PSMUD: Build 1!

On the Sunday 16th PSCUG meeting, PSMUD was made playable!

Here is our current list of features for milestone 1, X being complete and - to be worked on.

- Client enters a game server-controlled room
- Single-line chat messages to all players
X Hard-coded map/size
- Objects: Pick up / drop
- Movement: move requests are sent to the game server and are authorized with OK or NOT OK
- Map information dictates the map style: top-down / side view / action / backdrop
- Items can go into and out of inventory
X Keyboard controlled - allow user to pick movement keys to use
X BASIC for client program

So far all you can do is set movement and action keys (action does nothing at the moment) and set what you appear as on your screen and what the other player appears as and move around the screen. But, it is multiplayer! It allows 2 C64s to connect to commodoreserver and move around at the same time in live time.

Now here is Agent Friday's future plans for PSMUD:

"What I envision for build 2 is a (temporary) step away from multi-player, but a step toward client-server.  Since we currently have the ability to connect directly to other C64 computers over commodoreserver, and this most closely matches how we are going to have the gameserver operate, I plan to start the server out as a program that runs on a C64 itself.  It will allow one other player at a time to connect to it and do stuff.  It will maintain a state that will be seen by the next player when he connects.  The client will evolve in a way that when we move to having an actual gameserver (running on a PC), the client will not know the difference between when it was talking to the old C64 gameserver and the server proper when we set it up.

Still sticking with totally BASIC for now, but I can see that once we have the ability to do something meaningful, adding some assembly routines will help immensely.

NEXT STEPS:
  1.  Make Build 1 available for anyone to try out, including instructions.
  2.  Publish more detailed plans for Build 2 to this list."