Meanwhile, back at Chaos Towers: work continues on The Stack, but I’ve also got a bit distracted by returning to Dual Universe (sort of)…

Dual Universe was an interesting game.

I say was, because the original MMO shut down recently.

I signed up to it as an alpha backer a few years ago, just before they went into beta, and I stuck with it until well past the point where they officially released and were charging a monthly fee for it.

Calling it a game might be a bit of a stretch actually - it is really just a big sandbox, and almost all of the content is user generated, including ships, buildings, and most of what you might call narrative.

That’s ok though.

You can create functional spaceships, buildings and factories on land, and spacestations, using a range of elements that you can trade or create with an industry system. You can mine for resources, or trade for them. You can model skins for these constructions using some voxel-based tools which can produce amazing results (if you have the talent to use them properly, which I manifestly don’t). Crucially for me, you can also script the dynamic aspects of your constructions, using Lua.

I liked the setting (space / procedural planets), and I like the building and scripting, which were right up my strasse. There was a bit of a grind occassionally, but it’s an MMO so that comes with the territory.

All in all it was a fun way to “unwind” - although a bit of a busmans holiday for me as did a lot of building and tinkering with scripts.

I ended up putting in a lot of effort on the Lua, and even started writing a blog about the scripting process, in the guise of my in-game alter ego.

Sadly, over time I found that the game’s scripting limitations frustrated me. The development pace was glacial. The designers were concerned about game balance, and imposed all sorts of annoying limitations on the scripts, which crippled them. Their concerns were understandable, up to a point, but they didn’t have much of a “game” in the first place, and I felt that they had taken absolutely the wrong path. I think that the amazing things we could have created would have attracted more players and created new reasons for playing. The game designers didn’t agree.

I’ll never know whether I was right, but ultimately the game designers were definitely wrong; the game didn’t attract enough users and was not enough of a commercial success to sustain the cost of the servers; hence the recent shutdown.

So why am I talking about all of this now?

Well, about a year before they shut down the MMO, Novaquark, the company behind it, released a standalone version of the server code, and a version of the client that could connect to third party servers. Which was… unexpectedly sensible.

As a consequence, some community servers sprung up, and a couple are still going with sustainable populations. When I saw that the MMO was shutting down, I became aware that there was now a way to set up your own server, or to play on someone else’s, without having to pay a monthly subscription. I tried to resist, but ultimately dived in again.

The server I picked is The Third Verse. I doesn’t appear have quite as many users as the other main one, but so far I find it to be reliable and a nice crowd.

I don’t know how long I’ll stick with it, but for now I’m having fun again with the slow bootstrap. You start with very little, and if like me you enjoy trying to get to the stage where you have mega factories, a fleet of ships, and a space station or two - well, it’s a long old haul.

I’m also back to developing my scripts and toolkits, which are all open-source.

If any of this sounds like fun, why don’t you pick up a copy of the client (which requires a one off payment, but not a ruinous one), sign up to The Third Verse, and come and say hello.

You’ll find me in a lovely little bay, just northwest of District 3 on Alioth!