Maybe RPGWO still has a future.

[Raikaria]

torming on how to get get a server going so we can promote and try to get some kinda green light situation on steam or something.

Steam greenlight is shutting down very soon. It'll allow direct publishing afterward.

[Powerfox]

Good stuff Powerfox i remember the days of the file formats and hexing the updater/client learned a lot back then.

Yeah I was only like 15 back then when I first did the autoupdater hex, can't even remember where I learned how to do it, probably here somewhere.

I knew 2d tile based worlds are usually stored fairly simply, just converted all of the bytes in the .map to decimal strings and dumped them to a text file then sifted through the numbers. After making a few changes around 0,0 (Removing water, changing elevation, /surface etc) then saving and comparing the two files, its fairly easy to determine what most of the sections of the file are storing.

[Powerfox]

Got my own generator to export to .map and loaded by the server, this is a 2000x2000 map (10x10 sectors)



It's generated using a simple noise creator I made myself but it's fairly limited which is why its a bit spiky and there aren't any snowy mountains.

Gonna switch over to a more powerful noise library today, main thing is that I have it properly loading/saving and working fine in-game, so all there is to do is play around with the generation to get something a bit nicer.

[Mystic]

I do agree with how popular sandbox/rougelike games are getting it would be nice to see RPGWO make a comeback, though I doubt it will.

I'd love to take a crack at an offline version, but I don't know the first thing about working with graphics in C#.

[Powerfox]

It was a long time ago so I don't remember it well but RPGWO never really took off in the first place, did it? It and Star Wars Galaxies have always been my gold standard of open world sandboxes that were entirely powered by players and communities.

No MMOs really capture that nowadays, in vanilla, WoW had that community feel where you would regularly bump into the same people and talk to the same people every day in global chat. Like SWG there were server celebrities, in-jokes, popular communities etc and everything felt a lot more meaningful.  Nowadays when you play an MMO there is little to no player interaction and it actually makes people a bit uncomfortable if you try to talk to them at all.

The surge in multiplayer survival/sandbox games is a step forward but none really have the same scope that RPGWO has, and it doesn't help that the amount of resources you'd need to create a fully functioning procedurally generated 3D sandbox MMORPG is orders of magnitude higher than something like RPGWO, which is basically a (Not so) fancy windows gui that sends and receives packets every so often.

So the concept is kinda stuck in a catch 22 situation where its very difficult to make it attractive by today's standards  due to technical limitations so nobody really bothers trying to make it, but in its current state its too basic looking for most people to bother even giving it a chance.


Anyhow the world generator is pretty much finished I think. It's an unholy mess that I'll need to go through and clean up if I even want to think about releasing it.  Still been toying around with settings but it produces worlds that are playable in that the sloping lands have plenty of flat on them so building isn't an issue, and have some more interesting features than the vanilla one (More chance of islands, 'hidden' flatlands in the middle of mountain ranges etc)

Did biomes ever make it into RPGWO? I swear I remember farming in a desert area on V1. It wouldn't be too difficult for me to add varying biomes to this generator if there was a relatively easy way to define them.

(The map viewer in the server makes maps kinda ugly on account of not properly showing mountain snow nor green)

[Mickey Kudlo]

Biomes kinda made it into V2. Don't really recall exactly what.

V6 has them for sure. Each 50x50 area is a biome area. Cold areas to the north and hot areas to the south. Elevation variations was dependant on the biome, so plains would get a few plateaus but mountains get all sorts of elevation variation.

It looked ugly from a distance but as a player, you didn't notice... well, I didn't.

[Doogles]

Was there ever any consideration to a 'round' world?  One such that east/west boundaries were connected.

[Raikaria]

Can't you just implement that by putting a full wall of invisible warp traps through the entire land boundary?

[Powerfox]

Yeah you could just have teleports on all sides for a janky 'round world'.

About the floating maps, the save code Mickey posted shows that maps with a Z position over 100 are saved in a separate dungeons folder, so these are what would have been used and combined with scripts for separate dungeons/instanced home plots.

Problem is with no dungeon map files to look at the save code isn't enough to know exactly what is being saved there nor how to actually get them set up and loaded by the server. Tried messing around for 30 mins earlier and couldn't seem to get it to load / warp to it with /warp.

Not sure I'd be able to get it working without A: some .map files for working dungeons/floating maps or B: an explanation from someone who knows how they work/are saved.

[Neanderthal_Man]

I know this is kinda old but Steam is just what RPGWO needs. I would deffinetly help in any way I could if we could make this happen.

[EvilisticknessV2]

Honestly, I left for 10 years and didn't expect this game to still be up when I looked it up last month.  Definitely brought back many good memories so I got involved again.  Unfortunately, it is upsetting to see how few people still actively play.  There are many days that I am the only player on for several hours. 

[Mickey Kudlo]

The problem is Visual Basic 6. I just spent 1 year working on V3 and it was painful. It is over 20 years old and was worse than dealing with a teenager.

[Raikaria]

What is so bad about Vb6 (Haven't done this before) ?

[Pokemon Steve]

Open Source. Enough is enough

[chronolink]

Open Source. Enough is enough

Jordonias the MILF hunter