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Games Entertainment

New Graphical Trade Wars 'Dark Millennium' 113

Posted by CmdrTaco from the gimme-gimme-some-of-that dept.
7213 noted that the Tradewars site has announced "Tradewars, Dark Millennium", which presumably will be a MMORPG [?] RTS based on the terrifyingly addictive game that I used to write scripts to play my turns for me in middle school. Screenshots and descriptions are available, but its gonna be vapor for a long time I'm sure. TW2002 is really where I met Hemos, Nate, and Kurt The Pope. God I loved that game.
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New Graphical Trade Wars 'Dark Millenium' More

New Graphical Trade Wars 'Dark Millenium'

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  • Will it be properly translated? For great justice?

  • blacknova traders (Score:4)

    by Nonac ( 132029 ) on Tuesday February 20, 2001 @09:12AM (#417470) Journal
    While you're waiting for Dark Millenium, you can play Blacknova Traders an open source html tradewars at blacknova.net. When DM comes out, you will probably want to stick with the open source version.

  • BBSes (Score:1)

    by bliss ( 21836 )
    "I miss the old BBS's ... I had such good times playing games as a kid, leaving messages for people, trading files ... I found about about the Internet because of the BBS's we had connected to things like FIDOnet and other mail-forwarding services. I had a shell account as a result of the BBS's in my town. In fact, one of the comic shops on the West side of town who ran a great board called the Jester's Court (name of the store too) just closed a few months ago I guess. "

    Having dealt with BBSes and their kin I can safely say that having to pay possible long distance charges and having forced periods of connectivity and file transfer quotas are not good things in the least. The internet and unmetered access is the best thing that ever happened to network computing. The network is meant to be a public resource not a collection of fiefdoms.
  • renegade? ... EWWWW .....

    gotta go with oblivion...

    at least you werent raving about WWiV or some telegard hack...


    tagline

  • LEGEND OF RED DRAGON - lord.nuklear.org (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    LEGEND OF RED DRAGON - lord.nuklear.org
  • 14.4k or not, the latency was wonderful with BBSes for obvious reasons (one hop away!)

    I remember getting my 14.4k. Quite a leap up from my 2400bps- I remember not having to wait for most text to load..

    That's the problem with telnet BBSes- the latency sucks. Unfortunately, I doubt there are any easy solutions to this- what would be best is a BRE-manager that would allow the client to reproduce the menus on cue, etc, and have only the bare essentials sent down the pipe. Would certainly make latency less noticable..

  • You obviously have no clue whatsoever about the original Trade Wars. Trade Wars has always been an online game. Cmdr. Taco met Hemos, Nate, et. al online and only later face to face.

    Let me address your points one at a time:

    1) Have you ever played a MMPORPG? Trust is a major issue, if you can't trust people you can't pool your resources for the greater good. And when someone else does pool their resources you are going to be left in the dust.

    2) To me slashdot is a meeting of the minds. People have met with technology for years and years. I've heard stories of married couples who met because the woman packed mail order catalog orders and stuck her name and address in the box.

    3) It is not the internet's fault that these businesses can't attract any business. A flawed bussines model is not different offline than online and changing technology can make a perfectly good business model flawed. Take door to door milk delivery as a perfect example. As refrigeration and pasturization became viable technologies people bought their milk at the store and not from the milkman.

    I think this game is just a game and that you are reading far to much into what it symbolizes.
  • Of course... thats how the /. universe came together.. Thru the Days of yore in BBS Land.

    Now I'm getting all misty-eyed thinking about the rampant local flamewars, the Cheating in L.O.R.D, and waiting to get online @midnight.. Just so I could get the first turns of the day in BRE.

    I still have my old 486, with a 500meg HD in it.. With the 3 14.4 modems, and my old Renegade BBS software. Almost makes ya want to hook it up again. Except for that whole "14.4" speed.
    :-)

  • I don't know what you're talking about.. works fine for me:

    http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:tradewar s.com /+&hl=en
    --

  • to go back and forth between my planets and Sol to get more colonists...

    For colonizing from sol, I used emacs and gpm to do my dirty work. I just typed the appropriate command sequence in emacs, highlighted it, and whacked the paste button a dozen or so times. Of course, if anything out of the ordinary happened, the results could be catastrophic.

    Port-to-port trading, on the other hand, I did using a crack-addled perl client that I threw together. It'd also determine the optimal ordering for a list of waypoints to be visited.

    Oh, and I had a script to extract information from a log dump of CIM and a bunch of little scripts to work with that data to find things like port pairs.

    Nothing particularly special, but there's a certain degree of "I wrote it myself." pride.

  • Re:LEGEND OF RED DRAGON - lord.nuklear.org (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You got laid by violet!
  • the backdoor thing was a rumor is just about every single bbs system that was out there...

    everyone supposedly had a back-door that you could use everywhere...

    funny thing was, that i supposedly "knew" some of them, and they wouldnt work...

    at the very end of the bbs days, was "robo bbs" which was a graphical clienty thing... too bad it sucked...

    ok... renegade wasnt the /worst/... WWiV & stock telegard were much worse, as well as Major BBS and PC Board...

    though i knew of a guy that took the trouble of taking WWiV and hacking it into looking and acting like MS-DOS... why? i dont know... i couldnt figure out why the fuck he would do that...


    tagline

  • I think every area code had a bbs named Magrethea.

    MG

  • I have always disliked that definition of vaporware.

    It is vaporware until there is something concrete to point at. Until then it is just vapor.

    -chaswell
  • I used to be known as stick-stealer or ZaVoid

    Phuck the System!!!
  • Skiddish Underware, hiding your
    dirty laundry from the world. Play
    LORD, BRE, TW2002, and others to
    bring back your lost childhood ;)
  • That is for Trade Wars Gold/Game Server, not for Dark Millenium :(
  • Would be a cool idea. How would you do that? I guess you could take some source for a base telnet server and heavily modify it. Are there better ways than that?
  • From the Trade Wars webpage:

    Realm plans to release Trade Wars on Macintosh, Linux and the console systems soon thereafter.

    This is good for us Windows escapees.

    Let's hope it isn't vaporware.... (hope I didn't just jinx it!)

    PS: For those of you who remember Solaria... Earth:2025 is at games.swirve.com/earth [swirve.com]. It a great, large mass of online strategy gaming. There's nearly 16,000 players in the Standard game....

    (/shameless plug)


    Ruling The World, One Moron At A Time(tm)
    "As Kosher As A Bacon-Cheeseburger"(tmp)
  • I agree with you. I think the 'massively multiplayer' tag came with the advent of online gaming for commercial games and their need to boast a 'limitless' (although there are always limitations) amount of players that could join the game. CounterStrike, Quake3, et al, all have limits of 30 or so players per online game, whereas Ultima Online and Everquest boast 'massively multiplayer' because any number of users could theoretically connect to the same online game.

    'Massively multiplayer' doesn't apply to the text based games such as TradeWars and MUDs because those have always allowed any number of users to connect.

    Besides, it takes a lot more computer power to run a CS or Quake3 server because of all of the graphics processing, than to run a TradeWars game, hence the marketing 'massively multiplayer' moniker. (Say that five times fast! hah!).

  • For those of you who can't wait for this to come out try checking out some of these interesting and commendable knock-offs.

    JumpGate: Very cool first person ship flying in a pseudo-realistic physics universe. Three different factions vying for control of the same universe, join one. Fly your ship into combat or trade goods peaceably. You can't own a planet or a space station but the graphics are alright. It's in open-beta and available now @ www.mightygames.com [mightygames.com].

    MerchantEmpires.net: A slick web interface leads to a back end written in php and mysql. Almost exactly the same as Tradewars, but with a web interface, this game wasted plenty of my time. Check it out at www.merchantempires.net [merchantempires.net].

    Eve-Online: Looks very, very ,cool but is in the early alpha stages right now. You won't be able to play it for at least 18 months. The graphics engine looks awesome and you can own ships and spacestations. www.eve-online.com [eve-online.com]

    Privateer Online: Origin killed this title a while ago but some diehards still think it may be in the works. I wish it was but I think this is not the case. Have fun!

  • Hmm.. I used to be quite addicted to TW2002 back in the day (5-6 years ago) when I lived in Kalamazoo (616-area). We found a nice "race-condition" -bug in the game with a few buddies and cheated like hell on a couple of the larger multiline boards in the area. Wonder if CmdrTaco&co. fell victim to our raids ;) (I was young and stupid.. Sorry :) )
  • Right now I'm playing on a telnetable BBS and it's a blast.

    Got the url for the BBS? I would LOVE to play TW again.

  • Umm, it won't be "vaporware" until they start missing deadlines. Just because it's in the works, doesn't mean it's vaporware...

    I think that was supposed to be a clever remark about how we should expect them to start missing deadlines as soon as there are some set.

    --// Hartsock //
  • "I don't miss 2400 baud though."

    I do... have you ever watched the TW2002 ANSI graphics "movies" at 56k, locally, or through the telnet version of TW2002?

    The whole "blowing up an enemy ship" or the intro movie go by in the blink of an eye. I wanna see my slow lazers damnit!

    Sure, it still tells me that I successfully destroyed an enemy ship, or that the blast from the carbomite devices they had on board destroyed my ship, but I wanna see it happen... in real time!

    Heheh.. sometimes I dream of setting up a box running only tradewars (and maybe a front end using my favorite BBS... Renegade BBS (popular around Atlanta, GA in '91), hook up a serial line set to 2400bps, and play just like the old days... ahh, nostalgia!
  • Ahh...It's nice to know that some of us old-timers are still out there. Gang Wars, Trade Wars, Solar Realms -- Countless Zork rip-offs and DND clones. Those were the days. So, anyone know of any old-school Renegade/Galacticomm/Telgaurd BBS out there anymore? . . . Where's my 1200 Baud Modem? I want to play "Rabbit Jack's Casino" on Q-Link!
  • http://lord.nuklear.org [nuklear.org]
    (or telnet to lord.nuklear.org port 31337)

    You know you want to.

  • what part of 215?

    i was into the 610 area, which used to be 215...

    remember Minas Morgul, or Planet Magrethea?

    sighh....
    tagline

  • I'm a fan of Renegade only because it's what I was familiar with.. I have certianly seen better, but Renegade would have the most nostalgic value.

    As far as WWiV and telegard go... I absolutely hated those. :)
  • Well, any telnettable BBS running under OS/2 using VCOM (virtual comm port -- any internet connection can be redirected to a virtual comm port) can have whatever door game running, provided it uses BNU/X00 one for access. There is also a utility for Windows that is basically the same thing, virtual comm ports that work via telnet, but it isn't free and keys are/were closely watched (I think the keys were transmitted to the guy who wrote it.) I know there WAS a list of telnettable boards around; I do not know its current status. You might want to go to Renegade's home page -- there could be a list of telnettable boards there...

  • Well you could check out BlackNova Traders [blacknova.net] a web-based tradewars game...

  • cDc (Score:2)

    by Trepidity ( 597 )
    While we're on the subject of BBS nostalgia, check out Remembrance of Things Past [cultdeadcow.com], an excellent Cult of the Dead Cow T-File from 1998.
  • Hey, do you think it'll bring back the old infinite money thing in the bank trick?

    I wrote a script to do that trick fifty times in my game, meanwhile someone stole my planet the day it got the planetary drive......
  • They actually did purchase the rights from EIS. From Google's cached copy of tradewars.com [google.com]: Realm [Interactive] has recently purchased the rights to the Trade Wars name from Epic Interactive Strategy and its new title will be called Trade Wars: Dark Millennium(TM).

    The real thing to watch for is if the game truly captures the spirit of the original. Right now I'm playing on a telnetable BBS and it's a blast. I'm sure part of the enjoyment is nostalgia, but there's a lot of great gameplay left in the old TW2002.

    zsazsa
  • Let me take this opportunity to plug my server. It's the largest TW server in the land (view this [thestardock.com]), and is home to the developing MajorBBS/Worldgroup clone that runs in...Linux! :)

    BTW, the BBS software is free, too :)

    Eleqtriq The Stardock BBS [thestardock.com]
  • I'm going to have to quit my job right now..
    Brant
  • http://bbs.ufies.org/

    close tho! heh
  • Stop using them, now!

    ITYM SUTN!
  • I just played. I exhausted all my forest kills and 2 of my player kills. It is awesome. I love you. This is ontopic!! It shows my love for BBS games! Ok? ok.

  • Yes
  • Oh, yeah, the famous DOS matrix login. I guess that came from WWiV. Ewww :)

    Yeah, we were hearing even about a supposed
    Renegade backdoor "from a guy who knows for a fact" ... basically no one gave a shit.... the Vision/X and Oblivion/2 rumours came about mainly because of the stiff registration fee.... guy said FOAFF whole HD got nuked because he was running a keygen-reg'd Vision/X board.

    PCB had a major following by the elites. It was considered really hard if you ran it. There were file bases on this one guys board just full of every single possible PCB "mod" you could imagine. That's probably the best of the whole mod thing... I always thought mods for Renegade were stupid. It had a powerful programming language ... so that kind of sets it apart. Stock PCB is horrid. I wasn't blessed enough to see a highly modded PCB....got a copy once and it's, like others were saying, the most complicated BBS to set up.

    Funny you should remember RoboBBS! I called a RoboBBS board once during the OLD days... this was like, back in 1993-1994. Boy, did it suck. Part of the fun of BBSing was the ANSI, anyhow. Some of that artwork made people look like God.

  • i was at class, so i missed most of the fray on this, but it looks really cool. i've just got one request for the devel team, and i may pass it along.

    i really liked the feel that the original trade wars had... sorta a Star Wars meets Star Trek ambience, which may not be legally possible given the current environment and the business plan they have, but it deserves a shot. yeah, the ships in ANSI blue and red is cool... but unless it's got that plausible pankake-squashed look to the ships... right now it looks like Anarchy Online and not TW2002.

    of course, come the day, i'll probably not pay to play either of them, and just stick to FPS LAN games and TW2002 on free telnet BBS's.

    i don't MMORPG right now anyway... for what it's worth
    __

    alt.geek
  • Darn -- Forgot to log in. The parent is mine, so if you need to mail me, here I am.
  • its gonna be vapor for a long time I'm sure

    Umm, it won't be "vaporware" until they start missing deadlines. Just because it's in the works, doesn't mean it's vaporware...

  • I run a Tradewars 2002 server. I have links on my webpage to MANY other FREE servers which host the great game. We have even created a TW league. Come by and check out the site and server at http://webpages.charter.net/thedeepsouth Stonewall Sysop of The Deep South
  • Stop using them, now!
  • Sorry, it's a closed game running on a BBS with an NUP -- and I don't know the NUP.

    zsazsa

  • Registration (Score:4)

    by the_tsi ( 19767 ) on Tuesday February 20, 2001 @08:52AM (#417516)
    I registered tw2002... I want a discount on the new one! :)

    -Chris
    ...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
  • ...but thank my friend Nuke Skyjumper for the site. Have you read the technical details? It's quite a unique set up, although largely hacky. :)
  • And what about Iniquity, which came around in the dying days? That was a sweet BBS package (if a little 133t).
  • hope they throw in some bugs to make it interesting.. like the stealing of negative cargo holds or the invincible planet bug etc...
  • Yeah I miss the old days of running BBS's myself.. used to run one called The Forest of Infinite Possibilites back in da old 215 area code.. anyone from there still around??

    I think i played tradewars on ever BBS there was in my area... Loved modifying the ships and creating my own worlds for pepple to play on them.. makin the ferengi tough as hell!! ploping random planets full of bases through out the galaxy.. ahh the good old days...

  • TW2002: The ultimate game! And great socially too (Score:4)

    by TheZalm ( 129363 ) on Tuesday February 20, 2001 @08:58AM (#417521)
    I played this with my friends in early high school and it took up a lot of my time. We were obsessed with this game. We kept trying to write clones of it with QBasic. Eventually I gave up and wrote a full-fledged LORD (Legend of the Red Dragon) clone with QBasic. It was huge. I even utilized the modem to make an "online" version of it. This game is a true classic. I'm just waiting for NASA to come out with their commercially available Interdictor Cruiser. I mean, come on! 2002 Is next year!!! Hurry up! I met a lot of people on trade wars too.. It's great for meeting friends.. and enemies :) :) Long Live TradeWars!!!!!!!!
  • I remember running a whole bunch of SLBBS/WWIV boards and playing TradeWars ALL THE TIME! I wonder if I still have my old software with the saved games :)
  • > TW2002 is really where I met Hemos, Nate, and Kurt The Pope.

    No! Not Kurt The Pope! The Vatican have been looking for him for ages. No wonder the Catholic church is in such a bad state.

    Seriously though, this is not as positive a thing as the old version. It seems less sociable - people won't meet for this version of the game - and that is something very significant.

    Just imagine if Taco was 10 years younger, and instead of playing the game and meeting people, he just stayed at home. The result would be no Slashdot!

    This, I think, more than anything else illustrates the damaging effects of these kind of games. People are playing games in their bedrooms with other people and not going out.

    They are not socializing the same, and the undoubted result is the loss of things like Slashdot. There are good and bad effects here, and I think this shows how the internet can be negative - people using the internet imagine they are socializing when in fact they are not. This makes society a less sociable place, which has a number of bad effects:

    1. as society disintegrates, the loss of trust for each other means that crime increases, as people no longer look out for each other, and no longer care for their neighbors.

    2. meetings of minds no longer occur. This story, although it doesn't say it, says this: 'Progress means that the guys who invented /. would never have met', because now everything's done without face-to-face contact over the 'net.

    This loss of contact is bad news: bad news individually, because human contact has important productivity implications - those who are happy and sociable are more productive.

    3. there is the collapse of community businesses. As people withdraw further into their homes and internet games, businesses that relied on people like Rob going out go bust, since they no longer socialize.

    I don't think this game is bad on its own, but it symbolizes a lot of other negative things.
  • I disagree, online games gives you an opportunity to meet people that we, otherwise, would not be able to meet. I have several friends online that I have never meet simply because I don't have enough time or money to travel half way accross the world to meet them. That dosn't mean that 1) the friendships are any less real or 2) that I have stopped making frinds offline. It just means that I have a chance to take my frieneds from a larger pool.

    deAngelo
  • You spoke of gamers:

    They are not socializing the same, and the undoubted result is the loss of things like Slashdot. There are good and bad effects here, and I think this shows how the internet can be negative - people using the internet imagine they are socializing when in fact they are not. This makes society a less sociable place, which has a number of bad effects:

    List of how self-involved gaming will cause lawlessness, issolation, recession, apocolypse, and bad rashes.

    I used to think the same way. I'm not so sure anymore.

    There is a great online comics scene out there, and some of the best are all about modern gaming. Comics like Penny Arcade [penny-arcade.com] and Player vs. Player (PvP) [pvponline.com] are consistantly funny and high quality. What's more, they give a shared experience, and often foster a community.

    In a bit of nostalgia-meets-the-Internet, Gamers have resurected one of the shining examples of bad localization. The folks who translated ZeroWing did an awful job, and the results are so bad they are funny. The phrases recently became popular again, and you'll hear cries of "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US" across the Internet.

    These same gamers shut off the connection for a while to fire up the photo editor and create some great parodies. Many are posted to message boards [ezboard.com] to be appreciated by fellow fans. Some of them made a dubbed version [optushome.com.au], others made a techno soundtrack (search for "Laziest Men On Mars, "All Your Base Are Belong To Us"), and others made a hilarious flash movie [nulldevice.net].

    All this creativity was spawned by this later version of gamers. More that ever, I think creative people are meeting and interacting online, and the new games are, at worst, better versions of television, and, at best, a tool for creating a common experience, so that strangers can meet each other.

    All this is a bit off-topic, but I think you are worried over nothing. I'm hoping they do a good job with the new TradeWars, which I remember as fondly as other Slashdotters (...in my day, 2400 baud modems, 1 hour just to download 1 meg of porn, etc...)

  • Oooh, I loved all those games. I'm pretty sure SRE had inter-bbs support.. I have memories of launching Inter-BBS Balistic Missiles or some such..

    Ahh, I loved teaming up with everyone on the BBS I played on, and collectively attacking EVERYONE on another BBS. Now that absolutely rocked.

    As far as this Tradewars game goes, you can throw all the graphics you want at me... but if this game isn't as fun as the original (Well, TW2002 anyway.. never really played the original.. just TW2002 and TW2 (which was odd)) then I'm not going to buy or play it.
  • minas morgul sounds kinda familar... then my fave were the H/P/A/V/C boards which i ran one... and also the aslyum.. and the hackers group wars... CAGE or sumthin and PTS phuck the system
  • actually, my bbs is online and telnetable..multinode renegade... i ran a fairly decent majorbbs in chicago for many years until i wasn't a teenager anymore :( i miss tele-arena, but i just can't bring myself to playing it online anymore, its not the same over telnet, not even with the 2400baud "emulations"...ugh. i wrote a door called Wilderness Adventure. it was like an ansi version of ultima, where you could talk to NPC's using "keywords" and what not. probably ran on about 20 bbs's until we killed the project. twas written in pascal (whoa).
  • From http://www.jargon.org/ by Eric S. Raymond

    vaporware /vay'pr-weir/ n.
    Products announced far in advance of any release (which may or may not actually take place). See also brochureware.

    --
    He shoots he scores!
  • ReLive your past! Come play the real TradeWars 2002 here!

    telnet://clockworkorangebbs.org
    http://clockworkorangebbs.org

    TradeWars, LoRD, Operation Overkill ][, BRE, Falcons Eye!

    FidoNet, AdventureNet, JustaXNet, MicroNet!



    - Xabbu
  • funny thing is, is that every now and again, someone from the old boards puts two and two together and emails me... (my old handle is still my username in my email address :-))

    i wanna have an old fashioned meet-up of all the old people... see where they are now, what they're doign and what not...

    anyway...

    theold hpac boards were great... nothing like some good old anarchy to go around...


    tagline

  • BRE!!!

    Nothing like it before it, nothing like it after it.

    I also liked Usurper. SRE was OK. FE was OK. LORD was OK (borderline bad- I know I'll get flamed for this), Food Fight was a great way to spend your remaining minutes.. :)

    I would kill for a good modern day version of BRE. Alas, I doubt any replacement will capture the heart of the politics and strategy that was BRE.

  • Any 215'ers remember Chaotic Order? I used to call all of the boards in the upper bux/mont part of 215. What was the name of the cool one running WWIV who's name started with an I?


  • With all due respect to other web-based Tradewars attempts like BlackNova, the most advanced and playable Tradewars on the web is:

    Merchant Empires [merchantempires.net].

    Merchant Empires is Open Source software.

    Here [sourceforge.net] is the SourceForge Merchant Empires site.

    Here [linuxgazette.com] is an article that appeared in the latest Linux Gazette on Merchant Empires.
  • EWWWW???

    Some of the best boards out there were Renegade.

    You could easily search for FILE_ID.DIZ lines with excess ASCII symbols (including a repeating amount of low alphabetic ASCII characters) and have them removed -- this wasn't hard and when I was into it I wrote a QB program to do just that -- and all the stupid pissing of territory from file bases, magically removed replaced with concise descriptions. Granted, the file system wasn't the best, but it was very easy in most areas to make Renegade act right. You could even stuff keystrokes into the buffer with a certain menu function, thus eliminating the "List [*.*]?" and likewise redundant questions.

    An issue during the times was the so-called "backdoor." That was another reason most people supported Renegade; a lot of people presumed Oblivion/2 contained a back door, it being "elite" software.

    Oh, and you forgot PCBoard, the ultimate in ELiTE ;)

    On a lighter note, one of the largest WAREZ boards in my area ran using LoraBBS, a Remote Access clone. I guess functionality was there.

  • An online game based on Tradewars will be cool, but Tradewars will always pale in comparison to Ultimate Universe. C'mon people! Why doesn't Ultimate Universe ever get the recognition it deserves? It was vastly superior to TW2002. I want to see something based on UU.

    Carl

  • Check :
    http://www.eisonline.com/twgs/#Order
    under "Notice to Martech Customers" - get this - this company is HONORING Martech's Free Upgrade Policy
    Definately nice to see a company understanding the importance of keeping users of their product happy.
  • Get a grip. It's a game for god's sake. And it's a damn good game too. The very simple structure of the game lends to boredom unless you get social. It wasn't that good of a shooter, and unless you exploited bugs, you weren't going to get far unless you teamed with others. Ya know (shudder) actually try to work as a unit, develop and execute plans, etc. I hate this henny-penny shit.
  • massivly multiplayer online role playing game real time strategy?

    -------

  • Re:LEGEND OF RED DRAGON - lord.nuklear.org (Score:3)

    by KlomDark ( 6370 ) on Tuesday February 20, 2001 @11:34AM (#417540) Homepage Journal
    My .sig says it all... :)
  • When exactly does one stop being just 'multiplayer' and start being 'massively multiplayer'? I mean, the game its self can't inherently Be 'massively multiplayer' because before release it's probably got about 30 players from within the company.

    So when does it Become 'massively multiplayer'? 100 people? 200? 1000? There're muds out there with 500 people on at a time, but they don't call themselves MMUDs.. (or MMURPDs for that matter). I think it's just a marketing gimmick to let EQ and UO call themselves something other than graphical muds.. and calling tradewars a 'MMORPG RTS' is a bit nuts. Have people just totally forgotten what role-playing games Used to be?

  • Whatever happened to Trade Wars: 2112 ?? (Score:3)

    by KlomDark ( 6370 ) on Tuesday February 20, 2001 @11:51AM (#417542) Homepage Journal
    Gary Martin, several years ago, announced a new version called Trade Wars 2112 (He must be a Rush fan - the band, not the fat guy) to be released. I never heard anything else... True vaporware (The Internet must have happened or something)

    Here's the original announcement:

    Quoted off of WWIVnet:

    47/50: The Future of Martech Software
    Name: Gary Martin #1 @9354
    Date: Thu Apr 16 08:59 1992
    From: Castle Ravenloft (Topeka, Kansas) [913-842-0300]

    Statement of Direction, April 16th, 1992

    Martech Software, Inc.

    Recently we asked the BBS community if they would be interested in an advanced version of Trade Wars 2002. The response has been overwhelmingly positive! With the exception of a few who expect to get something for nothing, Sysops across the country enthusiastically screamed "YES! YES!" for our advanced Single and Multinode version of Trade Wars 2112.

    With this vote of confidence, Martech will be moving ahead on the TW2112 project. We do not have an estimated release schedule at this time.

    Some concern was expressed that TW2002 registrants should get a discount on TW2112's cost. We agree. So at this time we are setting forth the following tentative pricing schedule:

    Trade Wars 2112 registration (for all versions of TW2112)
    For 1 to 4 nodes $35 US
    For 5 to 10 nodes $50 US
    For 11 to 25 nodes $65 US
    For 26+ nodes $80 US

    *** Upgrading from a previous registration of TW2002 gives you a ***
    *** Fifteen dollar discount on any of the above prices. ***

    Trade Wars 2112 Vga Terminal Program $10 US
    | Please note this registration is NOT a Sysop's cost, but |
    | a user's cost. The TW2112 Term Program will support |
    | 640 x 480 256 color mode and sound cards. It will offer |
    | many of the features, integrated into it, of the current |
    | mapping and database analysis programs. This will be a |
    | complete TW2112 environment for your Users! It will |
    | even function as a standalone Term package so Traders |
    | can set it to dial their favorite TWs games... |

    For those that are curious about the multi-node costs of TW2112, we plan on supporting both Multi-process setups (Desqview, Windows OS/2) and Multinode setups (Lantastic, Novell lans. Std file sharing using Share.exe for record and file locking.) The multinode prices reflect the amount of INTERACTIVE PLAY that will be incorporated into TW2112. Users will be able to combat each other realtime, join in mutual assaults on enemies (fleet warfare!), communicate with all active nodes (through Ship Messages) and sit down in the Tavern for a chat... TW2112 will be a new step forward in user interaction for the multinode environment.

    Well there you have it. This is the direction Martech is moving to. This summer we will put out a Maintenance release of Trade Wars 2002 first, to cover all known bugs, and add a few new angles to the game. Once thats out work will begin fulltime on TW2112. Sysops who have registered TW2002 will be given FIRST CHOICE when it comes to putting out TW2112. They will have it on their system long before anyone else does. We're doing this to show our appreciation for those who have registered the game and helped to support Martech Software.

    For future reference, we will require Sysops to mail in their TW2002 registration letter or card to be eligible for the discount on TW2112. Make sure you have yours in a safe place! Resends on lost letters will be available for our regular processing fee of $3 if you've lost it. To request a resend, fill out all pertinent info about yourself and your BBS and the approximate date of when you registered and mail that to us along with the $3 processing fee. Then HANG ON to your registration letter!

    TW2112 is going to blow you away.

    Martech Software, Inc.
    134 Indian Avenue
    Lawrence,Kansas
    66046

  • Wasn't it Terra that had the colonists? Not sol?
  • FE and Usurper were easily the best door games. I loved the fantasy theme of FE; it was basically a BBS version of Master of Magic (the old Microprose game).
  • Speaking of which -- I've been playing your turns on kaybee [kaybee.org] (plugging the server to get more people to dominate), since you don't seem to be around much. Drop the corp some email, let us know what's up?

    Anyhow, all my homebrew scripts are in Rexx, since that's what my favorite telnet client for twar supports.

    What I'd really like to do is write a scriptable helper in tcl/tk (or maybe perl/tk). If anyone else is out there and wants to try and collaborate on this kind of thing lets all get together and write a for-real-helper that's unix friendly and gpl'd (unlike every other twar helper).

  • tele-arena was amazing. I played it a *lot* during grade nine (1995 or thereabouts)...I never had any particularly amazing character, like some people did (goblin acolytes were particularly favoured, though the best character was a necromancer of some sort).

    I think my best character was a hunter (?) who had a couple of runes.

    those dragons were bitches.

    c motu

    a bear^Ma bear^Ma bear

    etc. wow, memories.
  • PLAY LORD.

    you-know-you-want-to.

    in your browser, in the console, in an xterm - your choice. LORD the way you want it :)

    http://lord.nuklear.org
  • LORD! LORD! LORD!

    Here it is, back from the dead...

    Play it in your browser, in an xterm, in the console, any way you want it.

    http://lord.nuklear.org

  • The old days; waxing nostalgic, I guess (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I miss the old BBS's ... I had such good times playing games as a kid, leaving messages for people, trading files ... I found about about the Internet because of the BBS's we had connected to things like FIDOnet and other mail-forwarding services. I had a shell account as a result of the BBS's in my town. In fact, one of the comic shops on the West side of town who ran a great board called the Jester's Court (name of the store too) just closed a few months ago I guess.

    I don't miss 2400 baud though.

    Guess that's why I like /. so much. Posting messages, discussions ...

    hermit
    www.thegrinder.org

    I post anonymously, because I'm paranoid, and they're out to get me. (No, really, I'll get around to creating an account today.)

    Karma? I don't need no steenkin' karma!
  • you can try B5 tradewars along with regular, the webpage for his site is:

    http://www.geocities.com/lrdphoenix2000/tradewar s/

  • http://freshmeat.net/projects/blacknovatraders/
    This looks like an interesting variation that I intend to try one day. I used to run TradeWars, LORD, and The Pit on my BBS lo these many years ago...had one of the first online CDs too, with a lot of technical shareware disks to browse.

  • you know you use emacs too much when you try to ctrl-c->ctrl-X out of this post

    <pedantic>you know you're not using emacs enough when you don't type C-x C-c to exit emacs. </pedantic>

    Of course, it's entirely possible that you type it correctly, but don't remember typing it. Me, I prefer vim [vim.org].


    --
  • But am I the only one still longing for inter-bbs (and local only) BRE, FE, and SRE (if it supported it!) Man those games were simple awesome.

    Don't get me wrong, TW is easily the best game bbs's have ever seen but you can still play TW even today through telnet.

    Tell me where a good solar realms elite game is and I will give you a cookie! =)

  • MMORPGRTS? (Score:3)

    by drivers ( 45076 ) on Tuesday February 20, 2001 @09:02AM (#417555)
    Wouldn't that just be MMORTS?
  • I thought the old tradewars was played on BBSs, not "in person" . . .

  • Even the colors make me nostalgic (Score:3)

    by vees ( 10844 ) <rob@vees.net> on Tuesday February 20, 2001 @09:24AM (#417558) Homepage Journal
    I just love the fact that the ships in the new Trade Wars game (in particular this picture [tradewars.com]) all seem to be painted liberally in shades of LIGHTCYAN, LIGHTBLUE, LIGHTRED, LIGHTGRAY and DARKGRAY, just like the original ships. I get the feeling I'll be having flashbacks the entire time I play this game once it comes out.

    Yes, I admit it. Trade Wars cost me as many grade points in high school as Civ did in college.

    Alt-027[0;1;44m forever!

    --

  • I don't remember no TradeWars, I have never used or even seen BBS etc ..

    Is my life worthless ?
  • I remember writing scripts for Telix (an old dos comm program) in it's mini implementation of C, which it called SALT (which stood for something, goodness knows what...) to go back and forth between my planets and Sol to get more colonists... It was fun.
  • There are quite a few places that run the old style BBSs online. You acess them via telnet. A common one that gets mentioned from time to time is at ufies.bbs.org, associated with Userfriendly

    If you go there via http, there is a simple web page with some info, etc. and some links to see who is looged into the board, etc. Telnetting to the url gets you the board itself.

    And they do have tradewars, along with other things. (Now watch them get /.ed)

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • A plug for an old friend that SEVERELY needs more players on his telnetable BBS with TW, Lord, and a whole bunch of (165 - mostly registered!) classic doors:

    mmachine.com [mmachine.com] (telnet - use this to get to the games)
    mmachine.com [mmachine.com] (web - basically just info on how to telnet to the BBS)

  • Something about them is just too cool, even compared to EverCrack^H^H^H^H^HQuest. I think that RPG games are always better to be played non-graphical - let you mind do the imagery, it'll always blow away the graphics of even a 14 gigabyte Voodoo 20 9000 :)

    I've just started getting back into wasting too much of my time MUDding again. I forgot how much fun I had with them.

    I broke down and bought a router for my Cable Modem so can redirect incoming traffic to my Linux box so I could run CircleMUD again. I've just started modding it, but there's already some cool things in place. Just need players now! (And I'm in a generous mood - I've been advancing new players to level 15 when I see them online at the same time I am)

    telnet to ooze.bloomnet.com port 4000 [bloomnet.com] to check it out.

    Or use the Java telnet applet here [bloomnet.com]

  • What was wrong with Renegade? I'm curious what you would call good BBS software? I had a great time with Renegade, till I went ahead and wrote my own, LLABBS. Write me if you want the source, Turbo Pascal 7.0 (Dial-up only, unless you shim it with MurkWorks BBSnet or run it on OS/2 with the telnettable version of the X00 FOSSIL driver)
  • Actually, if it keeps the gameplay of the original, it will not be an FPS, I'm sure that intership combat will be FPS, but combat is only a part of the game. You'll like it, keep an open mind! :)
  • Trade Wars is not just killed or be killed! There is some combat, but it is more about colonization of new planets, building financial resources and space exploration, and forming alliances with other players. Sure, it's got the word "Wars" in it, but remember that it also has "Trade" in the name - it can be loosely descibed as a space-based version of monopoly. Much strategy, planning, and if you're not careful - you might even learn something...
  • the correct link to nate's webpage is: oostendorp.net [oostendorp.net], not oostendo.com as CmdrTaco would have us believe...

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