Plexus’ Sauerbraten mod

Posted by zot on August 28th, 2008 filed in Plexus, Sauerbraten

Plexus is more than just a Sauerbraten mod.  Plexus itself is a peer-to-peer MUD which is written in Groovy and Java, uses FreePastry for communication with other Plexus peers, and communicates with users through Sauerbraten.  In order to make this communication possible and more effective, we added and changed some things in Sauerbraten.  Here’s a list of some of them:

• “The Wedge:” remote scripting which allows Sauerbraten to communicate with our MUD (or some other program if you care to write one)
• Cursor-based user interaction, familiar to MMO players
• Custom low-profile HUD with blinking lights
• Dynamically changeable player models
• Ability to reload models that have changed on disk
• Lots of hooks, so that Sauerbraten can inform the MUD (or another program) when things change, like your position, the map, etc.

We have kept Plexus dependencies out of our Sauer mod, so other people can use it with their programs and we try to keep sauer changes to a minimum (doing as much in Groovy and Java as possible so as to maintain maximum compatibility with Sauerbraten).  Our coding preference is (in order): Groovy, Java, C++.

We also have a growing set of tools for Plexus:

• An MD2/MD3 Importer with presentation improvements (neck and waist bending, clamping)
• A maze generator which creates textured mazes with doors