gridia VS RPI-Engine

I've been working on this sort of game for awhile now. Never too seriously, though that will change in 2023. Hardly worth sharing at this point, but I will anyway.

https://hoten.cc/gridia/play/

I need to seriously think about what I want out of this game (more of a mmo game engine), but "UO-like" is definitely top of mind.

When making the netcode for my web game, I highly valued TypeScript support so to get it by default, I defined the message types in TypeScript so they could be used directly[1]. I see that this framework defines its messages in .yml and converts it to types (stored in a folder kept out of source control).

I'm not sure which way is best, but it is very nice to have the feature support of `.d.ts` files when creating complex message types, as opposed to needing to learn a new thing. Clearly if this is going to be a cross-platform (not just web) framework then using TypeScript as the source-of-truth makes far less sense.

Anyway, very impressed with the binary format/delta encoding feature! That's been something that I know I _should_ do but am putting off until I see signs of sending raw JSON being problematic.

[1] https://github.com/connorjclark/gridia/blob/master/src/proto...

- All my Preact code is in this folder: https://github.com/connorjclark/gridia-2019-wip/blob/master/src/client/ui/ - Most complex one: https://github.com/connorjclark/gridia-2019-wip/blob/master/src/client/ui/admin-window.tsx - CSS: https://github.com/connorjclark/gridia-2019-wip/blob/master/src/client/styles/main.css

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