Bill MacKenty
Home Computing Teaching Bushcraft Games Writing About
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