Alan Cox... HorrorSoft, AGOS and AberMUD V

[timofonic]

Hello,

I've seen a bit of historical information about the AGOS engine, in the ScummVM wiki is too few.

The AGOS Engine was originally created by Alan Cox at HorrorSoft and is based on AberMUD V, with graphical extensions.

( From http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/AGOS )

It could be nice if some wiki editor add more details to that, I think there can be in each engine sections some details about the history of thee engine and how evolved over the years.

In 1991, Alan Cox wrote AberMUD IV (unrelated to AberMUD 4) and then AberMUD V, which was also used, with graphical extensions in the "Elvira" game by Horrorsoft (renamed to Adventure Soft and then doing adventure games like Simon the Sorcerer series and The Feeble Files). AberMUD V was later released under the GPL.

AberMUD is named after the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. About twenty AberMUDs remain in operation, but even as of 2002, they have few players.

( From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AberMUD )

When I finally returned to university after a years absence I had three sets of AberMUD sources. The first of these was a fortunate backup taken before I spent a year working commercially for Horrosoft, the second the version including code I had written at Horrorsoft, and the third a commercial and somewhat different variant with a graphical interface that was used for the Elvira game. I was able to produce a limited distribution set of the second version, and also used it to start AberMUD5 running on the university computer society system.

( From http://ftp.linux.org.uk/pub/linux/alan/ ... /Manual.01 )

This seems a "bit" different. So AGOS was an evolution of AverMUD IV with graphical extensions. Then AberMUD V is some early HorroSoft engine (it was used comercially?) that partially its code evolved to AberMUD V or something like that. I have this not too clear too.

I have not very clear if Alan Cox developed those graphical extensions or he only worked for Horrorsoft on the main engine, maybe he did not developed the graphical variant. He worked for HorrorSoft one year.
http://www.nemmelheim.de/horrorsoft/elvira/history.html

Can anyone give more details about this? For historical reasons, it could be nice to know more about this in an ordered form.

Regards,
The Madventurer

[AlanCox]

So in a bid to break the record for the most ancient thread resurrection from things found via Google.

AberMUD went through several iterations

AberMUD in B on a Honeywell L66 mainframe (believed lost) - deeply 'strange' a mix of everything from fantasy to sci-fi and student humour. It actually started life as a chat system which them grew 'rooms' for people to talk in and then exits between them and then it got out of hand.

AberMUD II in C on Unix as a conversion of this

(which somewhere along the line became AberMUD III with a scenario change to a vaguely sensible fantasy setting).

A version of that ended up in Finland and then the USA (which was no mean feat back then - it was considered 'too big' to by posted to comp.sources on USENET. Quite how it got there is a fun saga in itself but I'm not sure what the statute of limitations is for Finland )

Rich $alz ended up releasing a version of that as AberMUD 4 which is what most US AberMUDs were based on.

Meanwhile I wrote parts of AberMUD IV on an Amiga which then suffered a terminal and catastrophic existence failure when all the disks holding it fell into the sea. Salt water and floppies - not good.

Somewhat later I started AberMUD V again on the Amiga and this was fairly well developed and working nicely when I re-joined AdventureSoft(*).

At AdventureSoft I wrote a new text game engine for Personal Nightmare. It was incredibly powerful and sufficiently like a real programming language that the non-programming games writers really couldn't cope with it. The graphics side (most of which was not mine) was rather more successful.

Elvira is a fork of AberMUD V with some extra handling for GUI features and roughly speaking the same graphics engine as Personal Nightmare. After I left it also got other extensions. You don't really see a lot of what the AberMUD V engine can do in the Elvira games. For obvious reasons stuff like live in game editing aren't part of the released game, but the entire game was written within the game.

Later on back at university I wrote YAMA (a tiny engine capable of running a 16 user MUD on a 8086 PC) and then various new AberMUD V versions from the code pre Horrorsoft.

One other question often asked was which platform was first. The engines and game were written on the Amiga, but in terms of actual 'release' I don't honestly think there was a "first". The game engine was portable while the graphics were done basically in parallel. Thankfully I didn't have to touch the PC graphics!

Alan

(*) As Adventure International (UK) I worked there first on work experience from college and then for real before I went to Unversity. Everything from TRS80 basic programs to format up the output of the old game editor/playing tool on the TRS80 for the assembler, to helping with German Gremlins (verb noun backwards), then graphics and text compression for Robin of Sherwood, bits for Seas of Blood (some graphics engine stuff, the crab graphic and oddments), Blizzard Pass (game and graphics), Demons of the Deep (never released and probably lost), and oddments like beta testing Kayleth (which was a joy of a task).

(and yes the stories of that era of the games world are mostly true - the crazy people, the insane hours close to deadlines, hacking sample copy protected discs and handing them to the boss *during* the meeting with the people wanting to sell him the system)

[digitall]

Thank you for the background on this.