Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I am a high school computer teacher. We are planning an Internet adventure game and would love to have someone who would like to advise us on some of the more techy aspects.

You can see a sample of a similar game I personally started to make when I was first playing around with webpage design at: http://users.techline.com/leiske/journey.html

Feature needed #1.

We want to have players be able to access the game with their own username and password (which they would just make up - no eMail required). When the players quit the game, they would be able to return to where they left off in the game, by the username and password identification.

Feature needed #2

Each player would have some information like where they left off last time, any points they may have earned or things they may have "picked up" along their way. I am assuming that all of these features would be done by some simple section of code in maybe PERL (which I know little about) which would allow the program to access invisibly a database of personal info for each player.

Maybe you have some suggestions or a user of your website that my wish to help us. It would be a great help.

Thanks so much.

Donn Leiske

dleiske@elma.wednet.edu

Edited 2002-01-03 by Ovid. Fixed the formatting. This almost seems like a "do my job" node, but it seems like a good cause.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Nethack
by drinkd (Pilgrim) on Jan 04, 2002 at 20:44 UTC
    IMHO, the ultimate rogue-like game is Nethack.

    This is an open source game which has been worked on for decades now by a constantly changing team. It does work over the internet, but is basically a local game, albeit very complicated.

    Maybe your students could use the source to get some ideas or solve some problems, or could perhaps build a web-based (Perl-based, of course) interface to a nethack server. The game has had a bit of a resurgence recently due to the recent Halloween occuring on full moon, both of which cause special things to happen in Nethack.

    Your project does sound like fun.

    drinkd

[reply]
Re: Help with game
by vladb (Vicar) on Jan 05, 2002 at 02:56 UTC
    The best "Internet Adventure Game" I could suggest (without seeming to be exceedingly self-centered in attending to my own likes etc.) is Ultima Online. You could have a server on your school network running an Ultima Online POL server. There's tons of server scripts that are written in a language similar to C/JavaScript, and I bet it would be hell lot of fun working on your own game scripts to enhance/modify the gameplay in any way you see fit.

    At a high-school I was attending, we ran a CS club where the only thing we did is solve some Math problems with C/Pascal. In retrospect, I think having had something like this would have been rather great.

    Also, there's a way for one to write Perl scripts to interact with the POL server (I think it's possible, though not announced in any official way ;-) and spit out certain game info on the web.

    Of course, for simplicity's sake, you may just resort to something like NetHack... but I, for one, would prefer UO over this alternative.

    Besides, reading as you know nothing but a little bit of Perl, you might as well give your students an opportunity to practice their 'hacker' skills at scripting the UO POL server. Here're some links for you:

    "There is no system but GNU, and Linux is one of its kernels." -- Confession of Faith
[reply]
Re: Help with game
by rbc (Curate) on Jan 04, 2002 at 05:27 UTC
    I remember an old curses based game called urogue.
    You might be able to use perl to write a cgi that interfaces
    with urogue and present its output on a web-page to the players

    Wish I had time to work on something
    like that. Sounds like fun.

    Good Luck

    --
    Its like a dog that can sing and dance.
    It's remarkable because it can do it.
    Not that it can do it well.
[reply]

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