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Games Entertainment

Dungeon Master Returns 63

Posted by Hemos from the but-is-java-darn-it dept.
Jonathan J. writes "Back in 1987 an all-time classic RPG game came out called Dungeon Master. It defined gui for that type of rpg to this day. It's still fun to play. Chaos Strikes back (1989) was the first sequel, and D.M. 2 came out in 1995 (dm2 was the least exciting, for me). There are a lot of very loyal fans of the first two, like myself. Please announce that Dungeon Master Java is out, it's free! The graphics are greatly improved and it's a whole new game with new content! There is also a level editor included. For more information about the game check the Dungeon Master Encyclopedia website " I can distinctly remember many hour spent playing this game in the basement of my friend's house - in between Alamaze and Monster Island - 'course I'm still playing the latter two, so it might be time to play the former again as well.
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Dungeon Master Returns

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  • I was working at Origin Systems in Austin when Dungeon Master came out. We were still coding for Apple IIs for the most part, but there were a couple of Atari STs in the office, and Dungeon Master brought the whole place to a standstill.

    Technically speaking, DM was indeed a souped-up Wizardry clone. But it was one of the first games that looked real. It heralded several sea changes in the industry:

    1) Programmers alone couldn't write graphically-competitive games anymore. "Programmer art" was considered good enough for most purposes at the time, but you had to have some serious professional art talent on staff to compete in Dungeon Master's league. We'd already pretty much gotten that particular clue at Origin by then, but most other game companies hadn't.

    2) User interface is every bit as important as any other aspect of game design. It's no exaggeration to say Dungeon Master's UI was a revolution. DM demonstrated that you didn't have to force your users to memorize an entire keyboard map to play a game. Believe it or not, this was by no means obvious at the time, especially at Origin. :-) Richard Garriott, in particular, revamped his whole user-interface philosophy after playing Dungeon Master. It was probably the single largest influence behind the "icon-oriented" GUI implemented, for better or worse, in Ultima VI. Richard didn't spend a lot of time playing other peoples' games, but DM was an exception.

    3) DM was among the very first mainstream titles to show off the graphical capabilities of the next-generation consumer machines at the time (Atari ST, Amiga, and Apple IIGS). Consequently, it showed us how first-person games were going to look for years to come, on platforms like the IBMs, color Macs, and later-generation consoles. Again, you have to remember that DM was one of the first games that looked like the real world. Hell, as far as I'm aware, it was the first game that looked like the real world.

    Even though the first wave of machines that could run games like Dungeon Master were all hopeless flops in the marketplace, DM's overall look and feel proved very durable. SSI's Eye of the Beholder series was basically the same game, with strong sales as late as 1992-1993. Later Wizardry titles revealed some cross-pollination as well, not to mention the heavily-iconic Ultima Underworld.

    In short, DM kicked major ass throughout the game industry. FTL did everything right on that one.
  • I think it was called "3D Monster Maze" but it's soo long ago I can't remember. It didn't have much of an adventure feel to it
    Dungeon master postdates that by half a decade
    FP.
    --

  • My Favorite Game of All Time (Score:4)

    by jgalun ( 8930 ) on Sunday March 18, 2001 @06:06AM (#356331) Homepage
    Dungeon Master was incredible. I bought it for the Amiga back in 1991, and played it endlessly. The graphics were beautiful. The gameplay was brilliant - you could practice your skills outside of battle, and you had to both think and hack and slash to win. The sound was magnificent -loud footsteps following you down a hallway, a monster SOMEWHERE...It was truly one of all the time great games.

    Years later, in 1998 or 1999, I downloaded it and started playing it on the Amiga emulator on the PC. I closed the door to my dorm room and played it for about 6 hours with the headphones on. I lost myself in the game completely, in the sounds and images...until a friend came to get me for dinner. I almost had a heart attack from fright. I had gotten so wrapped up, so involved in the game that when I heard the door open I thought a monster was after me in the dungeon.

    Any game that can still induce heart attacks 11 years after it was released is clearly a classic. Modern RPGs leave me cold - we need more Dungeon Masters!

  • Some said DM Java is not open source. Well it's true that it's just freeware. If you are looking for an open source multiplayers game, you may take a look at Worldforge. [worldforge.org]

    The WorldForge Project is still young, but shows promise. Like many open source projects it does not yet rival commercial titles, but it offers enticing flexibility to players -- and the opportunity to contribute creatively to the game world.

  • Sounds like both of you guys are saying that your problem with BG2 is that it has too much content. That's a rather unusual complaint.

    I think an RPG with so many optional sidequests that it's difficult to do them all in one game is pretty amazing, myself. Much better than the totally linear play of most RPG's in the past.

    You're right about the lack of options for player behaviour, though. You're pretty much forced to play the goody-goody since the penalties for having a low reputation are so extreme. Most RPG's are like that, though. I think the Fallout series is the only one I've ever seen where the designers spent almost as much effort on adding quests and events for evil characters as they did for good ones.

  • where is the src? :-)
  • applications are growing in numbers rapidly. Not just "server-side" stuff, but the server software itself. Java has only been around a few years, and its only been lately that people have finally gotten a good grasp in writing large projects using it. There's also the fact that developers are among the last people to start using new different tools.

    I'm a server developer. I use java. It's ease of creating an advanced multi-threaded application that runs on multiple platforms is amazing, and believe me, its far easier than developing with C++, which makes all the difference in reducing the amount of bugs to begin with, but in the bug hunt after one is discovered.

    I do my development in win2000, and deployment usually on linux. It's wonderful. I don't have to change a single thing, just copy my JAR file over to the linux box and it works the same as it did in windows.

  • Just add the following to your sources.list

    deb ftp://ftp.tux.org/pub/java/debian woody non-free

    Or

    deb ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/linux/devel/lang/java/bl ackdown.org/debian woody non-free

    Then apt-get update && apt-get install j2sdk1.3

  • I loved Dungeon Master on my Amiga, the graphics and sound were awesome! I recently downloaded the PC version from Underdogs the other day; the PC version just can't quite compare.

    Shortly after I bought the Amiga version, I attended the AmigaWorld Expo being held at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, CA. FTL Games was represented, along with some guy from San Diego that had put together a music CD containing 21 tracks of audio that completely and accurately represented some of the best puzzles and battles of the game. To this day, I still have the CD and find the music to be inspiring! The artwork on the disc's front is a beautiful red, black, and silver dragon with the DM logo below. The jewel case front has the DM logo above a pile of skulls holding what looks to be a sling.

    They told me at the time it was a limited release CD. I've never met any DM lover since who has it. My bandwidth would never survive a /. onslought, but if anyone had the resources, I could be convinced to post the songs in our beloved digital music format ;) -- jon_godfrey at yahoo dot com
  • Umm that's BS

    I've gotten many things to compile in Debian a lot faster then I have in RedHat/Mandrake

    MySQL's latest build would not even compile on Mandrake 6.2... now I realize that's not the newest version but it's not that old

    Debian's apt-get kicks ass... you gotta admit that at least, and the overall library placement just makes sense... RedHat genereally tends to put stuff in these weird places that you have to specify in the ./configure options usually... I've never had to do that with Debian

    Not trying to start a distro war... but at least be reasonable when you make statements like that.

  • I bypassed the case-specific filesystem problem by unzipping it onto my windows partition. After downloading the new JRE, I can run it through either windows or linux, no sweat. Works great, especially once I shut down some memory-hog applications like Netscape or Star Office.

    -schussat

    • Artemis, although a pure Java application, has separate Windows, Macintosh, and UNIX versions. Great platform independence there.
    Do you know why this is the case? It may be simply a different set of installs. If I make a Debian package and a RedHat RPM of the same code does that mean that Debian and RedHat aren't proper Linux platforms? Does that mean that the binary itself doesn't run, unmodified on both distros? Does that mean you can't download the source, build it, and install it yourself on your own favorite distro? Things can be so confusing if you are clueless, I guess.
    • Artemis is slow, and unstable. You might say, well that's the fault of the authors -- except -- when it dies, it dies with errors coming from Java's own interface classes, suggesting that Java, and not the application itself is at fault.
    What do you mean "errors coming from Java's own interface classes"? You are correct, that statement doesn't mean anything. Obviously, you don't know how to read a Java stack trace. NullPointerExceptions are frequently the result of poorly-written Java code. For all you know, the Java interface classes are attempting to notify the application code that they have been called improperly. The same idiots who can't check their own parameters probably aren't catching their Exceptions.

    What about C/C++? The worst application I can name is Netscape Navigator. When that POS crashes, it sometimes takes out my entire X server. I'll bet you couldn't do that with a Java program if you spent the rest of your life trying.

    • if shown an example of a speedy, stable, large Java application that actually exists and is not vapor, I could change my mind
    How about Apache Tomcat?
  • Run this script in the unzipped archive's folder to fix case dependencies:

    or i in `find . | grep -iE "\.(gif|png|jpg)$"`
    do
    echo $i
    if [ ! -d "$i" ]
    then
    mv "$i" "`dirname "$i"`"/"`echo \`basename $i\` | perl -pe 'y/[A-Z]/[a-z]/'`"
    fi
    done


    It was posted by someone named "RedHatDude" on the message board.

    "I may not have morals, but I have standards."
  • Is that whole "Java is Slow" myth still floating around so prominantly?

    To be a myth, something has to be untrue. Java *is* slow, unstable as all hell, and not nearly as platform independant as claimed. This is not some vendetta of mine against Sun or Java -- just simple observation from using Java applications -- the very few that actually were released, that is -- most Java projects, like Corel Java Office, simply ended in failure.

    There are many ways to make a graphical application run on many platforms -- Tk, for example, is much more responsive and stable in my experience than Java, but it just doesn't have the hype surrounding it that Java has, so it tends to get overlooked.
  • Sorry to upset the Amiga lovers out there but the Atari ST version was first :)
  • I started with a Stormix (RIP) distribution (also debian based), but recently did a dist-upgrade... it works fine on my machine (though it does look like he got a bit loose with the case on some graphics files, easily fixed though a sad error to make).

    Even the sound works. I'm pretty impressed, I really loved the original DM (I even wrote a strategy guide that I sold to a few hundred people!) and this is a great port.

    As for ease of install, I downloaded the JDK and installed it without issue. I'd love to be able to use apt to install it but it's easy enough as it is.
  • Well yeah this looks cool, I thought I'd fill in the form.. Then I noticed "Visa number". What the hell? Buried in the rulebook part of the site it tells you it costs $US4.50 per turn! Why couldn't they mention that it costs on the main page? I don't know about Alamaze, since the site seems to have been slashdotted.
    --
    Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig.
  • That'll teach me not to preview! Of course it was actually called 3D Monster Maze. My fingers have a life of their own.

  • Re:But it's java dept? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    1) Artemis, although a pure Java application, has separate Windows, Macintosh, and UNIX versions. Great platform independence there.

    First, Mac Java sucks ass and is stuck at some ancient version. Until OS X ships most vendors do have to ship a seperate version to work around all of the Apple VM's kinks. Blame Apple and the general technical shittyness of MacOS, not Java.

    Similar comments for the Microsoft VM on Windows instead of the Sun one.

    The Unix and Windows versions might just be installer differences (Windows users need a start menu icon, etc). Sun has taken steps to remedy this with the recently released Java Web Start. This should allow the same code to be deployed on both Windows and Unix.

    Also, sometimes people fork Java apps to work around platform differences with file dialogs and the like. That's usually just lazyness.
  • Elite. Now that was a good game.

    There was one that was even better (old & similar though) but I can't remember it's name ... ran on the System 80. I think it was called ????? Pilot. Anyone got any ideas ? Had crap block graphics but it was great.

    The only things I've played as much since then are Ultima and Tomb Raider (& after about a dozen levels TR get's pretty boring).

  • Nothing could ever suck more hours than Elite. That game was an amazing piece of work for something that fit on 1 side of a 5 1/4" floppy.

    Of course, since I had an Apple ][, you couldn't get DM for it (which frustrated me), I had to stick with Bard's Tale and Wizardry.

  • Sorry, that "or" at the beginning is really a "for"

    "I may not have morals, but I have standards."
  • Yes it is so... I've got as far as the demo but cannot yet start a game... would the first person to get this up and running on a case-dependent filesystem please put the converted package up somewhere?
  • I don't know why everybody tries to get this game to work on their PC's with emulators etc. DungenMaster 1 and 2 are available on PC. I suspect though that it will be quite hard to get hold of the orignal DM1 now though because it must have been one of the first PC games I ever bought in the days of the 286/386
  • if shown an example of a speedy, stable, large Java application that actually exists and is not vapor, I could change my mind

    At work I write in Borland's JBuilder 4. It's a pure Java app with a Java installer. It is everything you asked for. Fast, stable, large, and pure Java. You can buy it all over the place or download an eval from Borland's web site. And yes, it works in Windows and Linux. I believe the install routine is different between OS's since the Windows version uses an EXE file that calls the JRE for you and under UNIX you have to call it yourself or call a script. The JRE runs the same code on either OS though. Sounds like that other app you mentioned was badly coded/designed.

  • The company I worked for last year is writing their entire system in Java, and they even had me write a compiler for it in that language. I was surprised to find that my compiler's performance was quite good, hardly any slower than previous ones I'd written in C++.
  • Ah, Bloodwych!! :)

    DM never had a two-player mode. Bloodwych did, though. In the demo version you could duplicate the characters between parties and cheat, but not in the full release...

    ...oh, and did you know that it was impossible to complete the game in one-player mode? Couldn't get into the elemental tower things, because you needed one player to stand each side of the doors to cycle the "airlock". :)

    Some wicked puzzles in that game, too. Took the "spinner" to a whole new level of deviousness...

    "MURLOCK, YOU MAY BUY A SPELL - PICK A CLASS" :)

    Ah, great days.
  • I just turned an old P200 into a Dos box just to play this exact game less than a month ago. I had almost forgotten how long it takes to level up. I must have been throwing rocks at this staircase for hours just to see those little green letters "Gando gained a ninja level", while my mage was busy making mana and wisdom potions in order to gain magic levels in record time. Ahh.. 180 Wisdom, now that's a quick learner :)

    Ever since the day I first loaded it up ten years ago on a friend's Amiga 500, to the sunny day in 1995 when I found it in a bargain bin and gave up hot afternoons poolside with the cuspies in exchange for endless hours of fun in front of this VGA masterpiece, and now when I go back in time and play it one more time, I just can't help but feel profoundly absorbed by the game, not for nostalgia but for pure entertainment value. No other game comes close to that level of fantasy and immersion. Not even Dungeon Master 2 (which was rather depressing). It is truly a timeless classic for all adventure fans.
  • That's Mercenary III, not Damocles.

    Damocles has no people in it whatsoever, making it a lonely, yet strangely immersive experience. I actually prefer Damocles, because I can finish the game part in just a few minutes and get on to the good stuff, by destroying Icarus with the Author's Computer. :)

    Get (I think) a Red Beacon Locator, and go to Damocles - you can pick up Pulvin there and make an absolute fortune (and stop PC Bil). The solution with the electromagnet and the slot machine is cool, too, and you haven't lived 'til you've played the 'shoot-em-up' solution. :)

    Remember: Everything has relevance to the game. Paul Woakes spent a long time over his games. It's a shame they never got to finish the PC version, in it's texture-mapped glory...

    ...hey, if anyone wants to update Bloodwych, Damocles or Mercenary III, that's fine by me! ;)
  • You know, I reverse-engineered the original (Atari) Dungeon Master (v1.2, that is, the version without the killer bugs), just for fun and to see how it worked.

    It seemed to be written in C, for the most part, with all those links and unlinks around the place, lots of sp weirdness, some tables, and some things (graphic stuff mainly) coded in assembly. A rare thing to find a game of that era not totally coded in assembly, especially a game of that calibre.

    The only real issue for me was that the pre-calculation took ages on the ST's 8MHz processor, so you were really waiting around when you first started or resumed a game after a reboot. When I got the Falcon, that really made a big difference.

    DM was quite easy, though. CSB was more of a challenge, a little less obviously linear, and very confusing in places.

    Oh, and why has nobody mentioned the excellent, infinite-levelled, and often overlooked Captive, in my view the pinnacle of that genre on the ST (and a _hell_ of a lot faster than the sometimes slow DM)?

    --
    /sjx.
  • ZX81, yes it was called 23 Monster Maze. It had a T. Rex wandering the maze, and you had to get to the exit without bumping into it. Excellent game for it's time.
  • This couldn't have predated the classic Eye of The Beholder - after all, there's no such thing as non-pc gaming.
  • This game is my all-time favorite! I played it on the ST, and later tried it with an ST emulator, but sadly with the emulator movement with one hand on the keyboard and everything else with the mouse didn't work. Hope they have configurable keys now!
  • "The coolest experience ever was when we discovered you could kill the mutant shrubs by getting it to stand in a doorway and watch the door smash it to bits! We laughed for hours after."

    Sounds like you were loading up on more than M&M's...

    :)

    This game sounds a lot like the original Wizardry for the Apple][, which hooked me for about six months when I was in high school (early '80s I guess). A dungeon crawl with 90-degree corners and sprites overlaid on the "3-D" view. I still think pretty graphics are secondary to balanced gameplay and a deep world.

    Come to think of it, Wizardry at six straight months still has the longest replay value of any single-player game I've ever played.

    Jamie McCarthy

  • It's games like these that modern day gaming companies should should study. While not visually amazing, even in its own day.. Just goes to show that GAMEPLAY is really what counts. These days its all about how many polys, textures, and the res etc... All flash, and no meat. Hell, old arcade games often got more milage than modern shooters..and its not because they looked revolutionary, its because they were FUN pure and simple. Much like this RPG. Last note.. Baulders Gate 2 was ass. Being bombarded with 50 quests simultaneously really kills the level of enjoyment dramatically. Diablo 2 was ass. Do I even need to explain? I thought not.
  • The coolest experience ever was when we discovered you could kill the mutant shrubs by getting it to stand in a doorway and watch the door smash it to bits! We laughed for hours after.

    Dungeon Master's gameplay was truly awesome. I used to play it with two other buddies in my 7th-grade science teacher's classroom. We'd hurry to finish out work, then pile up in front of the Atari ST and play for the rest of class. Best damn science class I ever had.

    The gameplay rocked: smashing baddies in the doors was great, but how about throwing rocks down stairs to beat them up? We killed at least a couple of dragons that way, when our party was too badly beaten up to face them directly. (I guess you could call that an AI bug--dumb big dragon just waits at the bottom of the stairs and gets thumped--but at the time, the very idea that that dragon was still there when we were on a different level, well it was pretty cool).

    Unfortunately, I'm stuck here at school today, so no DM playing for a while yet.

    -schussat

  • Re:But it's java dept? (Score:3)

    by the red pen ( 3138 ) on Sunday March 18, 2001 @08:06AM (#356365)
    • Java *is* slow, unstable as all hell, and not nearly as platform independant as claimed.
    Since when?
    • Corel Java Office
    Oh, since 1996. Nice to see the the anti-Java crowd is staying current so they don't look like foaming at the mouth idiots.

    When COJ was written, Enlightenment didn't exists. Why do I bring this up? Well, how would the Slashdot community respond to reviews of a Debian release of the same vintage as COJ? The reviewer would cite it as impossible to use, somewhat buggy, lacking in any useful applications (except Apache) and offering almost no support for popular hardware. Of course, this moronic reviewer would be roasted alive for failing to obtain and rate the latest and greatest distribution.

    Still, someone who saw a slow Java application in 1996 feels empowered to trash Java's current state.

    Amazing.

  • Running on Linux (Score:3)

    by the red pen ( 3138 ) on Sunday March 18, 2001 @08:10AM (#356366)
    Anyone get this to run on Linux? I get an Exception and then it seems to hang. The tree that is unzipped from the download suggests that the author wrote it assuming a case-independent file system!

    Say it ain't so...

  • This game sounds a lot like the original Wizardry for the Apple ][, which hooked me for about six months when I was in high school (early '80s I guess). A dungeon crawl with 90-degree corners and sprites overlaid on the "3-D" view. I still think pretty graphics are secondary to balanced gameplay and a deep world.


    Well, DM was real time, but you can certainly trace an evolutionary history -- Wizardry to Bard's Tale to DM.

    Actually, though, my uncle worked for the PLATO project of Control Data, which was a timesharing service with black and white vector terminals in the late '70s, and I remember a game called "Shadowland" or something similar that again was a "3D" dungeon crawl, and that predated Wizardry.
  • Any program not written properly in *any* programming language is slow and unstable.

    Java is a *very* fast language when using today's modern tools and written properly (Resin webserver, written in java, is nearly as fast as apache for static pages, and its JSP/servlet processing matches the speed of mod_php, and simply blows away mod_perl).

    Today, people have much more knowledge of how to code in java correctly, as opposed to several years ago when java first started appearing. And the tools today are quite a bit more advanced.

  • Not just me then. I've stopped playing baldurs gate 2 for exactly that reason. The engine is much prettier than the original but you get a quest, halfway on your way to the location you are stopped by someone who gives you another quest, you try to do that quest then realise theres yet another quest you have to do first. It sucks. They have also imho broken the point in rpg's in that you dont have reasonable free will! Say you want to kill someone, no matter how weak they are if Bioware decided you arent going to kill them then you CANNOT kill them no matter what. They should let you kill them but just not do whatever quest etc.. you would have got. Scripting is fine in an RPG but they are trying to script what the PLAYER does which is frustrating.

    I guess I will never be able to enjoy a computer RPG as much as I did real AD&D and Cyberpunk - with real people.
    (Oh, btw was it released as "Baulders Gate" in America?)

    --
  • I've been putting off getting an iPaq, but now I need to know, has anybody gotten this baby to run on the PocketPC platform with Personal Java?
  • You're thinking of Bloodwych I believe. That had a fantastic two player mode. I'm pretty sure DM never had a two player mode.

    ---

  • Bards Tale, now THAT was an absolute classic. Okay, so it all boiled down too "Walk over there, kill stuff, grab gold and experience, head back to Inn to save, lather rinse repeat" but that game was so fiendishly addictive. The sequels blew though:(

    As for DM, I think the coolest thing was Chaos Strikes back, the wicked intro on disk 2 if I recall. I still quite often hum that music to this day:)

    ---

  • >Being bombarded with 50 quests simultaneously really kills the level of enjoyment dramatically.

    I'm playing it for the first time. I think the game rocks. The way to handle the quest system is to realize that the game is broken up into chapters. Don't finish any quests that will take you to a new chapter. Don't worry about anyone saying "Do this as soon as possible! Now! Now! Now!" Very few of the quests are time dependant.

    I started off with a Gnome Illusionist, got frusterated about 30% though and started over with a Half-orc. His name is Crunch. He rocks.

    Later,
    ErikZ
  • Look, I use Java applications *today* (for example, the Sanger Centre's recent genome browser Artemis)

    Some rather interesting observations:

    1) Artemis, although a pure Java application, has separate Windows, Macintosh, and UNIX versions. Great platform independence there.

    2) It is slow, and unstable. You might say, well that's the fault of the authors -- except -- when it dies, it dies with errors coming from Java's own interface classes, suggesting that Java, and not the application itself is at fault.

    I'm well aware that Corel Java Office is an old project. The painful fact is that no new projects of similar scope exist. Nobody is porting huge applications to Java anymore.

    I'm open minded here --if shown an example of a speedy, stable, large Java application that actually exists and is not vapor, I could change my mind. However, at present I can't help thinking that Java fans, like religious people, want me to believe in something without proof.
  • I agree. Free will is important for an immersive experience. In fact possibly the greatest example of freedom I found in a game was in an old game called Damocles if I recall, by Paul Woakes. I think that was his name. He wrote Mercenary anyway.

    This was a good few years ago, but if I recall the character you play was running for election and had to win. Anyway, I came across a woman and child related to the story. I honestly don't remember now what the storyline was, but what I DO remember is saying to my friend "I'm going to steal her kid for a laugh" and the game let me. I picked up the kid, the mother asked me to give him back, so I ran away. I was entered in the election in the game and, if I recall, there was a news story about me kidnapping this womans child, which I thought was very cool given that it had absolutely no relevance to the game, yet the design was made in such a way as to deal with it on the off chance some psycho like me decided "I'm gonna kidnap her kid!":) Now THAT'S freedom.

    ---

  • There's a partial fix for the case dependency available in the message boards here [ezboard.com].
  • Posted by asscottb:

    Yeah, with heavy use of mmv I got it running...Strange mix of "original" chunky graphics and modern, smooth graphics. However, I am still getting exceptions when I create a character, so the I have not yet completely got everything worked out. Gotta go code now (finals week :| ), so I probably won't get it all together before someone else does. I must say though, I am very happy to see this port. I still use DM as a design base for all of my games, especially the UI. scott sig? Nah, I feel fine, but thanks for asking
  • Using Java as a server side scripting language it all very interesting, but it rather goes against the whole reason of Java -- to provide platform independent *applications*. Yes, Java has improved, as have the skills of Java programmers. So where are the Java applications? In both the closed and open source worlds, big projects like office suites are still being done in C++.
  • Can still remember playing DM on my amiga 500, I Was thinking of this recently "hey, I should play that game again, it was soooo f... cool" but I didn't feel like pluging the A500 back, thank you Java :) that will rock! :)

  • Did anyone notice that the EYE (to look at items) and the MOUTH (to eat stuff) is actually the main character of Final Fantasy 8 ? His name is Squall btw.
  • Doh, you're on to me. I better burn all my chicken heads and put the quazits to bed early.

    --
    rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
  • Resin webserver. Makes tomcat seem lazy ;) Matches apache in static serving speed, too.
  • The tour de force that I like is that:
    It is written entirely in Java, and is designed to run as a stand-alone application rather than an applet in a web browser. It has high-resolution graphics that simulate a 3D environment. Most of the graphics are rendered in the free ray-tracer Pov-Ray. Item graphics and character portraits are done by hand with a paint program, though many are simply taken from the original and its sequels and touched-up.

    Gameplay is very similar to the original, with real-time action, 90-degree turns, and step-by-step movement. One major change from the original is that monsters are not "stuck" in groups: they are completely free to wander, sometimes occupying a square with other monsters and sometimes not.

    You just got to admire the effort it took to port it completely over.
  • Two words:

    Neverwinter Nights [neverwinternights.com]

    Dungeon Master, Wizardry [aol.com], and like games [zdnet.com], started a tradition of dungeon crawl RPGs that are currenly best explemfified by Diablo II [battle.net] on one end of the spectrum, and Baldur's Gate II [interplay.com] on the other. But it looks like Bioware's [bioware.com] Neverwinter Nights is about to take the crown.
  • I played the first DM while a freshman at NC State Raleigh. I, my dormmate, and a few others from the hall would go down to the quad each night, load up on snacks (I literally came back with $4 worth of MM's and candy bars, and a 22 ounce soda, each night), come back and play the game. One guy would map, I would drive, and the others would chill on the bunk behind us. People would occasionally stop by to see how far we had gotten.

    The coolest experience ever was when we discovered you could kill the mutant shrubs by getting it to stand in a doorway and watch the door smash it to bits! We laughed for hours after.

  • Fond memories (Score:5)

    by fleener ( 140714 ) on Sunday March 18, 2001 @05:32AM (#356386)
    My fond memory: playing Dungeon Master for several hours, then walking out of my room and encountering my brother in the hallway. My first impulse was to throw a club at him.
  • If it's "whole new game with new content!" is it actually Dungeon Master?
  • I even went so far as to run the Amiga emulator on my box so I can get my DM fix from time to time ;) Man, that game was a classic. Sucked back more puter hours than even Elite did.

    Bad timing though, now I have another new thing to suck back my nonexistant free time. The wife may not see me for a month!

    --
    rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)

  • Re:Good news! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    currently the best emulators
    saint.atari.org
    steem.atari.org

    could also try
    http://www.atarist.com/code/echo.php3

    all windows based
  • Not only was the Amiga version of the original EOTB first... it was a marginally better done product than the PC version.

    The second one was developed for both systems.

    The third one never made it to the Amiga, as far as I know.

    That sucked.

    "Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"

  • But it's java dept? (Score:3)

    by Aerosiecki ( 147637 ) on Sunday March 18, 2001 @07:22AM (#356391)
    Now really, you mock the fact that it is in Java in the sub-header, but let's think about this.

    Most of the time here on /., everyone is bitching about things being tied to the Windows world. If a video clip is only available in a windows format, everyone whines till the cows come home.

    However, now something is out in Java, which you can play on windows (should you be a masochist), Linux, Solaris, hell, even more obscure things. So why the instant negative attitue towards Java? Is that whole "Java is Slow" myth still floating around so prominantly?

    Daniel

    --

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