Greetings to the entire Yserbius community, those loyal souls who still remember the mightiest MUD of a golden epoch in gaming,
Finding Yserbius.org was like finding a lost photo album of my childhood -- a floodtide of nostalgia and that warm fuzzy euphoria of returning to a simpler time accompanied the loading of the site's banner. I'm glad to see that the love of Yserbius and Twinion still burns brightly within the hearts of some.
But I digress: I'm an accomplished C++ programmer with some free time and a longing to see Y/T live again. I posted once about reverse-engineering the Y/T server-side structure but upon reading the discussion about reverse-engineering at the FauxINN forums, I'm thankfully dissuaded. The time a group of programmers would spend deciphering the packet structure used by Y/T and the TSN/INN server would enable a similar team to have almost rebuilt the game client and server in a modern context.
So... are there any takers? I'd love to crawl through the dungeons of Yserbius and Twinion once again and I've got some time to put into a coordinated development project. But I'm not going to do it alone. I've attempted too many projects alone in my past and there's always some hurdle that shuts a single programmer down from accomplishing the goal.
XenSoft is down at the time of this posting and FauxINN appears to have stagnated. I would have loved to help the FauxINN team but they appear to have somewhat faded from the scene and left no signs of active progress. I'm in complete support of the projects behind XenSoft and FauxINN and there's a large part of me that would like to see the Yserbius community have something to *do* besides posting in forums and chatting about the good old days. Why not recreate the good old days?
At a preliminary glance, we'd need about 4-5 programmers:
(1) programmer to design and document the packets and overall packet heirarchy of the new system; we'd probably use the UDP protocol as many MUDs do today
(1) programmer who works closely with the packet-guru and builds the server-side architecture, including a database interface for user accounts, player characters, items, etc. -- this person could be the same as the first programmer if they felt confident enough in their skills
(1) programmer who designs the client program, including all elements of the GUI such as text boxes, input boxes, scrollbar interfaces, etc. -- this could be a more lightweight position thanks to libraries like ClanLIB that provide existing GUI frameworks
(1) programmer to design and implement the GAME itself, including a level editor for crafting the Y/T world and all the gameplay logic; this person should have some experience with making games (commercial or not, beggars can't be choosers ) and would work closely with the GUI programmer
(1) programmer to handle the rest of the trappings such as music/sound, installation packages, beta testing, etc.
As I said before, that's a very preliminary glance at the sort of coding team we'd need to pull this project off. But I'm willing and I can find a few other dedicated souls, this project could very well be a reality. There'd be much to discuss and even more to plan but it's not an impossibility. If you're interested in such an endeavor, please feel free to leave a reply here or PM me.
Cheers,
Tarquin
Finding Yserbius.org was like finding a lost photo album of my childhood -- a floodtide of nostalgia and that warm fuzzy euphoria of returning to a simpler time accompanied the loading of the site's banner. I'm glad to see that the love of Yserbius and Twinion still burns brightly within the hearts of some.
But I digress: I'm an accomplished C++ programmer with some free time and a longing to see Y/T live again. I posted once about reverse-engineering the Y/T server-side structure but upon reading the discussion about reverse-engineering at the FauxINN forums, I'm thankfully dissuaded. The time a group of programmers would spend deciphering the packet structure used by Y/T and the TSN/INN server would enable a similar team to have almost rebuilt the game client and server in a modern context.
So... are there any takers? I'd love to crawl through the dungeons of Yserbius and Twinion once again and I've got some time to put into a coordinated development project. But I'm not going to do it alone. I've attempted too many projects alone in my past and there's always some hurdle that shuts a single programmer down from accomplishing the goal.
XenSoft is down at the time of this posting and FauxINN appears to have stagnated. I would have loved to help the FauxINN team but they appear to have somewhat faded from the scene and left no signs of active progress. I'm in complete support of the projects behind XenSoft and FauxINN and there's a large part of me that would like to see the Yserbius community have something to *do* besides posting in forums and chatting about the good old days. Why not recreate the good old days?
At a preliminary glance, we'd need about 4-5 programmers:
(1) programmer to design and document the packets and overall packet heirarchy of the new system; we'd probably use the UDP protocol as many MUDs do today
(1) programmer who works closely with the packet-guru and builds the server-side architecture, including a database interface for user accounts, player characters, items, etc. -- this person could be the same as the first programmer if they felt confident enough in their skills
(1) programmer who designs the client program, including all elements of the GUI such as text boxes, input boxes, scrollbar interfaces, etc. -- this could be a more lightweight position thanks to libraries like ClanLIB that provide existing GUI frameworks
(1) programmer to design and implement the GAME itself, including a level editor for crafting the Y/T world and all the gameplay logic; this person should have some experience with making games (commercial or not, beggars can't be choosers ) and would work closely with the GUI programmer
(1) programmer to handle the rest of the trappings such as music/sound, installation packages, beta testing, etc.
As I said before, that's a very preliminary glance at the sort of coding team we'd need to pull this project off. But I'm willing and I can find a few other dedicated souls, this project could very well be a reality. There'd be much to discuss and even more to plan but it's not an impossibility. If you're interested in such an endeavor, please feel free to leave a reply here or PM me.
Cheers,
Tarquin