Slashdot Mirror
A Tale in the Desert II Goes Open Beta
Teppy writes "Yesterday afternoon, A Tale in the Desert II launched its open beta. Sometimes called 'a strange psychology experiment', ATITD is a competitive, independently developed PC MMO game, previously covered on Slashdot, based on socialization. Windows and Linux clients are available for download from the official website. If Slashdot readers use the special code 'farmertaco' and visit a school of Art and Music, special goodies await." We've previously covered the first iteration of this unique, combat-free MMO.
A mac port is currently in progress (written by the same guy who wrote the linux client), and supposedly very close to completion.
I'm sorry it wasn't fun for you. I found tons of things that weren't just grinding. Most of my goals throughout the game didn't require me to make a single brick or pick up a single blob of clay. Even most of the defined challenges, the 7 Tests in each of 7 Disciplines, do not require massive repetition of simple tasks.
Macroing is permitted in ATITD, provided that you are attending sufficiently to respond to GMs. However, despite initial appearances macros are not very useful and not really widely used. Most goals have a number of ways to achieve the same end, and if you feel you need to mindlessly click something a few thousand times then you may be missing a less tedious way to reach your objective. Many of the tasks in the crafting/building system depend upon player skill, not character skill levels or ability to tirelessly repeat the same action thousands of times. Finally, you achieve the highest position of Pharaoh's Oracle in most of the Disciplines by your abilities and reputation as a player and citizen of Egypt, not by having your character amass the most stuff.
If something is getting too repetitive, there are at least a hundred other goals you could be working toward; no player will master them all. Take a break from your current rut and try something else. I believe that anyone who finds themselves caught up in "the monotony of repeatedly doing the same thing" has lost sight of the long range goals in the game, and the fact that there are many different ways that they can work toward those goals.
-- Tim Little
Just download from one of the mirrors to the right side of the home page. When you install it, it'll say "A Tale in the Desert" (not II), but once it's installed you can choose to play ATITD or ATITD2 beta. It's very confusing, I know.
Actually, the network code was already byte order clean, however lots of the internal buffering code, and actual graphics code made assumptions about the byteordering in memory which where incorrect. Those are just a matter of tracking them down...
As for using network byte-ordering for eveything in RAM that is just horribly nuts... (why should I byte swap every int and every pointer before it ever saved in RAM...) The game was written to be portable, but over its lifetime, it was never tested and audited to ensure that it work on anything except PC hardware)