[MUD-Dev] WebRPG

[Travis Casey]

On Saturday 10 November 2001 9:27, J C Lawrence posted:
>   http://www.gamegrene.com/rants/1004070301.shtml

[snipping lots]

> The trouble started just about a month ago, when the creators of
> WebRPG made a rather surprising announcement. Their program would
> no longer be free to all who chose to download it. Instead, they
> had decided to institute a monthly fee in exchange for the
> privilege of using their program to run games. In my opinion, this
> decision spells the beginning of the end for WebRPG.

This article is either a bit old, or has taken some time to get
posted.  (From the URL, I'd guess it's a bit old).  It's now been
more than four months since WebRPG went pay.  Pre-pay, I never saw
less than a dozen games running on WebRPG, and often saw 40 or more.
Post-pay, I've never seen more than a dozen, and have often seen
only three or four.

> There's also the fact that WebRPG has now gone from being a free,
> extremely buggy piece of software to being an extremely buggy
> piece of software that costs $10 a month to use. The technical
> problems that followed in WebRPG's wake used to be a lot easier
> for players to justify putting up with; after all, it was free,
> and you get what you pay for. I should point out that WebRPG's
> creators have now released a new version of their software which I
> have not had the opportunity to test. If the new version resolves
> those issues, this criticism could become a moot point, but I
> wouldn't count on it.

The new version seems to crash less, but has other issues -- for
example, on four of our seven player's systems, redraws of the chat
window are slow enough to cause noticeable flicker on a 1.2 GHz
Athlon system, and can take more than a second on a 200 MHz K6-2.
Before the update, screen redraws did not take a noticeable amount
of time even on that slower system.

> And don't even get me started on the way WebRPG announced their
> decision. There was never even a hint that the transition to a pay
> service might be down the road, just a sudden, unprecedented
> announcement. How many well-established games do you suppose had
> to end abruptly because GMs and players wouldn't or couldn't pay
> the fee? And even for the WebRPG users who decided to pay for it,
> the upheaval must have been tremendous. WebRPG may have started
> out trying to encourage real roleplaying on the Internet, but by
> not bothering to give its users fair warning, it's done much more
> to hinder it than it ever has to support it.

Yep.  The lack of warning was one of the worst parts of it for us.
We wound up pretty much having to either pay or suspend the game for
a few weeks, because everyone's character sheets were in the
program.  Thus, in order to switch to anything else, we would have
needed to move all the character data to whatever we chose to use.
And we would have had to do that by hand, since WebRPG uses a
proprietary format, and has never released specs for it, nor tools
to export the data.


I notice that the article didn't mention either of the current
alternatives to WebRPG.  WebRPG is the oldest program specifically
meant for doing tabletop RPG gaming over the 'net, but it's not the
only one.

GRiP is a WebRPG alternative that has always been commercial.  The
fact that it was commercial hampered it in the past, but now that
WebRPG has gone pay, it doesn't seem nearly as bad -- especially
since it doesn't use a subscription model.

WebRPG is now a service that you pay for.  Their software is
closed-source, and only contacts their own server.  When you create
a game session, it's registered on their server, and other people
running WebRPG have to find out about it through their server, and
be referred to your machine by their server.  There seems to be some
amount of the data traffic passing through their server during a
game as well; I haven't actually sniffed packets or anything like
that, but I do know that we've had sessions die when WebRPG dropped
off the 'net, even though all our computers could still see each
other.

The WebRPG software automatically downloads and installs updates
when it starts up.  In some ways this is nice, but it also has its
downsides -- first off, since the program retries several times with
a long timeout, it takes a long time (i.e., 10+ minutes) to start if
WebRPG's servers can't be reached.  There's no way to end the
program gracefully during this time.  Second, there's no way to
"hold off" on upgrading until you hear from other people whether an
upgrade is causing problems, short of not using the program.

As mentioned before, WebRPG uses a proprietary,
not-publically-documented format for data files such as character
sheets, monster info, etc.  What's more, this format seems to differ
between their Windows and Mac versions -- files that people have
sent me from the Windows version, and my own old files from the
Windows version, will not load with the Unix version -- it claims
the files are corrupt.  (I would guess that they're using EOLs in
there without noting the difference between Windows and Unix ones,
but that's just a wild-assed-guess on my part.)

WebRPG is written in Java, and should run on anything that has a
reasonably complete Java implementation.

GRiP has two parts: a server module (called the GM module) which is
commercial, and a player module which is a free download.  Players
put in the address of the GM's machine, and their client connects
directly to it.  Thus, even if the company selling GRiP goes out of
business, you'll still be able to use it.  Further, if they should
decide to change their licensing, you'll still be able to use the
software you already have -- you'll only have to worry about the new
license if you want to upgrade.

One disadvantage to people changing over is that GRiP is *very*
different from WebRPG.  Thus, a group changing over has to relearn
how to do things.  On the plus side, GRiP's character sheet tools
are much more powerful than WebRPG's.  When I tried it about a year
or so ago, GRiP suffered from a *very* poor manual, but I've heard
that has improved greatly.

A second disadvantage is that there's no way to get a list of games
being run with GRiP at any given moment -- since there's no central
server that the games are registered with, you have to learn about
ongoing games through another medium.  This means that "pick-up"
games (games where someone starts running a game, and lets whoever
happens to wander in play) don't tend to happen with GRiP.  On
WebRPG, many people were participating in that sort of game.

There is a free demo version of the GRiP GM module, with a 30-day
time limit.

GRiP uses a text-based format for their data files.  The format is
copyrighted and thus technically "proprietary", but since it is all
in text, it's easy to get your data it and/or manipulate it with
other programs.

GRiP is a compiled program (or programs, really, since the GM and PC
modules are different programs), and only runs on Windows.

OpenRPG is another WebRPG alternative.  As the name implies, it's
open source (GPL).  Currently, it's less user-friendly than WebRPG,
but that's improving.  For the most part, it looks a lot like
WebRPG, which makes transition a bit easier.  That's also somewhat
of a disadvantage, though, because it makes people transitioning
from WebRPG expect it to be more similar to WebRPG than it really
is.

OpenRPG includes both a client and a server.  The server is a
standalone program, and can be run independently of the client.  A
single server can have multiple "rooms".  Games take place in rooms,
and, if needed, a game can involve multiple rooms -- nice for
situations where a party splits up.

When an OpenRPG server is started, you have the choice of having it
register with a central server or not.  If you do register, people
using the OpenRPG "game browser" will see your server in the list.
If you do not, they won't, and people will have to know that you've
got a server up and what your address is in order to connect to your
server.

Servers cannot currently be password-protected, but rooms within a
server can be.

OpenRPG data files are XML files.  Documentation is currently
sparse, but it's being worked on.  In any event, you can easily get
the text out of the files, and a bit of looking at the file vs. the
sheet it represents will show what's what.

OpenRPG is written in Python, using the wxWindows library.  It
currently runs on Windows and Unix; once someone makes a stable Mac
port of the wxPython toolkit, it should run there as well.  There is
a Java version called jOpenRPG currently in development; it is still
alpha, but does run on Macs.

Disclaimer: I am a member of the OpenRPG development team.

--
       |\      _,,,---,,_     Travis S. Casey  <efindel at earthlink.net>
 ZZzz  /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_   No one agrees with me.  Not even me.
      |,4-  ) )-,_..;\ (  `'-' 
     '---''(_/--'  `-'\_) 
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