RPI-Engine VS endless-sky

I would strongly strongly suggest investigating MUDs if that's your bag. They're non-graphical so they can be built and maintained by small numbers of people with low programming skills and they tend to be almost entirely about community experiences. I'll just leave http://www.middle-earth.us/ here because it's where I met my now SO and it's an absolutely wonderful community - but there are hundreds of them out there. They do take a serious time commitment though, since they're all about building up that interesting social world.

MUDs are a class of game that is terribly underrated. I've played on a few different one (mostly toward the RP focused end of things) but I think the whole family of games shows just how effective imagination can be when coupled solely with text descriptions.

I have extremely strong memories from Shadows of Isildur[1] and met my spouse there!

1. http://www.middle-earth.us/

A MUD I worked (uh volunteered, as a total newbie) on had a soft-reboot implementation for deploys that blew my mind when I first saw it in action. Open telnet connections were all sent keep alives before the MUD launched a new instance of itself from the executable (which may have been a different version from the currently running copy) and then killed itself. To users on the other end a message appeared saying "Relaunching the server" and was followed up shortly by "You may now resume play". Since this engine was designed to constantly fall over due to instabilities and OOMs it stored the current game state in a persistent state (originally on-disk files - most of it was migrated to MySQL) so the only things that really needed hacking were re-acquiring the right sockets and remembering which user is which.

This included, FYI, under development new game elements which were mostly written and launched using a mix of things called RPROGs, OPROGs, CPROGs and Descs (among other things) all of which were written in a custom domain language input into the MUD itself - devs like myself worked only on underlying mechanics and had no need to wander into the specifics of all those triggers.

This probably opened up a number of security holes but, given that the game only ever checked the first six characters of a password (and checked them one by one against a plaintext copy) there were lower fruit available to criticize.

If you want to check it out an older copy is available open-sourced[1] - it's a DIKU variant MUD.

1. https://github.com/webbj74/RPI-Engine

Sounds very similar to Endless Sky[1] - another open source game drawing on the old Escape Velocity games. I really enjoyed both Endless Sky and the Escape Velocity games, so I'll have to check out Naev at some point!

[1] https://endless-sky.github.io/

There's an open source successor to Escape Velocity that's fun and continues to grow:

https://github.com/endless-sky/endless-sky

#2 - Endless Sky - ALSO inspired by Escape Velocity, but IMO this is more polished Escape Velocity clone and could reasonably be called the modern successor. EXCELLENT space trade/piracy/combat and definitely take some good strategy to get far into the game.

From the changelog

Bottom left of the website has discord invite link https://endless-sky.github.io