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Dungeon Master Returns
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.
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.
:-) 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.
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.
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.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
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.
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.
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.
/. 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
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
-schussat
The hour of noon has passed. Let us go and get some Kentucky Fried Chicken.
- 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."
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Sorry, that "or" at the beginning is really a "for"
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
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!
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted and ignored otherwise.
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
The hour of noon has passed. Let us go and get some Kentucky Fried Chicken.
- 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.
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.
---
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++.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Two words:
Neverwinter Nights
Dungeon Master, Wizardry, and like games, started a tradition of dungeon crawl RPGs that are currenly best explemfified by Diablo II on one end of the spectrum, and Baldur's Gate II on the other. But it looks like Bioware's 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.
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.
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.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Now really, you mock the fact that it is in Java in the sub-header, but let's think about this.
/., 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.
Most of the time here on
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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Cherish. Live. Dream.