Darkness Falls: The Crusade

Despite the very boring and predictable Florida primary today in which the first real power flex of Super PACs was shown, I'm going to dive head first into another nerd post as I don't do nearly enough of them.

To start things off, I should probably describe what a "MUD" is, it stands for "Multi-User Dungeon" which probably doesn't help most people reading this post.  It is best to think of it as the middle ground between Dungeons & Dragons and World of Warcraft.  The player opens up the game, logs in and is basically playing a text version of World of Warcraft with whoever else is also connected at the time.  The player-base can range between heavy role-players that never leave character and hardcore gamers that just play for the games sake as opposed to their character.  MUDs have been around for decades and are still around, in most cases allowing players to play for free, but some do charge.  There are fantasy style dungeons and dragons types but also ones that mimic other things like Pokemon, Star Wars, etc.  Tonight I am going to talk about the MUD I lost many hours of my life to in High School.  It was incredibly addictive, the community was great and the only reason I stopped playing was because all of the work it would have taken me to get to the next level would have equaled something like 3 months of all of my free time, which is beyond absurd.  Also, please forgive some of the inaccuracies related to Darkness Falls (DF) as I only played it briefly, as opposed to DFC.

In the beginning, there was Darkness Falls.  The Evil lord Arnak's minions had stormed upon the world, rampaging through the city of Tamia.  The inhabitants fled to another continent while Arnak's minions took over the city.  In DF, the player chose between the various classes, Vampire, Demon, Skeleton, Zombie, Necromancer, Imp and Werewolf.  DF was a free for all style game where Player vs Player was mixed with Player vs Environment.  The goal was to reach level 50 and become an elder in the army.  Some classes were strictly fighters or casters and others were more utility classes that would hire out their services to other players in the form of healing and repairing.  The game was fairly successful, being hosted on AOL's gaming center as well as GameStorm's service.  As I mentioned before, I only played this briefly, partially because AOL charged $ .99 an hour to play and partially because it was just too PVP centered for my tastes in that there was no way to separate PVP from PVE.

Then there was Darkness Falls: The Crusade.  This game was much more popular and offered up a unique experience as the "successor" to the original game.  In the era of DFC the inhabitants of Tamia, having been driven out of their city and fled by sea, have reached the far off land of Karimere and rebuilt their civilization.  This would later be more commonly known as the "Good" realm as the Gods were all of that alignment.   The good realm was made up of Gnomes, Elves, Dwarves, Halflings, Half-Elves and Humans as well as a second sub-race of Humans known as the Kilanese who had already inhabited the area.  The races could choose from various classes, Paladin, Monk, Wizard, Craftsman, Priest, Rogue and Ranger.  The primary God of the Good realm was Niord, an Odin-like figure.  The realm of Chaos, worshiping the God "Ra'Kur" was made up of Ogres, Trolls, Lizardmen, Kobolds, Goblins and Orcs.  Back in Tamia, now known as the "Evil" realm, the human necromancers were gone and replaced by "Bael-Elves" a race of fallen Elves but for the most part the races and classes stayed the same.

I started playing DFC in 1999, using it as my primary source of entertainment until about 2002 when I finally got reached the point of diminishing entertainment compared to effort.  The game remained up until 2006, during this time I had switched to another game known as "Magestorm" which was also being offered on the "Mythic-realms" gaming service alongside DFC.  During those 4 years I would play here and there, usually only pvp but sometimes getting a few more levels on other characters, but my primary, a level 61 monk, was pretty set in stone.  There were 75 levels possible and every five levels the total experience needed for the previous level doubled.  That meant to go from 61 to 62 I would have had to have gotten 50 million experience.  At a rate of 3k a kill every 6 seconds, it is pointless.  During those 4 years I only raised him one more level.


What make DFC unique among MUDs was this inter-realm style of play.  Within your own realm, everyone is your ally, you cannot attack each other so PVE is relatively safe.  You won't have people killing you for your gear that you worked hard to get.  The PVP component of the game came in when realms would gather together and travel to one of the other realms to attack.  This was the only time it was dangerous to be out and about in your own realm, but usually someone would broadcast a warning of an invasion or would notice "Blank was killed by Blank" which would also be broadcast automatically.  These invasions could be strictly for PVP and fun or they could also be missions to steal away the other realms Idols of Power, Knowledge and Strength.  Each realm earned bonuses to their abilities based on how many of the idols they had in their own realms shrines, thus the primary motivation for PVP.

Interestingly, DFC was the primary basis for the game Dark Age of Camelot which was created by the people who owned Mythic-realms.  If you had played DFC then you would have loved DAoC.

Sadly the Mythic-realms gaming center went down in 2006 and with it both DFC and Magestorm.  At the time, Magestorm was starting to die off, with fewer and fewer regular players, DFC had experienced a slight decrease itself, but was still going pretty strong.  The abrupt shutdown of both created a sense of longing in both communities that would seemingly never be met again.  More than once people had said they would try to remake DFC themselves, but 6 years later, it is still not done.  There was one attempt, Cyra, but it has seemingly stalled with no communication from the developer.  Magestorm was much more lucky.  In the time that the game had been unavailable, one of the players had become a software engineer and had come into possession of an old client and began basically, reverse engineering the back end of the program.  About a month ago, the game went live, for free, supported by donations of the players.  There is regularly 90+ people playing, which is more than enough to say the game is active.  The game is more or less the same as it was when it went down except for some minor changes in balance.

Here is where everything comes full circle and is FREAKING AWESOME.  I am a computer science student, that is, a computer programmer.  However, I, in general, lack self confidence and I haven't really had a way to prove my skills to myself as the University of Nebraska at Omaha program leaves a lot to be desired in that sense.  Over Christmas break this year I saw what was happening with Magestorm, as it was in Beta and I had played a bit in that time for nostalgia, and realized something.  One of my great weaknesses in programming is I've never really programmed a user interface.  Almost all of my experience is with console programming, and if you don't know what that is, it doesn't particularly matter so don't worry.  At this point I began talking to a friend of mine, David, who also used to play and we began reminiscing about the old days like we do just about every week.  At this point it suddenly clicked, I can remake this game myself.  I have the programming knowledge to do all the engine logic, I have database experience, though not on this scale and I can figure out pretty easily how to do the client<-> server communication as well as the limited GUI I would have to build to support it.  Most importantly, I know the software engineering process.  You don't just dive straight into programming, you have to meticulously plan out how things will be laid out, what fields are needed in the database etc etc etc.  So over a 3 day period, with very little break for anything else, I reverse engineered nearly the entire mechanics of the game using only my memory and the input of my friends David and "Masterpuppet." 

For those reading this who used to play DFC, that means I figured out how stats were asigned various bonuses based on race and how those bonuses translated over into skills.  There were points where I had to wing-it though.  While it was easy to figure out how the bonuses affected skills in general, ie what percent added on to it, a lot of guesswork had to go into deciding which stat went to what skill.  I also theorized on the workings of many of the skills while simultaneously making touchups to areas that I thought were unbalanced or broken.  Each realm now has a shapeshifter to match the werewolves (Gnolls/Monks), though Werewolves are still the most prominent in this area.  Each realm also now has wards instead of only Chaos, though Chaos is also the most advanced in that area.  The old issues with light vs dark have been taken care of.  Each realm now has a "bless" type buff.  Zombies now have a bite attack that will do debuffs.  I have made it so that chainmail is now actually useful.  Weapons and Armors are now a single skill for all realms and there are no armor restrictions but are replaced with proficiency in a certain type.  Wearing above that incurs penalties.  Certain types of weapons go better with certain skills.  Before many skills were deemed unnecessary to train like double, melee etc.  I have made it so that training these skills actually benefits the player.  While there is only a single weapon skill to train, under the hood there are still Crushing, Slashing, and Thrusting weapons.  Stats contribute different to each so some classes are better with them than others.  Imps/Rogues/Kobolds will have better bonuses in thrusting whereas Dwarves will have better bonuses in crushing.  Skill points will be made available so that important things to classes are all trainable but not so much that you can train everything available at your whim.  I have spent the last week working on a program that tests the algorithms I have come up with.  Things look pretty good so far, I am quite proud of my ability to break down my memory into the formulas that go into it.

So for anybody looking for their DFC hookup, it is coming.  Also, any logs you may have kept around would be extremely handy.


DFC Names:

-Deathscythe (Monk)
-Intel (Wizard)
-Khabarakh (Paladin)
-Ultimatemoo (Werewolf)

Magestorm Names:

SF_Cow
SF_DethZyth
SF_MoOoOoOo