Eric: 00:10 Welcome mages, clerics, thieves, warriors one and all to the Titans of Text podcast. We're your hosts, Eric Oestrich. Danny: 00:17 And Danny "Austerity" Nissenfeld. Eric: 00:19 And we have with us today Dentin of Alter Aeon. We're going to talk about the game. Welcome Dentin. Dentin: 00:26 Hello. Eric: 00:26 All right, so to start us off sell us on Alter Aeon and why I might want to join as a player. Dentin: 00:36 Oh, that's an extremely broad question. If there's one thing I've learned over the years, it's that people have very different desires for what they want out of the game. And just answering that ad hoc without knowing your background is really hard. What I can say is that we have tried to cover almost everything except for dedicated PVP. If you are in any one of the four of the old Bartlett four stereotypes for Explorer and power leveler and things like that, if you're in any of those then there is at least something for you and in Alter Aeon. And we have tried very hard to make sure that there's something for everyone except for hardcore PK. Danny: 01:18 So what got you specifically into mudding was Altar Aeon your first mud? What happened all those years ago? Dentin: 01:26 It's actually a really interesting story, or at least, so I'm told. I was in Alaska on student exchange going to school in the early 1990s one Christmas break. It was just me and a handful of people that stayed in Alaska. Everybody else went home. And so I was in the dorms and everybody was bored and one of my friends comes up to me and says, "Hey, I found this text game online". And it turned out that this was an older game called Hidden Worlds. And we ended up playing it extensively and doing a lot of what would be considered group raids and so forth on a modern MMO. And I played this for a year and spent something like 2,500 hours in that first year playing this old game. And then it went down. There were problems with it and the owners just took it offline at the end of the year, cratered everything, shut it off. That was it. End of the world. And I thought, this is stupid. I'm a computer science engineering student. I can build one of these. And so the next month in January of 1995, I started with void main() in a Unix shell and started putting together the scaffold of what eventually became Alter Aeon. Danny: 02:41 Did you look at any other code bases? For any of the bits like a Diku or anything like that? Dentin: 02:47 I totally looked at code bases. I tried really hard to find something else that we could just bootstrap and run, but it turned out that I didn't actually know enough C and I wasn't a good enough programmer make heads or tails of the existing code, but I did know how to build things from scratch. And so I just started building stuff from scratch and I ended up including no external code whatsoever. The entire code base was built by me and other people in Alter Aeon over the years. Danny: 03:16 Well you said you didn't know enough, you really weren't familiar enough with C to get around an existing base. So what language is it in? Dentin: 03:23 It was written in C because back at that time C was the only programming language that was available basically for free. It's on every Unix machine and I had a Unix account cause I'm a student so I checked to see that the C compiler was installed and I wrote a very basic C program and then I sat down with the KNR C book and learned the minimum stuff that I needed to learn in order to make forward progress on the project. No, that sounds absolutely crazy that you don't know enough about something to be able to work on an existing project, but you know enough to write your own from scratch and that it's really easier than it sounds, because when you're writing something of your own, you're always starting from a state where you understand everything that has happened so far. And when you're grabbing somebody else's gigantic code base that five people have worked on for years, you are being thrown in the middle of a vast ocean of parts and components and complexity. And if you don't have the skills to really understand that, you're not going to be able to make forward progress on that. Danny: 04:30 No, I don't think that's actually all that out of the ordinary. And I'm personally self-taught on BASIC and C. Let's be fair you could have made a mud, I don't know, in basic or lisp or assembly. Maybe assembly would've been too daunting. Speaker 3: 04:50 Well, assembly was the next language that I knew, but you can't really write assembly language programs on Unix machines. I knew that it had to be portable, which takes assembly right out of the picture. I knew it was going to have to run on at least two or three different architectures before we finally figured out a permanent home for it. C was the only only feasible option. Eric: 05:12 Yeah, and I guess just to kind of continue that a bit,,we're both admins of the mud coder's guild and we get new people popping in, checking things out and, and a lot of people say like, "Oh, what big code base can we use to start with like, and I want to learn how to program". It's like, Oh, just like start from scratch and then you'll know exactly what your app does at that point. So I think that's, that's not too crazy, at least from where I'm standing. Dentin: 05:39 It seemed crazy to most of the people that I've talked to over the years think that it's also had this really amazing sort of impact on the way that the game itself plays. Like there are some really subtle weird stuff in Alter Aeon that lets you get complex emergent behavior in ways that you just don't see elsewhere. And I think that's been worth it over time. Just from a personal standpoint, I got a lot out of it. But also from a gameplay standpoint it looks very much like a Merc. It looks very much like a iku in terms of how you can configure it, but it's not, and the stuff that's inside is a lot more interesting than first appears from the very ordinary interface. Eric: 06:23 So speaking about emergent gameplay can you give us an example of that and like how Alter Aeon is different from your standard mud? Dentin: 06:33 One of the most obvious things is that objects and mobs are typically separate entities held in separate lists. And they're not in Alter Aeon. You can pick up a mob if you have the ability to do so. If you have the strength and whatever else, you can pick up a mob and carry it around in your inventory. And that's a little thing that doesn't have a whole lot of impact on the game, but it's used occasionally in ways that are interesting. We also have a number of other features that are just kind of weird in the way that they work together. There was a story on the web about the infinite wood fountain, which is a classic example of the really goofy emergent gameplay that you can get. Danny: 07:17 Okay. You can't just say there's an infinite wood fountain without at least giving us what that means. Dentin: 07:27 I totally can say that. So the basic idea is a long time ago we did allow PK, and there were a couple of people that had a grudge against another person that was kind of a jerk and they found a set of rooms that were connected in a circular fashion with airfall flags so that things would fall out of one room and into the next in an infinite loop. And so you could go into this room and if you didn't have the fly spell up, you would just start plummeting forever and you would fall through this loop of rooms over and over and over again. And so what they did is they went out and got a whole bunch of firewood. They gathered firewood from the forests out in the game, which is a skill that you have is a gathering wood. Dentin: 08:13 So they gather all this firewood and they stood in the room next to the fall loop and threw all the firewood into the fall loop. So there's several thousand pieces of wood falling through this fall loop over and over and over again. And they eventually cast blind on themselves so that they wouldn't see any of the wood stepped in the fountain of wood with blindness cast on themselves so they can't see, they summoned the target. And that actually works because someone can grab the target, even if you can't see them, it just has a chance to fail, a high chance to fail. So they all go in there. They all repeatedly try to summon the target until they eventually get him. And now he's in the fountain of wood and he's falling because he doesn't have the fly spell up. Dentin: 09:06 So he's falling. All the firewood is falling. The minute he tries to do anything, he can't see what's going on because of all the firewood spam. And they retreat back to the edge of the cavern and start shooting fireballs at him as he comes past and eventually kill him in the infinite fountain. And so when he dies, now it's his corpse that's falling in the infinite fountain with all of his stuff in it. And again, this was back in the olden days of PK when you left behind stuff. And when things like this were a lot more common. But it's, it's just such a weird situation where they use this fountain to help them. PK this guy, I'm not really sure how to describe just how unusual that is to find that sort of thing in a, in a modern mud. Danny: 09:51 Apparently. Eric found a fan fiction that you wrote, I suppose cause it is your name about the wood fountain. Dentin: 10:00 And it's, it's embellished in the story, but it's actually based on something that happened for real. And the only reason we noticed it is there was so much stuff in the fountain falling at the same time that was starting to lag the game. Eric: 10:14 Yeah. I was going to ask if, if that had like a noticeable impact on anything and I guess it did. Dentin: 10:19 Yeah. Once they got up to four or 5,000 pieces of wood, it started to be a noticeable drag that dropped from I think the standard eight FPS down to about four. And people started to complain about it. Danny: 10:31 So Alter Aeonbasically had a classic Minecraft chicken generator problem. Dentin: 10:38 Yeah. And, and I think that's why I liked Minecraft so much is because it, it gave me the same core sort of really goofy behavior that we see in Alter Aeon from time to time. Danny: 10:50 I'm going to leave behind fountains of wood and any other material. I was bopping around your website. I noticed you have an entire page about your visual impairment support. Talk a little bit about how you came to recognize the importance of that and and also talk about go into a little bit about how you support the visually impaired player, you know, other than listing like what clients are good for it and that kind of thing. Dentin: 11:21 So I guess around the 2000 or so timeframe, your average PC became fast enough that it was really feasible to have text to speech in a way that made sense like enough of the browser components work together and enough of the TTS stuff work together well enough that somebody of moderate technical skill could actually surf the web in blind mode and be able to navigate things and do things. And we started seeing a handful of these people that would log in using regular Telnet on windows, which is at the time was absolutely terrible, but it worked. And that was the critical thing. So they suddenly had an online set of games that they could play and they would log in and they would try really hard to do things, but sometimes it was just too much. And one of the people that came in eventually became a builder on the game. Dentin: 12:13 He kept sending me messages like, Hey, I get this message an awful lot. If there's any way that I could turn this off, it would be really helpful. And so I thought, Oh, well, you know, that's a perfectly reasonable request. We'll just add that and throw it in and you'll have it tomorrow. And so we've started just doing these things because I was always big on making sure that the gameplay experience wasn't impeded by your interface. And before I know it, I start getting weirder requests for more obscure things and like, Oh, Hey, can you turn off all of the output for this? My screen reader can't keep up. And then it occurred to me, Oh, that's what's going on. We have a separate population with a very specific kind of client that has very specific kinds of needs. Dentin: 12:54 These people don't have random access to the characters on the screen. They can't just skim over stuff. They have to listen to everything in sequence. And that means that everything in sequence has to be important. So if something's not important to them, it should be strippable from the output in some fashion. And we started adding a lot of options and a lot of ability to do that. What we call spam filters where you could just turn off messages that you don't care about. And it was never a matter of, Oh, we have to support the blind player base, or it was never an ethical or moral sort of thing. It was just, Hey, we have users that, that have a legitimate difficulty playing the game with the way that the world is set up. So let's go ahead and make it easier for them because we can, because I know how, because I wrote the code base because we have all the tools. Dentin: 13:46 Let's just do that. And so we started doing that. There's always this assumption that, Oh you, you did all these things for the blind. What made you do that? Or what was your end goal? Or what showed you that? That was a critical sort of thing and it really never was. We always just grew it out of the needs of our player base and over time that player base changed to where the majority of our players are blind but nobody notices and nobody cares because we've put effort into making the interface work well for everyone. I think at some level that's part of the reason that the blind is so dedicated to Alter Aeon is because we don't treat them separately. They get the same interface everybody else does. They turn on a few things and it works really well for them and you don't need to know if, if the people you're playing with are blind or not, everybody can function. Eric: 14:39 Yeah, that sounds pretty great. And I guess kind of pivoting just a tiny bit to some other clients, you, your website also lists a whole bunch of different clients that you can connect with and also some proprietary proprietary ones with like almost every OS listed, which is pretty amazing. How did you go about that? Speaker 3: 14:59 In the olden days, a long time ago, there was this concept of standard mud clients and everybody just used a standard mud client and that really didn't work that well for the blind players who again, have all of these dedicated needs. So one of our blind players from about 10 years ago started putting together a custom mush client pack that had a whole bunch of additional filters and specialized things, a specialized support for the blind and visually impaired. And we eventually found space for him to host his project so that it could live on its own and it could have additional maintainers and everything else. And the vast majority of blind players use that. Then there's the proprietary client, which I'll talk about in a minute, and between those two is everything else. And it turns out that the everything else is such a small fraction of the total player base that we basically don't support or officially approve any of those anymore. Dentin: 15:57 They're there because they've historically been there, but the vast majority of our player base simply doesn't use them and it hasn't been worth spending our limited resources to make sure that all of those clients are up to date. The proprietary client came about because I was having a hard time playing on my own and getting all the information that I felt that I needed in a quick and easy way. So I started looking into, well, I'll build my first GUI app. I've never built a GUI anything before. This will be good experience. I'll throw in together in a few days and we'll see how that works. Three years later there was a vaguely functioning client and I guess I've always been fairly hardcore about making sure that things are our system portable and platform independent. So when it came time to selecting a windows toolkit, I picked something that looked like it had a good chance of being portable. Speaker 3: 16:53 In the future, something that had windows support and have macOS support and had Linux support cause I was going to be doing the development on Linux and I had to be able to port it to the other platforms if I wanted to use it there. I don't like the idea of just building something that runs once on one platform and then having to do the whole thing over again later. And it, it turns out that that's a much more comprehensive project than I thought it was. And nowadays I try to just maintain those clients and make sure that they run, but I don't have the kind of energy to really, really bring them forward into the modern era that they probably need at this point. Danny: 17:31 Have you ever considered ginning up kind of a web client? You know, like a web based client you know, like the little client that grapevine has? Dentin: 17:41 Yeah. Yeah. And I think web clients are actually a really good idea. It's something that we need to put some time into and that we need to straighten out. One of the reasons that it hasn't been particularly important to us is that the sighted player base is actually a minority of our total. If we were going to be truly cost-effective about it, getting people to improve the mush client for the blind would probably have more bang for the buck. That said, I want to have something so that I can play and I can have a good time. So I try to keep the custom GUI client running as best I can. Danny: 18:16 I'd like to take a moment for a word from one of our many sponsors. The Spring Thing Festival of Interactive Fiction. Spring Thing is an annual competition for newly finished and freely available works of interactive fiction. The deadline to submit intent to participate. It's coming up on March 1st. So you should head on down to www.springthing.net and read up on the rules. Check out the prizes and fill out the entry form. That's www dot spring thing, one word, dot net. Danny: 18:50 So let's we've talked a lot of tech talk. Let's get into a bit of the gameplay. So dedicated PVP, you know, like PK PVP is off the table. So how do you keep the game interesting for the people that have been playing this game for you know, decades at this point? Dentin: 19:11 Because the game is really big and we are really good at PVE and making PVE interesting to to say that the world is really big, is not doing it justice. I suppose there's on the order of nearly a thousand areas now and the world isn't just a sprawling conglomeration of a bunch of different pieces of vastly different styles. It's a pretty integrated world and it's a pretty smooth flowing world. You don't just walk from a low level area into a death trap zone that's 30 levels higher than you. So it's, it's very carefully managed in terms of where areas are placed, how areas linked together, how questlines are done, things like that. I guess a good example of the PVE gameplay is that there's a quest line that runs from character creation, I believe, all the way through level 29 or 30 without a single break. Dentin: 20:06 And this takes you across all three of the introductory islands, shows you the pieces of all of them and encompasses hundreds of stop points along the way where people can, can do a side quests or can just continue on the main line. And the best part about it is you don't actually have to do any of the quests to make forward progress or to get through the game. But if you do, there's a lot of bonuses that come along with it that can be helpful. So it's, it's not trying to corral people or constrain anyone into going down a dedicated path, but there are interesting, dedicated paths for almost everyone at almost every level. Danny: 20:42 So we talk about how large the game is and you know that usually in the mud world, traditionally that meant the people just search the internet for every area file they could find and stapled it in somewhere. Saying that you have a continuous world have you ever had to re-engineer, let's say the, not an area itself, but where the areas are what the level ranges are, has that ever had to happen? Like kind of you know, World of Warcraft cataclysm type thing where they basically remade the base world? Dentin: 21:18 I think any game which doesn't do that is actually subject to stagnation for us. That's a every few years sort of event when we discover either some new thing that would be a really good global constraint for all areas to behave in a certain way. Or when we notice that there's just a certain class of problems, I believe it was about five years ago, we started really seriously attacking level disparities between zones and then the idea that you could walk from a low level zone into a high level zone, not really be aware of it and, and get killed. That shouldn't happen. You should at least have notification on it. And so we, we went through the entire world set over the course of a couple of years and tried to figure out, well, what areas do we want to have here? What, what level ranges do we want to have? And we ended up pushing the levels of a lot of stuff around. It's easier to re level a zone than it is to disconnect it and relink the world and still have the world make sense. So we've, we've put a lot of effort into that and we have a lot of tools for doing those sorts of changes to get the kind of global consistency that you need for a game to really be world spanning like this. Eric: 22:30 So what else might you do in the end game of Alter Aeon? Dentin: 22:35 I don't really know at this point. I haven't thought a whole lot about it. The problem is the end game is so far out there that there's only a handful of players that really could be considered at that point. And they currently seem to all have a lot of stuff to do. So I don't feel that there's a tremendous urge to add more than what we've got. That said, we do have plans to bump up the level cap. Again, we try to do that every two to three years to add another level and add a handful of new things to it. I don't see that there's the world of Warcraft sort of pressure where everybody is at max level and everybody's chomping at the bit for something new to do. We just don't have that. There's not enough people at the absolute end game for it to really be a problem. And I think part of that's because the world is just so big. No single person can know enough about it to really feel like they've got the entire game under thumb and every time they do new areas come out. Danny: 23:32 Your your website mentions one there's what, six base classes? Pretty pretty D&D standard type classes. But there is a multi classing system, is that kind of like how D&D works for each level. You choose what class to take that level in or is or is it a different mechanic? Dentin: 23:53 It's a very different basically custom mechanic. I've only seen something similar in a handful of games and in a handful of muds. The basic idea is that levels unlock skills and you can get any skills that are unlocked and form them together in a way that makes sense for your character. It's also important to note that the number of practices it takes to max out your stats is something like 1200 the number of practices it takes to get every spelling skill is on the order of a couple thousand and over the course of leveling you only get six or 800 practices total. You can buy additional practices, but the point is that everybody even at the high levels is going to be practice short at some level and that forces people to think about, well what are they going to get? Even though all of this stuff is unlocked, which things do I want to add to my character? Dentin: 24:48 Which things make the most sense? Which skills that are unlocked would be most powerful based on the classes that I have and the the power level associated with that class. So I think it allows you to multi-class based on what you want to do as opposed to being shoehorned into a specific thing and it lets you get much more, much more narrow focus in an area. If you want to be a summoner controller necromancer that focuses explicitly on minions and minion power, you can spend most of your practices to do that and just get enough support skills that you're functional with it. But you can also go the other way and be a fully broad spectrum caster that has all of the utilities for everything ever and is also a decent healer. It's a very different way of playing. I will say that some people seem to have difficulty with it. They, they want to just be the ideal warrior and so they only level their warrior class, but the warrior class without all the utilities that you can get from your secondaries really hampers you and training people or showing people that the best way to have a warrior is to get all of the combat skills across all classes and merge it together into something that works really well for you. That's a hard concept for people who are used to traditional D&D. Eric: 26:06 So with the Alter Aeon on having been being around for almost 25 years now, I guess is there any section of the code base or kind of areas or whatever that you just seem impossible to change but you would like to? Dentin: 26:21 Yeah, there are definitely things like that. One of my go to examples is underwater. We have the, the idea that you can go underwater and do stuff underwater, and this is really problematic because underwater is such a different environment that almost nothing makes sense underwater, like fireball spells for example. Does that make sense underwater? It's magic you can sort of make some sense there, but you're floating around in the ocean. How do things like trip skills in regular combat skills work? But players are so used to underwater mechanics being basically the same as above water mechanics that it's a very difficult thing to rip out and still have credibility. It will affect a handful of areas. And over the years we've tried to reduce the amount of that, but it's just something that fundamentally doesn't make a lot of sense and that I'm really not very happy about. There are a few other things that are like that. Unfortunately none of them spring to mind at the moment, but I would make some changes if I had to do it again. On the other hand, if you make too many changes, you end up with brand new problems. So it's very much a matter of figuring out which ones are the most egregious and stripping those. Danny: 27:35 So another thing I noticed on the website is a, there is a mechanic where you can pledge your fealty to a God and as seems to be tradition in mud design. The staff members actually play the gods or are representative of them. So explain a little bit about that. How does that system work and how does it benefit the players? Dentin: 27:57 That's one of the things that I would have been more aggressive about not allowing if I could redo it. So the fundamental problem there is that people follow the gods that they follow often for the personality of the God, not because it makes any sense. And it's really easy for people to complain about bias or about God's giving out special behavior or special favors to players. So over the years we've restricted down what God's can do to where it's a very narrow subset right now and for the most part, the gods that you follow, some of them ostensibly have a real person behind them, but the vast majority are automagic. They they are background code that is run by the gods subsystem that decides who to restore, when and when to give out special booms based on probabilities and behavior and favor and everything else like that. Dentin: 28:53 And I think that's a much better model to go to you. You take the administrative power out of the picture so that nobody feels picked on. They know it's just the algorithm. And if they game the algorithm right then their God will have favor on them. And I think that's a better way of dealing with it in the future. So we've been moving in that direction over the years. Most of the gods that we have set up in the last few years have been automagic gods and haven't had a backing persona behind them. And now it's just a matter of moving enough stuff there that players are happy with those as happy with those as they would be talking to a regular person. Danny: 29:27 So some literal Deus ex Machina happening here. Speaker 3: 29:32 Yeah, and I guess you could say that, but one thing I will say is that players like that more and the reason they like it more it, they don't like, they don't like the machine God more than having a personal relationship, but they like it a lot more than having a unfairness where other people are given benefits. And they aren't. And if it's a machine, God, nobody questions whether or not the machine God has a preference or whether the machine God is cheating or being corrupt. And that that I think is really important. People have to have faith in the system and faith that the system isn't, isn't out to, to mess with them or, or isn't out to cause them problems. They just want fairness in most cases. And the machine God has a really good way of getting fairness in a way that's trackable and auditable. Danny: 30:19 On that note, well before I have to ask, I know you're listed as one of the gods. Does anyone still follow you? Dentin: 30:27 It's really low. Danny: 30:31 On the note of fairness though. Aside from the whole deity system what do you and I, and I guess the rest of your staff see as your role in the stewardship of the game, aside from building and coding. Are you guys more hands off or do you get, do you actually get involved in like the player stories and that kind of stuff? Dentin: 30:53 I used to be heavily involved in the player stories, but the last few years my real life work conditions have changed and I just don't have the time to really get involved in that. I can't take two weeks off and just run the most amazing event of the year every year like I used to. So my, my role has been shifting out of the storytelling and more into just making sure that everything runs, making sure that everything stays up, that the server is stable, that everything's provisioned, that we don't have problems. In a lot of ways I am the the Pedro monkey that just makes sure that the game keeps running. And that's literally my job. We have a handful of other builders and Shadowfax who write a lot of the code, if not the majority of the code now. And so they have code base access. They, along with Morpheus are the world builders that help manage the world and keep the world together. And those three also are generally the central contact point for player events. We have a pretty robust player event system. So there's a lot of, there's a lot of events that can run in the space of the year, something like 50 different, different kinds. And we try to make them reusable, but there's also a lot of one off stuff and those are often delegated out to our other volunteer builders to put something together and to, to run periodic events for players so that there is something new and interesting to do. Eric: 32:19 What's on the horizon for Alter Aeon and is there anything interesting happening in the near future? Dentin: 32:24 We've been working a lot on crafting and this is an area that a lot of games seem to really fall down on or that at least there's a lot of demand for where there's a class of the player base that just wants to build stuff. They want to sit back and make things and create custom caps and paint custom ruins on their armor or build some rings or whatever it is. And it doesn't even have to make sense, much less be powerful. They just want to make some things and they want to feel like they've built something that's durable. And for the past couple of years Drak has really been putting a lot of work into that and our crafting system is coming along has come a long way to where there's an amazing amount of things that you can build and you can build them at relatively low levels to it. Dentin: 33:07 It doesn't make sense to have a crafting system where you have to get to end game before you can do anything. So we've been trying to work it in that low end mid level players can at least do something with it and then more options open up at higher levels. So crafting is one direction. There's, there's a lot of rural maintenance I suppose that's in the way there's clean up to the world files that that we've talked a little bit about before where we know that there are some things that aren't quite right and that if we put some, if we put time into it we could make parts of the game flow much better. But all of this is optimization and there isn't really an overarching, we need to move the game in a particular direction. The game works really well right now and it's a fun game. It works for a lot of people. The end game content is largely working and I don't see the need to add more and more stuff to it unless there's a call for it, unless there's a clear need for those things and until we get that, I think that it's probably best to just make sure AA is the best game that it can be instead of trying to shoehorn things in that are our solutions looking for problems. Danny: 34:12 Well, with that, I would like to thank you for coming on the podcast with us too, to go over a bit about Alter Aeon and a bit about yourself. You have some very interesting stories to relay. Dentin: 34:25 Thank you. Glad to be here.