Laying the keel
Somewhere on dark water, the tide is coming in. Harbor towns wake at dawn and fill their taverns after dark. A festival starts in one port while a storm rolls through another. And none of it waits for you to log in.
That's Blacktide: a MUD, a text-based multiplayer world you explore by typing, being built from scratch in C# and .NET.
A world that doesn't stand still
Most MUDs are frozen in place. Rooms sit empty until a player arrives, and nothing happens unless someone types a command. Blacktide is built around the opposite idea.
- Time passes. The world runs on its own clock whether anyone is online or not.
- Things happen, and the world remembers. Events leave a record of what happened, where, and who was there.
- Places have behavior. Rooms and objects can carry their own logic, so a harbor can get busy at dawn or a tavern can fill up at night.
- News travels. The Broadside, the world's own newspaper, reports on what happened in each part of the world, so you can catch up on what you missed.
Why build the engine from scratch
A living world has to be designed in from the start. Time, events, and memory aren't features you can bolt onto a static MUD later; they shape how everything underneath works. So the engine comes first, and it's being built in three phases.
- Phase one: Foundations. Connections, commands, movement, and the game loop that drives the world.
- Phase two: A world that moves. World events, the game clock, and scripts that give rooms and objects their own behavior.
- Phase three: A world that remembers. Persistence, so the world survives restarts, and The Broadside, built from everything that's happened.
Each step ends with something that actually runs, and each one will get a devlog.
Where it's at
The project skeleton is set up and phase one is underway, starting with a server you can connect to.
The keel is down. Next entry when the first milestone is done.