Cyberscope
                               ~~~~~~~~~~
                      Monthly column by Dustin Nulf


     Wow!  The current bulletin board systems of today are flooded with
a myriad of door games!  As being a gamer and modemer for the past 10
years, I've watched the BBS world expand from the simplest of Blackjack
to the most popular of door games, Tradewars.  I estimate that Dallas
(my place of residence) alone has over 200 registered games of Tradewars
running currently, and then multiply that for each city of equivalent
size to Dallas!  I'd like to be in the shoes of Mr. Martin right now,
that is, if the guy is still alive.  And if only Operation: Overkill
were that popular, I'd be living the highlife!  Yet, most BBS games
contain one basic ingredient that has attracted users since its
conception: ANSI graphics.  Wow.  Tradewars has descent ansi graphics,
Usurper, and hey, even Operation: Overkill has formidable ansi graphics,
but wait.  There's something missing here.  Something isn't right.
What's the big deal about ansi?  Compared to some of the commercial and
shareware games I've seen lately, why don't they use ansi in their
games?  There are smidgeons of ansi screens in some commercial games'
setup programs or configuration utilities, but why not have ansi the
dominant "graphic" in the main engine of the game?  Tradewars does.
Usurper does.  Lord does.  Overkill certainly does.

     I may have an answer to that: RIP graphics!!  Oops.  Wrong answer.
Try again.  RIP has not come on strong like ansi graphics has in the
past.  Namely, there are not many drawing programs are available for RIP
graphics, and if you do happen to find one, the authors have decided to
use an outrageously high registration cost for their RIP editors.  Also,
the quality of screen appearance on the BBSes is only slightly above
ansi.  I was expecting some really cool graphics when I called a RIP
board recently, only to find out that I was seeing AutoCad-type graphics
on this BBS!  Another reason why RIP is not finding its way into the
populous is that most people don't take the time to download the RIP
icons and BBS specific graphics.  In a similar vein, perhaps the authors
of RoboBBS should have taken a better look at RIP's progressiveness (or
lack thereof) and RIP's acceptance by the BBS domain.  I suppose RoboBBS
is falling into the same category as RIP (no pun intended).  Avatar has
met almost the same fate, yet it has prospered somewhat more than RIP.
However, Avatar doesn't relieve us of the extended characters world.

     So with ansi's stronghold on door programmers, it looks like the
future of online BBS games are going to be stuck in the pixels of a
flashing white cursor.  Blocks and chunks of regular text are supposed
to be simulating today's hightech graphics.  There must be something
else that door programmers can offer the gamers of the BBS world.  As
gamers, are we going to be stuck with making macros of Usurper's combat,
or trying to understand the Islamic map symbols on Arrowbridge?  I mean,
this *is* 1995, and we *are* more advanced in technology now.  We all go
out and buy 486s and Pentiums just to play online BBS games, right?

     "Does Tradewars really require this 8 megs of memory I just
bought?"
     "No sir."
     "What about this half-gigabyte harddrive?"
     "No sir."
     "Well, heck, I could have stayed with my old XT if I was content
with playing ansi online games!"
     "Yes sir!"

     Attention programmers: Gamers are not satisfied with ansi games!
Not in this day and age!  And please, don't start listing off the 
reasons why ansi is so good by saying: 1) ansi is universal, 2) it's 
easy to program for, 3) everyone has access to ansi, 4) ansi is fast
and 5) ansi artwork is finally becoming good!

     Ansi, and please excuse my French, is dead.  Its pulse is fading
fast, and there is no further advancement for ansi as it was created.
Rest in peace, dearest friend.  Its successors are dead (RIP and
Avatar).  Ansi has hit that invisible Kubrickian wall of non-progress,
and it appears that we are indeed digressing in order to progress
(example: Mystery of the Purple Tit).  Although I loved you in
Operation: Overkill, Mr. Ansi, I'm sorry to say that you're now out of
our demographics.  Old age is setting in, and the liver spots are
visible.  We'll be glad to sign your living will of euthanasia.

     "So what's next, big shot?" you may be wondering, snarling your lip
and narrowing your brow.  As my audience, don't get me wrong or take
offense to this opinion that ansi is dead.  Ansi, in fact, has had a
great influence on all of the BBS games we've played in the past 10
years.  Ansi will be classic, as classic as Pacman and Space Invaders
are to the video game genre.  Tradewars will live long and prosper in
the minds of the current generation.  I even have a relatively large
cult following on Operation: Overkill which thrives on ansi.  The next
generation of computer wizards will see our ansi creations as possibly
the most horrid creation known to computers.  They will even gasp at the
fact that we associated the term 'graphics' in conjunction with 'ansi'!
As generations continue on, so will technology, AND SO MUST GAMES!

     Mr. Scott Baker -- congratulations on a good door game which has
broken the ansi seal-of-approval, and thanks to the author of the Pit
(is he still alive?!), who brought us one of the first BBS targeted
EGA/VGA graphic terms.  Also, a recent game came out on the BBS market:
Metal Knights, which has a good soundtrack.  Believe it or not, but I
had actually been working on Dark Wasteland (pre-cursor to Overkill) to
use with a graphics term, but I was way over my head in the technical
aspect of it.  But now, as knowledge of the current day has been passed
along through the information highway, programming has become
simplified.  Techniques are easier now to implement.  Complex theories
can actually applied, and discrete calculus algorithms have been reduced
to mere pre-calculated charts and tables.

     If you've ever logged onto Prodigy, you've seen all of these ideas
of a graphics term in action.  Prodigy, unfortunately, is not much of a
challenge for us gamers.  In fact, it's rather boring.  But, BBS games
can be created in the exact same way as Prodigy.  To imagine it in
simple terms: the BBS is running a host program (a door) and the user
online is utilizing a remote program, communicating back and forth to
each other and exchanging data.  It is not difficult to send a block of
data over a communications line.  The ansi programs of today already do
this.  All the visible text on the screen you see when playing a door
game are simply characters, sent over one character at a time.  Your
communications program (Qmodem, Telix, etc.) receives that character,
for example 'z', and writes that character to your screen.  You then see
the letter 'z' (and yawn).  Now just imagine, when your terminal program
receives a character, again the letter 'z', that it flashes up a picture
of your naked sister!  (Stop yawning)  Well, that probably doesn't sound
too thrilling to you, but hopefully you get the idea.  The idea is that
instead of your nekkid sibling flashing up on the screen, a picture of a
maze, a monster, a weapon, a majik wand, or anything game related, could
pop up in full 256 colors of astounding VGA graphics!  All this requires
is a communications program that translates the incoming data (like the
letter 'z') from the host program and pops up the relevant picture for
the data.  Obviously Qmodem or Telix isn't going to do this for you, but
programmers could create such "graphic terminals" to translate the data
for the players.

     BBS gamers would definitely be interested in seeing quality
graphics games and still be able to interact with the other players on
the BBS.  The only thing that's missing here is the graphics.  Swap out
the ansi and replace it with 256 color graphics, and whammo, you've got
a kickass game that meets the standards of today's gamers.  Wouldn't you
like to see a 3D version of Operation: Overkill with a rendering system
comparable to Doom?  I bet you would.  And wouldn't you like to see your
ships transporting from planet to planet in Tradewars?  This also might
intrigue you.

     So gamers of BBS land, don't settle for ansi games for too much
longer.  Start asking for programmers to use more creativity and design
quality games with REAL graphics.  From reading the Fidonet message
areas of Online Games and Door Games, everyone is complaining about
L.O.R.D. and Usurper being too similar.  I don't feel that all of the
gamers, including the Sysops, are satisfied.  Instead of trying to hit
the spacebar on "AAAAA" in Overkill, I bet you'd all like to see id
Software's Doom being played on your favorite BBS and being able to
compete against other players!  (Although Doom isn't designed for BBS
competition, it is fairly close if some additions were made: saving of
player positions, saving objects, calculating top scores, etc).  This
type of setup looks to be our future of BBS gaming.  In fact, you may be
the first to experience a new online game that I and another programmer
(Andrew Welch) are currently working on.  Although I'm inclined to keep
everyone in suspense by not revealing too much, I can at least let the
tail of the cat out of the bag: full VGA graphics game with 256 colors,
joystick and mouse usage, Soundblaster effects and sound, a MIDI
soundtrack, 3-dimensional rendered animation sequences, huge maps, and a
good amount of gore.  Since this is my first actual attempt at a
graphics game, it obviously won't be near the quality and playability of
Doom/Doom II.  But, it can only get better from there!  The game will
probably be released sometime this summer after local testing on my BBS.
Stop by sometime though if you'd like to take a peek at it in a month or
two.

     But this isn't a plug -- it's a plea:

     Gamers -- demand quality games.
     Programmers -- this is the 90's.  Let's give our diehard gamers
                    90's type of games!

     ...In the meantime, happy gaming nevertheless!
ÿ