Bill MacKenty

Hspace and Textual 3D space

As my 4 regular readers know, I’m a text-based gaming guy. There’s something “pure” about computers, networks, and text based games that appeals to me. I started back in the heady days of infocom, and moved to pennmush.

In the interest of sharing my geek cred, I became interested in Star Trek MUSHes about 5 or 6 years ago - really great coded systems, especially their space systems. You interact with the game (only through text) and fly through 3D space. Imagine Eve online, only textual.

A text-based space system is exactly what it sounds like; a text-based representation of 3 dimensional space. You want a sensor report?  Try this:

—[Sensor Report]——————————————————————————————————————————————
### Type Res Bearing Range   S Heading Speed S Name           Class Flags
—-———-———-———- -———-———-———————————————
  1 Base 100 224 328 0.71981 A   0 0   None F IRS D’Stelam         AbEem
—-———-———-———- -———-———-———————————————
  2 Plan 100 296 309 [0.933] V   0 0   None D Addams IX           A  
  3 Plan 100   0 0   0.00000 F   0 0   None F Marion III           AEe  
———————————————————————————————————————-
      Course: 0.000 0.000             Speed: Stationary      
      Location: Open Space             Velocity: Stationary      
———————————————————————————————————————-
(screen grab from ats: among the stars, which uses A-Space). Trading, combat, role playing, and even skill building are all custom built text-based systems.

My point is these games are totally textual and totally immersive. Really great stuff. Imagine, if you will, what it would be like to play a book - except of course you choose where you want to go, and what you want to do. I’ll be increasing my frequency of text-based gaming, and text based gaming resources.

http://www.hspace.org/
https://www.hsdev.org/trac/
http://community.pennmush.org
http://code.google.com/p/pennmush/downloads/list

Interactive Fiction after school program

http://if1.home.comcast.net/~if1/

Good text-based gaming links

I’m a long time text-based gaming fan.  I fondly remember Zork and I enjoyed many titles from the now-defunct Infocom company.

About 7 or 8 years ago, I discovered multi-player text based games (MUD’s) and I am pleased to report text-based gaming is alive and well. I prefer MUSH’es rather than MUD’s, really just a preference. I’ve included some excellent community sites which I encourage you to visit.

http://community.pennmush.org/
http://www.mudconnect.com/
http://www.topmudsites.com/
http://www.electricsoup.net/
http://www.tinymux.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

and of course,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_fiction
(which is probably the most direct descendant from Zork)