f13.net

I was surfing around the web and I came across a multiplayed indy game developement environment called BYOND. It is a 2D tile based multiplayer game engine so graphics whores might want to click the back button now. The graphics in most of the games I've played on it are circa 1992.

There are a bunch of user created games on it with everything from "GTA: Online" to Zelda Online to UO clones to strange little RTSs and other crazy stuff. The GTA Online for example is flash game style stick figure graphics where you run around in multiplayer stealing cars and shooting the other players. There also seems to be a large number of anime (like Dragonball) clone games as well as MTG style card game arenas. And lastly I'll mention that there is a "table top pen & paper" which is suppost to enable pen & paper RPGing via the net but I didn't try it. Most of the interfaces are pretty clunky combinations of Windows GUI, mouse, and keyboard input.

There were about 1000 players on playing any one of 115 different games available on the system when I tried it out. Everything seems to be free as far as I can tell. Most games have between 2 and 10 people playing them.

For anyone who is more talented, it might be a way to explore your MMOG ideas. The strength of it seems to be the no brain power required to impliment multiplayer.

Download the client first and then you can launch the games via the browser.

http://games.byond.com/

I've played with it some in the past.  The libraries that come with the game provide alot of helpful functions for handling the UI and multiplayer stuff.  The language used to write games is OO, with inheritance and all that jazz, but has some odd things, like using tabs and other whitespace as block structures.  Handling the information 'panels' in the client is a bit of a PITA too, but not impossible.

Alkiera

Actually not uncommon in programming languages.

Seriously?  Can you name one or more than one language that does so?  How about more than one language that is in current use?
Every language I know more of than just a name ignores extra whitespace completely.

Fortran and Python are probably the most widely used "space-sensitive" languages where indentation and such matter.  Also  ABC, Haskell, and the syntax in Makefiles.

Bruce

It took me a few to figure out that wasn't a programming language but a misplaced right hand.   :-D

Python's whitespace dependence is why I haven't learned it, despite it being a fairly popular and by all accounts useful scripting language.  It just feels wrong.   :-P  People who didn't cut their teeth on C-like languages seem to take to it pretty readily, though.

Despite being a Java programmer I consider the dominance of the C family of languages to be a great evil, and welcome our future Python and Ruby overlords.

But it's all the fault of the "pay lots of money for our technology" Smalltalk companies: If the three dominant companies back in the '80s had "done a Sun" and made Smalltalk as readily available as Java is now... ah, but that ship has sailed.

Python is used in the games industry too. E.g. EVE and ToonTown make extensive use of it.

It's not as bad as it sounds. And if you use something like python-mode in Emacs it's just the same as using c-mode -- everything is auto-indented for you.

Freedom Force uses Python as its scripting language (accessible to mod authors).

Lua seems to be creeping into the game industry too.

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Re: Byond...

Now that I've played around with it some more it is a pretty powerful MMOG prototyping platform. It really is a shame that they don't have a 3D client for it. A flash or java based in-browser client would make it a killer app even in 2D. At the moment I have realtime combat, a use based skill system, and player housing (or should I say player built dungeons) setup in it in 811 lines of code. All of those were off the shelf libraries or examples from their developer section which I spliced togather. Other off the shelf libraries include full RPG leveling systems, monster AI, inventory systems, etc. The only multiplayer code there was to write was in the Login() and Logout() events and as far as I know it can support as many players as the hardware can handle.

Yes, it's pretty interesting the amount of stuff that the game engine handles for you.  I've played with it some in the past, but not recently.  Creating art that doesn't suck always holds me back.

Alkiera

This site has a pretty good collection of free sprites:
http://www.molotov.nu/?page=graphics

The nice thing about the Byond image importer is that it detects if the image isn't 32x32 and automatically cuts it up into 32x32 images and automatically unique labels them.

Poser also renders pretty good character graphics at 32x32.

I'm using a combination of free sprites, not so free sprites (from old tile based games), and custom sprites. Graphics always seem to be the most time consuming which is why I applaud more new games taking the Spore route.

I could put some stuff together for someone, if you can't find any generic stuff you like.  I'm not... y'know... great at it, or anything, but it's something I enjoy doing.