Ok, so I had been meaning to sign up for GDNet+ for a while, and today I finally couldn't think of a reason not to, so I ponied up and did it.

I guess I should give a little background on myself.

I'm a 25 year old programmer. I have been programming pretty much as long as I can remember. I've spent the last ~7 years doing it professionally in the applications sector.

I've always enjoyed working on games in my spare time, and have worked on several mods for Quake 2, Half-Life, Unreal, Serious Sam, and several others I can't remember. Some of the mods were even moderately popular during their time, some of them I still get emails about today.

The last year or two I have worked on several concept projects. Mostly to learn new skillsets, or enhance ones I had been slacking on. I wrote two different mud servers, and worked on a couple other projects that haven't hit playable status.

My current project is in the design stage. It's something I have wanted to work on for a while, and one I would like to see through to completion.

Basically it's a meshing of several ideas, I love BBS games, especially TradeWars, and I wanted to see a modern adaption of it. When I was playing around with one of the mud servers I built, I thought about the difference between typical muds and mmorpgs(I know, but bear with me). The main difference is the dropping of the "room" concept and the implementation of a coordinate/graph based system. The difficulty in the graph based system is depending on how many entities you have sorting through them at a reasonable speed to determine what is in "viewing" range of another entity becomes slower the more entities that get created. I'm still mulling over how to handle this with reasonable speed.

So the meshing of the two becomes a space based multiplayer game where you control a ship in a persistant universe. Do you play it straight and make money via trading? Do you go evil and plunder other ships for loot? Giving the ability for groups of players to come together and form "Corporations" or "Clans" in order to share territory and technology becomes a good way to survive. Adding in the ability to customise your ship (instead of having static ships ala TradeWars) gives players something to work towards, and possibly another way to produce money by either manufacturing, selling, or stealing parts from other players and NPCs.

Reading that it sounds a lot like Eve Online, but if you have ever played tradewars it's a lot more free-form and action based instead of incredibly pretty and boring.

For the client I'm planning to just do a 2d topdown type view, instead of a full 3d view, although by designing the communications layer properly it wouldn't be difficult to make a more involved client later.

Assuming something doesn't come up, I plan on having the basic part of the server portion completed this weekend. Since I've already written several mud servers, it's basically retrofitting the room concept into a coordinate based system.

Wow, that was a lot longer than I originally intentioned, but hey, that's what it's for, right?