34 replies to this topic

[ice_cold]

Posted 21 May 2008 - 10:54 PM 

Thoughts i'd reply to this with a few thoughts (so this post isn't in any great structured order!)

 I'll start this post by saying that Nightmist is not for sale unless it's a stupidly large amount and the staff (and players to an extent) agree it's in the best interests of the game/community.

 Nightmist (as an idea) was created by Pandilex back in the year 2000 when we were in school, I then spent an entire summer writing the first version, and lots of code was written up until about 2002 time ish. Development work then slowed down due to my university degree in maths and computer science, then full time employment at an accountants since january 2006 (working in the IT dept and doing a lot of programming there too). I have met people through Nightmist that I consider to be great friends irl, and Nightmist has been, is, and will continue to be, great fun for me to run.
 My main reason for not giving Nightmist much of a priority is that irl I have a lot more to do now and I am also lucky to have a great job that I really enjoy and I am able to do as much paid overtime as I wish (I intend to buy my own house soon, and given the current market conditions with banks, this requires a large deposit!)
 Nightmist is easy for me to look after, having written it from scratch - it would be difficult for others to run as it is not really documented at all. It would be next to impossible without a great deal of time spent reading the code to actually understand how I did it. Now I do admit that I have not done much on Nightmist in quite a while but I do intend to do a lot more development on Nightmist because there is a lot more on the list to add to the game.

 Hiring additional programmers is rather futile since it's so complex and it would take ages for me to explain everything to them and I do not want to release the source code for the game or provide remote access to the nightmist server in london to other people. There is also the possibility that someone would copy all the code and then create their own version of the game that was exactly the same.

 If there is urgent stuff that needs looking into, then it does get done rather quickly, and I am freely contactable on MSN, leave messages if I don't reply, it's usually always on.

 Another thought, is that it is fairly obvious that the game isn't as popular as it used to be, there used to be 300 odd people on nightmist (back in 2003 or so when people only used a few alts, so say 100 real people) every night. These days, you have world of warcraft and other graphical games that will take people away from the classic 80s/90s text based games. I don't believe it is possible for text based games in general to survive with the kids of today who are all into the console based graphical games. When I started on computers in the early 90s (i was born in 1983), text based was all there was, and PCs were only just coming around (intel 386, 486), I personally learnt the BASIC language on a BBC Micro, which i still have!
 You may think that this is a reason for me not to continue development on Nightmist, and I will admit, it probably looks like that to many people based on my limited appearances on the game. However that is not the case, I have always said that I will continue to run Nightmist for as long as there are players to play the game. The financial costs to me to keep Nightmist running are perfectly justified given what the staff team and I have created over the many years, Nightmist means a lot to me, even if you think that I have deserted it.

 Hmm, I think that's everything I have to say, feel free to ask questions and I shall reply. 

[ice_cold]

I apologize but I was having problems with the forum and quoting/pasting anything in the forum. The above quote is from JLH from a portion of the website that can't easily be searched however I remember reading it and showing it to Stig a couple years ago. I understand it's a bit hard to read as I had to find a workaround to get it to post to the forum and I wasn't about to rewrite all of that, but I'm pretty sure any rational person can read that and understand where he's coming from. I would also like to say that JLH even now hasn't abandoned the game and extremely recently just made changes to the gamr for us for which none of the players thanked him for (at least on the forum). There are more things then just JLH possibly not wanting to code this that's holding this back from being added to the game and that was already stated by Wes a few messages ago.

[Exor]

Thanks for posting that. That makes sense now, and I totally understand where he's coming from. I guess the code is just so garbled that it's not feasible for anyone else to take over. Maybe when JLH gets older he'll slow down and have time to spend again on ol NM, you never know. He's in his 30s now, and I seriously have expectations this game is going to be up and running with players when he turns 40. If there's still people plaiyng today, there will be a decade from now. I thought the game would be dead long before now, but I was definitely wrong. There is still an interest in text based games. And of course there's a large part of nostagia in it. For most of you, this version of nightmist is able to fuel all your nostalgia. But for me, my main nostalgia comes from pre-reset. So I suppose that's partly why I'm so desperate to be able to see a pre-reset map/server up again someday. I think I'd have a nostalgic overload.

 

I'm sure this is the same reason I've campaigned on twitter to Blizzard's heads to create a legacy server for World of Warcraft for the past 4 years. I'm certain -that- will eventually happen, but I can't say the same about pre-reset NM sadly!

 

basically - who cares? just hunks.

[Tietsu]

Lose yourself to dance.

[ice_cold]

I personally seem to be having problems quoting anyone, is this just an issue with me or is anyone else having this problem?

 

To Exor

 

There was a time when there was discussion of adding the pre-reset maps to either the multi-alt or 1-alt server. I won't go into to much detail about that, but it would be interesting to see a pre-reset map added to the 1-alt server even if it wasn't connected to the map. Staff could tp level 1 characters there, those players local there, and now it's a pseudo pre-reset server. That is a lot of work to set up the area's (and they would probably need to ask for the old descriptions which Simon was saying are somewhere) and tp'ing characters, plus if staff stop logging on we would lose the ability to transfer to it, but it would be super fun.