GABYSOFT

If you've beaten this version of Oubliette and want some more, then you might be interested in playing the original version on Cyber1.

Click on 'How to get started' on http://www.zimlab.com/oubliette/plato for instructions.

Snafaru

p.s. On Cyber1 you'll also experience the beginning of multi-player computer role-playing games. Besides Oubliette, you'll find other very popular games such as Avatar, Empire (Star Trek) and a slew of other ones, too many to list here, you won't believe your eyes, I didn't, this is all where it all began folks, unlike today there was nothing anywhere near like it anywhere else in the entire world at that time.

Some Sherlock Holmes that obviously is not registered did a lot of sleuthing around and pieced together my identity to ask me for help with cyber1. wow. what a lot of work to avoid registering on this forum.

If anyone else wants help, but isn't registered or a consulting detective, send email here:

mithrilranger10@gmail.com

I will check for email every couple days. Be patient.

Cyber1 isn't that hard. My 10 year old uses it. It is just a bit different in an olde timey sort of way. You'll figure it out in about 20 minutes or less.

I would love to create a multi-player version of Oubliette, but it would require a certain level of users to be playable. The original Oubliette was designed so that you could NOT play it alone. Each player controlled only one character and a single character (even a ranger) could not survive by himself. The means that there would need to be enough users so that you could reasonably put together a party when you wanted to play. Unfortunately, I am not sure that Oubliette has enough players to support that.

The problem with that is that if you make the game playable solo, then you will find most people playing it by themselves which kind of defeats the idea of making it multiplayer. I have see this in most of the MMRPG games that I have tried. You have thousands of people, all playing by themselves. It is not the kind of game that interests me. Oubliette was a very social game and the fun of it was playing with a group of other real people.

The biggest problem with supporting mobile devices (not just iOS) is that you need to have a way for people to come and go as they please. If you are on your phone, you need to be able to leave to take a call. The problem is if you are down deep in the dungeon, or even in a battle, how do you handle that? I have some ideas on that subject that I can share if people are interested, and I am interested in any suggestions that players might have on how to deal with that.

I am not sure a bot would really cut it. I can just hear the screaming now if someone left and came back only to find that their 'bot' did something stupid and their character died. In addition, a player may need to leave and not come back for some time, and that needs to be addressed as well. A dungeon trip for a party might take an hour or more and the nature of mobile games is that you can come and go as you please on a whim. This enables you to play while you are waiting at the doctor's office or some such and leave when you get called. But if you were in a party that was down deep in the dungeon and had to leave for an hour, when you came back you would find yourself alone down deep with not much chance to survive.

A couple of ideas that I had were:

1) If you had to leave for a short time during combat, you could set it so that the leader of the party could control your character for the remainder of the combat. I would want this feature to be quite limited in scope, or it could be used by people to play the game solo which is something I would not want to encourage.

2) If you left the game and were not in combat, perhaps your character would remain in the party as a 'ghost'. It would move along with the party but would not participate in future combats and could not be injured or killed. When you returned to the game, you would have the option to rejoin the party in progress (assuming it was still around). I do worry that this feature could exploited, however, by purposely leaving the game to avoid some unpleasantness.

3) Another alternative for when you had to leave for a protracted period of time would be to allow you to join up with parties that are currently on the level you return to without having to find them. We might be able to add some kind of push notification that would notify you when there are players on a given level so you can pop in and join up. Again, however, I worry that such an option could be exploited.