It was a sad day when EnB died. Unfortunately, the publisher did not want to support the game any longer as they did not consider it to be a successful title. It does not matter that they reportedly had around 30,000 subscription on close, which is more than enough to keep the servers running, and even make a little extra profit.

It depends on how much personal player skill is involved in the game. It is surprising what can be achieved when you have a solid game core, with the flexibility to allow players to influence combat directly, instead of relying on designed skills.

DarkSpace?

Of course, you would have to try it to see why it is so unique. And I would never listen to myself, personally, considering the whole bias issue...

Try Neosteam?

Try looking at some of the smaller titles if you want PvP only...

If you want to assist in distributing the latest version of DarkSpace, you can do your part by helping to host the DarkSpace Installer Torrent.

All you need is some torrent software, such as is available at http://www.utorrent.com, and then to download the latest DarkSpace executable at the following link:

http://www.darkspace.net/index.htm?module=files.php&download_id=408

If you are worried about this sucking up all of you bandwidth, you can restrict just how much the upload can use.

In uTorrent, simply right click on the file, select Bandwidth Allocation > Upload Limit > and select the desired limit. Depending on your connection I would recommend setting this to between 15kB/s and 30kB/s, as these values will generally not interfere with your gaming too much.

You can pretty much just leave this running in the background when you are using your computer and it will have a minimal impact on performance, although there are some tweaks you can try if you do experience issues.

Contact me via drafell@palestar.com if you need any assistance.

Our Thanks.

- The Development Team

You mean cannon fod...

The easier way is to generate a unique ID number when a new user joins. This unique ID is then used to track that player through the game system and cannot be changed. When you request to block xxSephirothxx, you are in fact blocking user #0380085 via their ID number.

We use a similar system in DarkSpace, and it works well for both us and the user base.

I am still playing DarkSpace.

Medusa is a fully featured C++ development platform for MMO games. It includes the server backend, rendering engine, audio engine, chat facilities, update manager, an asset manager, and just about anything else you will need, except talent and programming skill...

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Richard Lyle, Palestar Inc. CEO, is happy to announce that the full source code for the Medusa Engine is now available for download. He has been wanting to do this for years, and our hope is that the community can step in and help improve the code and help make new features that we can all share.

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Richard Lyle, Palestar Inc. CEO, is happy to announce that the full source code for the Medusa Engine is now available for download. He has been wanting to do this for years, and our hope is that the community can step in and help improve the code and help make new features that we can all share.

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Being 'attuned' to a zone would be a similar experience to how skills would work. Everything on you would slowly lose it's adherence to it's original host zone unless used on objects within that zone. Keeping a zone 4 item attuned to zone 4, while the player is in zone 5, would require you continually use it on zone 4 objects.

Essentially you have parallel worlds. You might die on one, only to wake up and find you were not killed in another, it was only a flesh wound. Soulbound items would then have another, entirely different, role. They are bound to your soul, not to your body.

Added some expanded text and information with regards to levels and skills to the OP.

Yeah, but that's not really intended in WAR :-P

I have considered the following concept on and off for a number of years. It can be a little confusing to describe to begin with, but hopefully I can pull it off adequately.

The Concept.
Imagine that there are an infinite number of parallel worlds surrounding us. We move through them blindly, with every action changing our balance and alignment with the world around us.
Now, imagine that we are not so blind, that we can see the adjacent worlds as ghosts. We can interact with and manipulate those ghosts, but doing so will pull us into that world and away from our own.

Making it work.
You start with ten identical zones. This is not a fixed number, but just for demonstration purposes. You start off in zone 5. You can see things in zones 4 and 6 as solid looking, but translucent objects. You can also see some items in zones 3 and 7. but they would be very 'ghostly', and mostly see through. You have a sword, manufactured in zone 5. The sword does 100% damage to anything else that is within zone 5, but only 66% damage to anything you try to hit in zones 4 or 6, and only 33% damage to those objects in zones 3 and 7.

Every time you interact with something from a different zone, you get pulled more and more into alignment with it. This would apply to all objects as well.

You see a mace on the ground, it is slightly translucent, it is an object from zone 4, so you pick it up. Just by performing this action you get pulled into alignment with zone 4 by a small amount, and the mace gets pulled into alignment with zone 5 a little. You go around, and kill some critters from zone 5 with the mace. It is only doing 66% damage to start with, but the more you use it, the more damage it will do, as it is becoming more aligned with your zone. Your actions with the mace will try to pull you into alignment with it, but as a counter you are hitting objects in your current zone, so you will stay 'anchored'. If this continues, eventually the mace will end up as a part of your zone 5.

Instead you decide to hit critters in zone 4. The mace will do 100% damage to those critters, although it will lose some alignment the more you use it. However, because you are continually interacting with items in zone 4, you will get sucked into that zone. At this point zone 5 will seem slightly translucent to you, and you will be able to see zone 2 items as ghostly objects.

Being 'attuned' to a zone would be a similar experience to how skills would work. Everything on you would slowly lose it's adherence to it's original host zone unless used on objects within that zone. Keeping a zone 4 item attuned to zone 4, while the player is in zone 5, would require you continually use it on zone 4 objects, as well as the player constantly interacting with zone 5 to stay attuned there.

Death and Taxes
The game would be full loot by design. Due the the entire 'parallel worlds' concept, we also have an easy way to deal with and explain away death. It is one of my pet issues that most games just resurrect you with no real explanation as to how. Just because you are killed in a fight, it doesn't prevent a 'parallel' you from coming too in the middle of a battlefield, suffering from a flesh wound that miraculously failed to kill you. Thus you would be transported to a 'safe' parallel location, only carrying items that are bound permanently to your soul, with everything else having been dropped where you died elsewhere, and looted by the pesky attackers. This would also help answer answer the whole issue with regards to why players would want to travel. Maybe you would just want to get back 'home' and defend your slice of the multi-verse, or to enact revenge. This is an important part of the core concept of the game design.

Skills and Levels
What levels? You learn skills, either from other players, game objects or NPC's. How you utilize and combine these is up to you. You can be a magic wielding, plate armored, psychopathic killer if you really want to. There would be skill levels of a sort, but not using a skill for a while will also cause you to lose your edge. You may have been a master swordsman last year, but this year you are out of practice as you have been using that really cool Quarterstaff you attained. Skill levels need to be actively maintained. The same for magic.

Server Model
This is the difficult part, especially as a lot of it will come down to load balance and synchronization issues. Ideally each zone would run on it's own server, but this is not a realistic possibility, and synchronization of potentially hundreds of parallel servers could bring things to a halt quite swiftly. In practice you would probably end up with a single server/cluster processing a group of between 3 - 10 zones. If things become busy, it can offload low population zones to other servers or cluster as needed, with priority being placed on keeping the adjacent zones in sync.

Hopefully this gets the basic idea across. When you start to bring player vs player interaction into things, or multi-zone groups to defeat bosses, thing become far more mind bending. Imagine trying to fight a PvP battle where you can only see half of the players...

Your thoughts would be nice, and also feel free to ask specific or general questions as to how so and so would or might work.

The CSR route is very similar how I got my current role with DarkSpace. I joined the game Staff as a Moderator (mall cop), and slowly progressed to the point where I am now one of the head honcho's in both CSR and development. I would love to be able to define my role more clearly, but there is simply far too much to list.

The main difference with my position and the above article, is that this has been done entirely from home, on a voluntary basis, for less than peanuts, as a hobby, while trying to hold down various full time jobs. I may be a fool for this, but I do get a twisted sense of satisfaction in knowing that I have helped our service survive for so long, and it looks pretty good on the resume too.

You get to see the best and worst in people when dealing with CSR, and as for Tubgirl... that's not even scratching the surface of internet depravity.

Would I do this as a full-time job? I honestly couldn't say. I certainly wouldn't mind getting paid for what I do, but then that brings a whole new series of expectations and commitments.

It would be fun to find out, though.

Quest bangs.

It is not so much how to get rid of them that matters... the issue is with explaining away something so incongruous within a historical or fantasy setting. Magical fantasy would have an easier time of it, and in some ways the implementation would not be that difficult - you only need to look at today's technology (and that of the near future) for inspiration - bluetooth style alerts, job boards, GPS systems and 'enhanced' reality, etc. Each of the aforementioned could be adapted into a magical universe to help 'explain' the bangs, instead of removing them.

Historical settings are another kettle of fish entirely... maybe have little pet monkey that skitters over to nearby NPC's and begins dry humping them if they have quests to offer, or will guide you back to them...

1) DarkSpace
2) GuildWars
3) Everquest
4) WarHammer Online
5) Tabula Rasa

Reasons:

DarkSpace
I have been involved with this title for a number of years now, starting out as a newbie like everyone else, and ending up as one of the main developers and senior GM's. Obviously I love the game and the community, even though (like any title) it has it's share of issues.

GuildWars
This game and it's development team deserve a lot of respect. For PvP it is probably one of the most balanced games out there, and has forced WoW to adapt. I loved the storyline for Prophecies, and have great memories of the early beta days, and the adrenaline rush to complete the Krytan missions before the beta's ended. I don't play it any more, mainly because they started pushing grind (titles, heroes, armor) and that offers no fun for me.

Everquest
This is the first MMO that I ever played, and I lost 6 months of my life to it with leading a guild and the general social aspects.

Warhammer Online
I have played this for a couple of months, although it has lost it's attraction to me, mainly because I am stuck on EU servers, and most of my friends are on the US servers. The PvP sieges are quite good and now have some half-decent rewards, although this was not true in the early days. I like how quests give a general area to go to, and not a precise location. The concept and overall design is good, although some of the feature implementations are questionable, to say the least. Scenarios... need I say more?

Tabula Rasa
Plagued with overambitious system requirements on release, a plethora of bugs, and many other problems, I actually liked this title. The combat system was a refreshing change from other MMO's, and I think this was actually very well done. I also liked some of the CP area's and concepts. However, it did lack for content after the first few zones, and the actual character progress felt very limited, with little replay value for creating a new character.

Anyway, that's my two cents (and then some).

P.S. Wizard101 deserves an honorable mention. It is a great game concept that is well designed. It pretty much nails it's target audience. I also know that Kingsisle are working on another project, although what exactly I haven't been able to fathom as yet. It is certainly a company to keep an eye on.

Haha! Nice video.

Kudos to the person/people that created it.

This is a very simple question to answer.

Is the experience of playing a given game worth more or less than the equivalent value in fast food and beer?