Monday, August 31, 2015

Episode 106: 30 Minutes of UMoria

This is episode 106 of Roguelike Radio, where we discuss the 30 Minutes of UMoria video series by Ben Horst.

You can download the mp3 of the podcast, play it in the embedded player below, or you can follow us on iTunes.





Topics Discussed:
  • Ben's 139 episode run of UMoria Let's Plays, culminating in the defeat of the Balrog yesterday - episodes and further details also on Ben's archive.org page
  • The history of Moria, with some details from David Craddock's Dungeon Hacks, and how it influenced the roguelike genre
  • The Wheel of Source Code focus on.... place_gold()
  • Ben's desire to beat UMoria for the first time in 17 years, and to make videos to have some output of his play
  • How the Balrog was beaten and how Moria brought grinding to roguelikes
  • The dominance of Dungeons and Dragons vs Tolkien
  • Details of the work that goes into making the episodes and the various features in each ep
  • Greater interest in Moria thanks to the videos
  • The problem of game length in Moria (Ben's winning run took 57 hours)
  • Ben's future plans, including Moria speedruns and offering to help others with roguelike plays
  • Play Moria yourself: Beej's Moria page (includes multiple binaries and guides), UMoria 5.6

Join us next time for more roguelike-y goodness.

7 comments:

  1. Nice and timely episode---an excellent accompaniment to the end of the LP. The present future of Moria is most active in the land of Rephial (or the deeper place at http://forum.nppangband.org/ ) alongside the Angband associates, where NPPAngband dwells as it, while it is still deep into a massive new update and/or QT-powered frenzy, also contains within it NPPMoria which aims to provide much enhancement to the core experience---both projects haven't gotten much of a spotlight yet, but Mr. Horst should definitely look into it at his convenience if he'd not heard of it prior.

    Looking forward to further Moria projects and it would be interesting to see how a Rogue project would go be it of the 57 Hour Challenge or otherwise as it is definitely a very hard game almost to the degree of something like Telengard ( http://buildingworlds.com/telengard/ )---either using one of the oldest preserved editions or the mysterious works of Donnie Russell, who has also done a bit himself to get Moria more...available...in recent times as of this year: https://sites.google.com/site/donnierussellii/home

    Other classics it would be interesting to behold such a treatment would definitely be Omega and Larn as the last of the oldest guard of all. Well, and Quest for the Unicorn if only for netting that Silver Anniversary of late as a window into an alternate timeline where evolution for 80's Roguelikes wasn't so much a thing vs a maddening progression of escalation~ http://elf-emulation.com/rcs/unicorn5/index.html

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  2. Just posted a build to my Github of the DOS flavor of UMoria 5.6 that will work on Windows XP. The VS2013 build I had up before apparently only works on newer Windows versions.

    I also just created a Github account to capture what little history I could find of the Larn source code.

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  3. Also, there's something funny about Moria and guys named Ben. I've been making various ports since the mid-to-late 1990s, and another Ben ran a successful project to contact the original contributors to get permission to relicense the source as GPL and/or public domain. Now a Ben has posted a cool video series about the game.

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  4. Cool episode, I really like the wheel of source code section. It displays a lot of the interesting quirkyness of roguelikes in this one function by juggeling with probabilities, browsing through lists... really nice.

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  5. I'd really recommend Ben trying out Sil since it seems like he likes very old school traditional roguelikes. I think it's the best representation of the really old school in modern roguelikes.

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  6. great episode - i really enjoy bens video series and love the wheel of source code. i wouldnt mind seeing him as a regular contributor to RR, especially if he had a technical or linux/FOSS oriented perspective to give as i anticipate he does, considering the licensing and tools used on 30 minutes of moria.

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  7. OMG "wheel of source code" I love that. I'm going to copy that somehow how fun is that.

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