Merry christmas and happy new year everybody!!

I made a decent Castle and also made Clint Bellanger's armor items have transparent backgrounds.  I need to collect more items, and armor for Dusk but for now I think there's enough to make at least the first continent in Dusk!!

Here's all the sprites and items I've collected for Dusk so far.  Credit goes to Redshrike, Jetrel, Hyptosis, Clint Bellanger, BartK, Antifarea, Mumu, ArtisticDude, Zabin, Tracy, Surt, Battle for wesnoth, Monster RPG2, especially OpenGameArt and more that I can't remember ATM.  I'll write up a proper license file ASAP.

I felt bad since I've talked about Dusk a little on OGA, but nothing to show for it.  I thought this guy Lou would have at least hosted it for a month so I put word out on my submissions and amazingly a member of OGA's community "Redshrike" remembered Dusk.  I checked everyday to see if Lou had the server up, and I did log onto his server once but instantly it went down.  I think he's been using the buggy sourceforge files.  Lou never did anything except get my hopes up and I haven't herd from him since October 20.  I feel bad because Redshrike and his bro remembered Dusk but nothing is available to look at to bring back the old memories.  So I've decided to put together a Dusk world with nice looking graphics and most of Redshrikes RPG enemies.  Here's some screenshots to bring back the old memories guys =]

I'll have a video made soon-ish showing some neat features in Dusk, like players and mobs could be invisible so you have to cast "detect invis" to see them.  Storing money at the bank, when you pull the sword from the stone the tile changes to a stone with no sword.  Simple things like that I'll show off in the next video.  Oh and if you watched that last video, please reboot yourself..that video sucked!

So my plans with this Dusk game is: make enough content to provide at least a few hours of gameplay keeping the player busy with quests until they reach 200cp (credit points).  Then I'll start posting Dusk on freegamedev.org seeking somebody who can/will host Dusk.  I'm hoping that Dusk could get spruced up code-wise as the GUI is very ancient looking, character walking animation is jumpy, and the players/ sprites should be sized differently in game to make the proportions look better.  I don't know Java so I'm hoping to draw some attention from the open-source community towards this old game project and maybe someone will be interested in sprucing up this old online RPG to look more "modern" looking. 

I've Finished my Castle tileset (mostly) and made a example screen-shot showing 1 of many different possible Castle designs.  I think it's simple yet efficient.  I tried to design it so you can get a lot of variations with as little amount of tiles as possible.  I still need to create 6 tiles to smoothen off the back towers.  This screen-shot is what Dusk could look like if the map had more layers.

I thought this would be a nice contribution for the open-source community.  I was inspired to make this Castle for a few open-source games.  Mostly I had to replace the ones I had on Dusk.  Though, I have gotten my inspiration to work on reviving Dusk from Bertram who has revived Hero Of Allacrost by making a fork called "Valyria Tear".  All this wouldn't have been possible if it wasn't for Roots making HOA in the first place.  Those games and The Mana World are my favorite open-source games.  Unfortunately I haven't had the chance to play TMW in a few years because my Internet isn't fast enough to play online games.  So you might be wondering why am I interested in reviving this online game then?  It's because Dusk is the only online game I have ever played that works good enough on such a slow Internet connection.

The Castle took me a couple days to put together and the example map I drew in 1 day.  Thanks to Tiled (Bjorn, TMW) it wouldn't have been possible to make this awesome example without such a nice map editor. 

In a couple days I'll have a better game-play video showing the new images and especially all the neat features already in Dusk.  That might require me making a few quests, but that is a piece of cake so cya with some updates in a couple days.

Enjoy the screenshot :-)

I've been working on replacing every single tile, sprite, item, and character I had on Dusk because most of it came from Lou's Dusk in (2006) and I'm not sure what he drew or how it was obtained.  I've finished replacing every single questionable tile on my map.  Every tile you see below is either licensed GPL (from The Mana World) or a CC license from OpenGameArt.org.  I know it's unorganized but I didn't want to break the map and have to remap what I had.  I plan to redo the map later when Dusk gets fixed up a bit so this is just placeholder for now.

Soon I will have the players and sprites finished, at that point I'll show some screen-shots of Dusk with LEGAL images! 

I made a lot of new tiles in order to replace the *ahem* illegal ones I had.  Mostly castle and caves tiles.  I need to make a couple things to finish the castle and then I will submit it to OGA.

Lou worked on Dusk 2005-06.  He called it Dusk Ataxia.  He made the GUI look beautiful!  Unfortunately he never saved his files anywhere on the internet and they are lost forever :(  I think he used the buggy SF files because my buddy found a serious bug where you click rapidly to pick up a item and each click picked it up, thus duplicating it 10+ times.  Shortly after discovering that bug he abandoned Dusk and started SlothRPG.  Here's a couple old links where Lou talked about Dusk.

http://www.freehax.com/post.php?t=v&h=2193&i=4
http://www.freehax.com/post.php?t=v&h=2285&i=1

He has my bug free Dusk files now.  The whole month of October we talked about what Dusk needs to make it look more new.  I haven't herd from him in a little over a month now since the forums went down, so I don't have his upgrades :(  He always seemed pretty busy and probably doesn't have much spare time for his Dusk hobby ATM.

More links about Dusk.
http://www.mpogd.com/games/rating/rating.asp?id=561&page=1&sortby=date&filter=favorable
http://www.linuxgames.com/archives/4759
The last post in this topic on mudconnector kinda sums up what Dusk is.
http://www.mudconnect.com/discuss/discuss.cgi?mode=MSG&area=admin&message=6224

This is why I like simple 2D games better then 3D.

I enjoy playing 2D RPG's, like Zelda or Final Fantasy of the 90's, because of the simplicity of the graphics.  Isometric is good also.  I've played Skyrim and the first day of playing I got see sick from seeing too much.  Learning to walk the character took me about 12 hours to build a tolerance to where the tremendous headache and sickness in my stomach finally wore off.  This is where people who are susceptible to seizures will get triggered.  My bro and sister were playing Kingdom Hearts years ago (lots of flashing lights while fighting in anti-gravity) which caused our down-syndrome sister to get a seizure.  I would rather sacrifice graphics then my own sister or 12 hours of misery.

Hi!  Welcome to my blog about "Dusk" it's a online graphical MUD made back in the late 1990's by Tom Weingarten.  It's open-source and coded in Java.  The thing I love about open-source is that anyone could use an existing game engine to make/host their own game world!  Around 1999 Tom made me a god on Dusk and I was part of the development of the game a little by mapping and scripting quests.  Getting to map and create game content in Dusk was more fun then any of the fancy games I've played since then.

The neat thing about this game is that it has it's own "scripting language" which means anybody can make their own game world and not need to know any Java programming.  The scripting is easy to understand.  If your good at remembering formulas like in trigonometry and passed that class with a B you'll understand this easily.

Dusk has potential and I think if the game was polished up a bit and the antiquated code and everything made to be more modern this could be another great free open-source game for everyone to enjoy.  Dusk is like a online 2d RPG in 90's style kinda like The Mana World, they are both free and open-source so I compare Dusk to TMW.  I don't know of any other games that fall into that category except "Stendhal" but I haven't played that yet.  There's Fantasy Tales Online but they aren't open-source.  Dusk is no-where near as massive as TMW but I think it has the potential to be more massive if improved on. 

I truly respect open-source and would love to see as many games open-source as possible.  I'm not a Java programmer (yet) so I can't improve this game but I'll do what I can and see if other people might be interested in improve it (hopefully).

https://github.com/ZabinX/DuskRPG

I've uploaded my Dusk files on github and I will keep github updated with Dusk's latest files.  Here's a attempt at making a video :P



Regards,
Zabin