I'd be interested as well; and I know several of my non-forumgoing friends would be too

I would like it. So are we talking IRC rooms - since you said no not like MUSH (YEAH fellow MUSHERS!). I think this could work well! I shall play! i think the idea of a persistant EP 'verse' in a text based/sheeted universe could be interesting.

I'm still interested in developing something along these lines. A did a bit of research and found that there is an EP MUSH already out there. Anyone here had any experience with it? BlueJean I was also wondering why you specifically ruled out MUSH (assuming you meant all MUX etc.) as a means of implementing? My thinking, and it was still kind of fuzzy, was that you could do that to facilitate mixing online and offline gaming activities. Things taking place in the mesh or dealing with infomorphs would all be online, and if players needed to buy equipment they could do so online without having a GM present. Something like EP seems like it would benefit from a shared gaming universe since the scope of having multiple solar systems is so huge. It just seems like there should be things going on all the time that are "off-stage" from an individual player's perspective.

And their whole ilk are much much simpler than Second Life or MMOs. They are predominently text based. It's a series of rooms and the methods of traveling from one to another is like a huge graph of nodes (rooms) and edges (exits between rooms). Also there are people which are self mobile and objects which can be carried by people or left in a room. Everytime you enter a room it simply shows you the room's descriptive text and that of all the top level objects you can see in the room. What's top level? Well if there's a bag full of stuff sitting in a room you might see "There is a huge cloth bag here". If you wanted to see what was IN the bag you'd have to use a command like "Inventory bag" or maybe "take bag; open bag; inventory bag". People are also top level objects and can be either Players or Non-Players (often called mobs for mobiles). Often people are distinguished because they are living, i.e. they have a heart beat. If the heart beat property is turned off then the person becomes a corpse object instead. All of the current 2D and 3D games are basically driven off of the same concepts. There are rules within the game engine for manipulating various kinds of objects. All of this used to be done with just text. Later on it graduated to "graphical MUDs". MUSHes, MOOs, MUXs, etc are all synonyms of the same class of "Multi-User Dungeon" but are destinctive for having different classes of rules. Some (MUDs) have built in rules for combat and split Immortals who are game creators and maintainers from players who enjoy the content. Others (MOOs) are more like shared worlds wherein anyone can create objects and the more experienced you get you are gradually given more types of things you can create (code or use in game code generation rules). MUSHes, are basically somewhere in between. That sums up about 700 to 800 pages of detail and glosses over many things, some of which sparked "holy wars" long before most readers here were probably born. I'm over 50 and have been playing and coding on main frames before the personal computer was really "personal" and I missed most of them because they happend before my time. You can definitely trace all of the current set of online RPGs and MMOs and FPSs back to the original MUD stuff. And MUDs were nothing more than a multi-user version of text games like Adventure, Rogue and Hack. Hopefully that gives you a bunch of background to spark your curiousity with out being too much of a "when I was a pup we had to walk to school in 3 feet of snow, up hill, both ways!". :-) Sorry it took so long to answer, Thanksgiving Day and Christmas decorations came up on my honey-dos list.

Yes, I still want to do this. I am in the process of buying a house and thing are a little crazy. I was planning on start using my local server for development. We need to get all the people what interested at various levels to come together in a round table and decide what our design goals are and we can go from there.

Ok for all those of us still interested in the initial creation stage, where should we meet? We will need some forums and a place to store design documents. My servers ( Yes I have 4 "servers", juiced up desktop units, in my house in addition to 5 user PCs.) are going to be shutdown for 2-6 weeks while I put some network infrastructure into the new house. After that I could host a MU* off of my home IP. If we got really big with 100s of users online we'd then have to find a dedicated host. Not all that hard or expensive any more. Anyone know of a good place? We could do Sourceforge if nothing else. That's what I used previously but it has been a few years. Thoughts?

I'm intrigued, and I know at least two people who would probably be excited at the prospect - one might even be interested in contributing GM time. I'll pass this topic along to them.

I, too, wish to subscribe to your newsletter. I've thought we needed an EP MUCK or MUSH for years, but the one I beta tested a year ago died and the only one I could find now (eclipsephase.kydance.net: 2300) was empty. Is this still going on?

I was just thinking about this, and I made a post of Facebook about it. One of the responses suggested that we could use Roll20 as an online map, and coordinate the session using google hangout. That could work out for you guys.