Legend of the Green Dragon
| Legend of the Green Dragon | |
|---|---|
| Studio | Dragonprime Development Team |
| Senior Developer | Eric Stevens JT Traub |
| Erstveröffent- lichung |
March 2003 |
| platform | Web browser |
| genre | Browser game , multi user dungeon |
| control | Keyboard & mouse |
| language | English |
| Current version | 1.1.2 (June 21, 2009) |
Legend of the Green Dragon , also known as LotGD or LoGD , is an online browser game based on PHP . It is a multi-user dungeon game .
Game principle and technology
The gameplay is often the same no matter how much the server is modified. To create on the home page a character . When you log in for the first time you have to answer the questions about which race you want to play and which special skills you want to practice. In the standard release there are 4 races available: Human, Elf, Dwarf and Troll, all of which offer 4 different advantages. Regardless of the breed, you can choose your special skill; the standard version offers three variants.
After you have decided, a new day starts. Such days are often seen depending on the server settings - sometimes 24 times a day (1 game day = 1 hour), sometimes once (1 game day = 24 hours). Finally you get to the village square, often with a little entry fee, and find yourself in a world that can only be described with words.
It is usually possible to look at the basic settings (e.g. length of game days, entry fee, etc.) and a list of the installed additional modules before creating a character. From this it can often be seen whether in this "world" more emphasis is placed on the fights or on the role play and what degree of difficulty one has to reckon with in the fights.
Level up
As in any role-playing game, you can also gain experience in LoGD in order to level up. In order to gain experience, fighting in the forest is essential, later you can concentrate fully on defeating other players.
In combat you can use the special skills you selected at the start of the game in addition to the normal command ("fighting"). The applications and types of attack depend on the level and the chosen skill.
If you have gained enough experience, you have to compete against your master in the training camp. If you defeat him, you rise in the level.
While looking for monsters in the forest, “something special” may happen. Instead of a monster, there is a small scene in which a lot can happen. For example, you can find gold or precious stones or be surprised by an old man who hits the player with a stick.
From version 1.0.0, such special events also take place on the village square, in the garden and in the shade.
The shadows, or the land of shadows, is the realm of death. If you lose a forest fight, you die and end up here. You can torture other creatures in the cemetery to earn favor with Ramius, the god of the dead. With these favors one can - in addition to restoring the soul (the life points in the shadow realm) - also be revived. Usually this resurrection counts as a new day.
If you reach level 15, there are no more masters who allow further level advancement. Now you have to look for the dragon that is in the forest. If you defeat this relatively strong creature, you get to see a closing text, which finally heralds an endless loop.
If you kill the dragon, it always injures the player himself while dying. You don't die, however, you get a new title, but you lose all strength and memory of everything you have learned. You start again with the standard values, apart from a bonus that you get for each killing of a dragon.
role playing game
A PHP-based chat can be found at many venues. On most servers, these places are not used as normal chats, but as places for a pen & paper-like role-playing game. You let your character perform actions, interact with other players. Depending on the server, you have sometimes more, sometimes less space to write. The main difference to the original pen & paper is that there is usually no direct game leader, only the external circumstances are given by the description of the respective game location and the players can create their own starting point. Certain role-playing based interactions between players can have an impact on combat values (see "Leveling").
To describe your character you have at least one biography available in which you can describe your character. Usually this offers space for 255 characters, which is sometimes considered too few. It is therefore widespread, especially with version 0.9.7 + jt ext GER, to offer more space here (~ 4Kb characters). There is also a possibility to link avatars on many servers, but not provided in the core release of version 1.0.
In order to be able to play such a role-playing game, all players need a good imagination in order to be able to imagine the described situation and not to describe any illogical reactions. Since the role play in this form is usually not moderated, firm discipline is required. So-called "PowerGamers", players who appear in role-playing games with superpowers, who beat everything down and don't even give their fellow players the opportunity to react, are outlawed and are punished accordingly on servers that value role-play.
The named owners of the individual shops in the cities can be included in the role-play as given NPCs . In addition, the administration of the server can use an additional module to use experienced players as game masters, who can then create various NPCs. This module is rarely used, especially where a lot of emphasis is placed on coherent role play.
In contrast to version 0.9.7 + jt, the core of 1.0 places more emphasis on a role-playing atmosphere. There is a core module that creates several cities, one for each race in addition to a capital. However, it is debatable whether multiple villages actually promote role-play itself. Especially for small servers, multiple cities are disruptive to the role-playing game, as the probability of meeting a player in the same city by chance decreases with the number of cities.
As an alternative to the various cities, many German 0.9.7 + jt servers offer several additional locations that are purely intended for role-play chat and enlarge the village itself, but not the world.
There are a total of around 30,000 created accounts, distributed on the various servers, with the largest server being in German with around 4,000 registered accounts (as of December 2009). There are over 300 listed servers in different languages in the official LoGD network.
On the largest servers there are around 100–150 players online at the same time at peak times, which is quite a high number compared to other MUDs.
Technical background
Theoretically, Legend of the Green Dragon can support different database systems, but by default it only supports MySQL . The versions from 0.9.8 are under a Creative Commons license ( by-nc-sa ), the previous (from 0.9) under the GNU General Public License .
Version 0.9.7
Version 0.9.7 is still the most common of all versions on German-speaking servers and is still being actively developed. However, since all changes have to be made by hand in the source code, there is no general standard and most of the versions operated are therefore incompatible with one another.
Version 1.0
Version 1.0 and all subsequent versions are characterized by a well thought-out module system that enables changes to be made at almost any point without touching the original files. This primarily simplifies updates, but errors in modules can also be localized more easily by deactivating them. A major disadvantage of the system, however, is that without activated caching the database is used excessively.
With the help of the integrated translation engine, texts can be translated into the current language during the game. From version 1.1.0 the game is also able to use other character sets than ISO-8859-1.
Production notes
LotGD pays homage to the BBS door game Legend of the Red Dragon (LoRD) by Seth Able Robinson. Since the exclusive rights are with Gameport, the content of LotGD is completely new, with the exception of the buxom barmaid Violet and the attractive bard Seth. The gameplay itself also had to be changed, since LotGD is a browser game and not, as with LoRD, a console game.
In March 2003, Eric Stevens published the source code of his browser game under the GNU GPL on SourceForge . A month later the game was mentioned in an article on Slashdot, which resulted in a drastic increase in the number of users and made the game popular. In May 2003 Stevens released version 0.9.7 in cooperation with "JTraub". In July of the same year, Eric Stevens himself removed the game from the project website at SourceForge's request, as the project was now consuming a lot of traffic. After several preliminary versions, Eric Stevens and JTraub finally decided in April 2005 to release version 1.0.0 of the game.
In December 2005, both developers announced that they would cease development of the game, and then released version 1.0.6 as the last official version in January 2006. The project is being developed by volunteers. The last stable version, 1.1.0, was released in April 2006.
Web links
- LotGD.net , the central server , also called "classic server " (s)
- LoGD-Net , the official list of LoGD servers (en)
Individual evidence
- ^ Slashdot
- ↑ Dragonpedia: A Brief History of Legend of the Green Dragon
- ↑ Project statistics on SourceForge.net ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
