Angband, Nethack, MOOs, and other text

GameSetWatch has a very in-depth article talking about Angband and Nethack, two classic roguelike games. It’s well worth a read if you are familiar with the genre.

Along the same lines, Julian Dibbell’s book “My Tiny Life” is now available. It describes his time playing in LambdaMOO , and is based in part on his Village Voice article, “A Rape In Cyberspace“.

For those readers too young to know these games, roguelike games are single-player dungeon exploration games like Diablo, and MOO/MUDs a type of MMORPG. The mechanisms are remarkably similar, but the graphics were all terminal based. Keep in mind you can still try these games right now.

While we are on the topic: It Is Pitch Dark.

Rsync vs. cvsup roundup

Vincent Stemen found that it was difficult to get cvsup running on DragonFly, and went looking for mirrors that supplied DragonFly via rsync. Joerg Sonnenberger handily supplied an example script, and Simon ‘codecode’ Schubert supplied a more complex example, though there are more servers that run rsync than just the one in the script. Vincent’s further tests showed better performance with rsync, though Garance A Drosihn pointed out these tests were not comprehensive enough to point out a real advantage. Csup, the cvsup replacement that isn’t dependent on modula-3, is close to working completely as a replacement, though it doesn’t remove the need for cvsupd.

Pile of links time

A bunch of links from around the web, thrown out while I catch up on my backlog of news:

Nostalgia gaming: Micropolis

Micropolis, a cleaned-up version of the original SimCity game, is now available under the GPL. Anyone know if this works on a DragonFly system? Don Hopkins’ blog is a good place to see details about the history and ideas involved, among other things. (Via lot of places)

Note that there’s already some open-source clones out there, like lincity-ng.  Feel free to comment with more links if you know them.

A shout-out for wiki work

Dario Banno and Matthias Schmidt have both been doing a lot of cleanup work on the version of the Handbook contained in the wiki. I want to point out the work they are doing because it’s helpful, and also because it’s possible for anyone else to contribute to this. If you’ve been feeling an itch to do something, here’s your chance to contribute to DragonFly with only a few seconds of labor.