After spending two years of developing on the TBG Engine I have decided to cancel it and construct a complete new engine for making Text Based Games. There was a lot of thought put into this as I messed with working on the TBG engine over the last three weeks, before I finally decided it would be easier to write a whole new engine rather than make the changes I wanted to the existing engine.

    For those of you that might have looked at the source code, the TBG Engine was not programmed very elegantly. The code was a jumbled mess and it made editing it a very difficult thing to do. As I added a new feature or changed something a separate piece of the engine broke. This was mainly due to how I designed the engine. The editing environment was tied into part of the engine and that presented a lot of problems for me.

    So thus I introduce to you Mud Creator! Mud Creator was wrote in Microsoft’s C# 2008 and uses .NET 3.5 and is nothing more than a library of code. Users can add the library to a new .NET 3.5 applications and write their own game using the libraries, or they can use the still under-construction Mud Tool Kit which is a GUI based editing environment that uses the Mud Creator Engine. I will go into detail on both the Mud Creator Engine and the Mud Tool Kit in just a minute, but first I want to say thanks to those of you that have used the TBG Engine, and I apologize for dropping support on it. It was a rough choice to make, but it didn’t matter what I did, in order to fix the problems the TBG Engine had, it was going to make existing projects in-compatible with the new version anyway, so I decided to just start from the ground up. While both the Mud Creator and Mud Tool Kit projects development time was expected to be around 6 months, I have managed to get roughly 40% of it done in less than a week. So this is really good news, and I hope to get a version of both the engine and the Tool Kit released soon. I guarantee you that when it’s released it will have more features and be a better solution for you than the TBG Engine was.

Mud Creator:
    So let’s get down to the important stuff, what does the Mud Creator Engine do? What features will it have? Let’s start out by saying the Mud Creator is a Text based Game Engine, and that’s it. No editors are included with it. In order to build a game using the engine you will need to construct your own editors by writing them in the programming language of your choice that supports .NET and build your games that way, or hard-code your game with your preferred language. Airhead Gaming will provide a Mud Tool Kit that includes an entire GUI based editing environment you need to build your games but it will be a separate product and it is described below.
    The Mud Creator provides better documentation on how to use the engine, what each class does, what each method and property does and how you can extend onto the engine with custom classes.  
   
    The biggest feature implemented right now is the ability to add your own custom commands to the engine. You can now simply create a new command class, pass a string to it specifying the name of your method (example: MyProject.MyClass.MyMethod) and assign a command to it (Example: Walk or Look) and the engine will automatically execute your custom method when the user enters the custom command. This adds a whole new level of customizability to the engine and allows you to really make your game your own. You can even replace the included default commands (walk, look, talk ect.) with your own commands.
   
    I had to make a decision this time around as to if the source code would be released with the engine or not, and I have decided to not ship it. The engine will be provided for free, but the source code will no longer be available to modify. With the Airhead Gaming Forums, Engine Documentation and ability to add new commands, there really was no reason to include the source. If someone wants a new feature added they can simply extend on the class they want to modify and create something custom. If they have any questions the Airhead Gaming forums should be able to provide the answers.

Mud Tool Kit:
    Next we have the Mud Tool Kit, which is a GUI based editing environment that uses the Mud Creator Engine to build complete Text Based Games. The Tool Kit started out with a similar design that the TBG Engine had, but that quickly got changed into something completely different. The Mud Tool Kit allows you to edit every object in the game, and every aspect of your project from a single window. The tool kit now has a Visual Studio look and feel to it, and it even includes a real-time testing feature in the editing environment so you can make a change to the project and see it reflected in the test window immediately. The Mud Tool Kit loads every object in your project when you load your project file, so you no longer haft to load each object in your game individually when you want to make a change to it. The Tool Kit includes a search feature so you can search for a specific object by name and it will find it for you. This is a nice new feature for the projects that can contain thousands of objects.

    While it might take a little getting used to how the Tool Kit works, it is definitely a better solution and will allow you to make your games much faster and efficiently.

- Johnathon
Airhead Gaming