In 1998 Louis Erickson and Andrew Quinn sat down to create a multi-player game. They both spent hours of enjoyment playing Lord British's Ultima games on the 8-bit computers they grew up on. They had also both spent time playing text-based multi-user dungeon (MUD) games. The goal was to combine the two, to create a world full of people.
Both Lou and Andy worked at a small software house and worked on the game in their spare time. It was set up to talk over the Internet, and used the tools they knew best to solve the problems of an Internet distributed game.
As most things of the time, this wound up being a client-server game, with a client the user had to download and run, which talked to a custom server.
The game reached a point they called "Demo 1", where they could show it to people before they both changed jobs and did not have the time to continue working on it.
The name was too good to resist, although couldn't be used for more than a sample app or demo.
Please download the Demo 1 client, and give it a try! The server should be up and running at the default location of rpg.rdwarf.com. Enter a user name and password and have a look!
Start the client. Use the default server and port. Fill in a user name and password. If you get a dialog "We couldn't log you on! Sorry!" then that name is probably in use. Try a new one, or try to remember your password.
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| Up Arrow | Move North |
| Down Arrow | Move South |
| Left Arrow | Move West |
| Right Arrow | Move East |
| E | Enter Town |
To leave a town, walk off the edge of the town map.
The 1MB download size was a deal-breaker in 1998. Today it would not be an issue. Of course, today it would probably be a JavaScript app written to talk to a server via XML or JSON.
The background tiles can all be animated. Only the wandering NPCs use this facility today. At one point the water was all animated but it was annoying.
Sample graphics were, in fact, borrowed from a well-known 8-bit video game. This test release was never intended to be widely distributed.
The msetup.exe for the client download has a file date of 26 July 1998. The server needed to be rebuilt because only a debug build was available.
The program and server are all written in clear, object-oriented C++ using the MFC framework and Visual Studio tools. The system was written in Visual Studio 5.0, with all warnings on and set to cause errors. When the time came to rebuild the server, Visual Studio 6.0 found three new warnings, which broke the build. All three warnings could not have caused code issues, and were trivial to correct. The code is very clean and readable.
This screen shot shows the player at the center, with a wandering NPC to the right. It also demonstrates the line-of-sight checks and the obscuring of the map caused by certain terrain. There are no other controls visible, because they were floating windows at the time.
This screen shot shows the player at the center. You can see the line-of-sight obscuring terrain features. This shows the main text control docked at the bottom of the window. The UI used standard MFC libraries and tools, and was configurable by the user. Loading a saved game file should have reconnected them to the server and restored their window positions.