.
Damn...better get back to making our next rip-off game.
 
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