Rimworlds Ref

[JonO]

You have the best avatar on the site, so far, JonO.

This old thing? Actually it's a Uefamy1 Warrior, they are an insectoid species that along with the Terrannen, Katr'ne, DAZ-Goth and the w'Cha have created the Trade Compact Civilization. One of their racial advantages is, not having external genitalia, they can be illustrated without having to add clothes. On the other hand, the folks who have seen some of the renderings say they prefer looking at the Terranen women, who appear to be in danger of demonstrating that they are fully functioning mammals.

I hope that you will start a Rimworlds discussion thread, and tell us what distinguished Rimworlds from other space type PBM games, back in the day, and also, how your new version is the same or different from the old PBM version of Rimworlds.

I'll be glad to.

Additionally, do you happen to have any copies of old advertisements for Rimworlds that were run in magazines, if there were any such advertisements? Did Rimworlds originate with you, long ago? Or did you acquire the rights to it, at some point down the road?

I found PBM from an ad for Universe III on the back of Analog Magazine and joined it a couple of months after Draper Kaufmann (designer of Illuminati PBM) did and we soon ran across each other. Dray was great at getting lots of people to communicate with each other and was soon putting out a newsletter that increase the roleplaying aspects of the game about 1,000 %. I realized that it was the chance to act out a role that was making the game so addictive. Unfortunately, Universe II/III (though it spawned Rimworlds, BSE, and Illuminati) was at heart a rather simplistic game. Within six months, I was working on the first version of what became Rimworlds about eighteen months later. It was originally programmed on a souped-up TI99-4A that ran a 20 meg harddrive and 4 floppy drives. It had a whopping 128K of programmable memory. I later converted it over to a 286 XT running PDS 7.1 on MS-DOS and I had a whopping 512K of memory to play around in!

I wish I did have some of the old ads (they ran in Flagship) but my copies disappeared in the dozen-odd moves I've made since then, and the Flagship reprints jump from issue 3, the last one I didn't advertise in.

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I heard last year that it was going to be revived as an mmorpg. Is that still the plan, or will it be a pb(e)m game again?

Joe

Neither. It'll be Play-by-Web. If I pull it off, it'll capture the feeling and the role-play and the community aspects of what I still think of as a game/novel being cooperatively told by all the players working together even while competing but cutting way down on the busted turns by allowing the player to see the results of today's orders before working out what he wants to do tomorrow.