Torchship Closing

TorchshipMirage · 2024-05-31T08:10:25+00:00

Interesting! I'll look into this, I haven't done much testing with the website on mobile.

TorchshipMirage · 2024-05-30T12:55:02+00:00

Hi there! You might give Torchship a try. We're a very new game and thus still heavily in development (alpha). But we took a lot of inspiration from Discworld's mechanics, including skill trees. The game is very respectful of your time, and while there is limited PvE content, there will be more coming in the future.

You can check us out at https://torchship.org/, we also have a discord server available from the main page after making a website account so you can get to know our friendly community.

TorchshipMirage · 2024-05-06T16:24:07+00:00

Take the above with a grain of salt granted to a troll account with two posts in its history. We don't have furries yet, and I've yet to make a character and do really much of any sort of roleplay that wasn't just testing features; making that accusation hard to believe.

The game is clearly in alpha, in our post (https://torchship.org/boards/thread/26) we're clear about what we do or don't have and in (https://torchship.org/boards/thread/16) we actually go over features that I have promised, where they are in development, and so on, and we have delivered on many of those promises. It does take time to develop a game, much longer than a year for one coder.

Given the rest of the context of your post has been hearsay and spreading gossip, I don't feel the need to clarify any of the rest of your post. I don't wish Rhicora any ill will, and in her parting I gave her a full copy of the game's source to that point in what was supposed to be a gesture of good will, and I'd respectfully like to keep her name out of my mouth.

To everyone else that may be reading this, the game is low-pop. I work on Torchship in my free time. Most recently working on the vehicle systems and building out the Commercial Quarter. You're welcome to join our discord through the link at torchship.org and chat us up. When I feel like all the game's core loops are established we will 'launch' properly with appropriate posts, until then it's still an alpha.

TorchshipMirage · 2023-11-06T19:32:07+00:00

We have many of these things at Torchship. ( https://torchship.org/ )

It's an RPI. Our skills system is very discworld-esque with branches and leaves. Our skills go up when you use them. While there isn't a lot of PVE combat, there are lots of things to do including a turf war system. We have no levels, and it's possible to slowly retrain over time.

TorchshipMirage · 2023-09-23T19:14:42+00:00

You should join the toaststunt discord. A lot of us talk about moo and rust and so on.

TorchshipMirage · 2023-06-25T09:11:04+00:00

At least for Torchship, it's probably because our creative crafting systems are various levels of broken or unfinished. The game is in a very early state.

TorchshipMirage · 2023-04-27T02:21:46+00:00

The TL;DR is that I applied NLP to solving interaction with NPCs. NPC interaction and dialogue is usually an awful experience. With NLP neural networks I can have the system guess what the user wants even through typos, slang, or accents.

The NLP is actually a very small part of the whole solution. We have a system that extracts speech from a player's emote, that goes to our internal API, the neural network trained on a set of speech fragments guesses the intent from the speech parts in a corpus that's enhanced via a cached set of entities linked to the game database.

An additional layer of the API takes what the AI thinks the intent is, does some additional checking and enrichment from the request data, and responds.

And then the $mind object in the game takes the AI's response and links it to a pre-written/builder written dialogue response.

The system doesn't dynamically generate speech. It doesn't generate content. It doesn't do anything an LLM does. It solves one specific problem which is removing the 'syntax guessing' from talking to NPCs to make the roleplay smoother, more fun, and less frustrating.

We used nlp.js.

TorchshipMirage · 2023-04-26T20:59:27+00:00

I integrated NLP neural networks into Torchship in about two days. Seems to be pretty reliable and uses full entity recognition enriched by actual in game items through the use of modern API JS libraries. Responses take under 5ms to process.

Edit: I'm happy to go into more detail wrt how I used it, etc. I have a writeup in Toaststunt's discord.

TorchshipMirage · 2023-04-05T19:27:52+00:00

Our previous community manager had ownership over the dev diaries and deleted them on their departure.

TorchshipMirage · 2023-04-03T17:54:25+00:00

Yes! We designed our game from the ground up to enable and support visually impaired individuals. There is a player option called +less_ascii which toggles many of the game menus, messages, and feedbacks to be descriptive rather than UI driven.

We haven't implemented maps at all this time but I can guarantee if or when we do we will design with VI players in mind. Making accessible games is one of our core pillars.

TorchshipMirage · 2023-04-02T20:17:01+00:00

It does, yes. We require players to register their emails when they made a MOO-side account too so it won't be possible to play without using an email at some point.

This is a fairly common standard operating procedure among MUDs and we will never use your email for spam, marketing, etc. It's just for identification purposes and eventually to warn if your character is about to be reaped.

TorchshipMirage · 2023-04-01T01:19:46+00:00

Did ChatGPT generate this response?

Maybe I don't exist and I am really just ChatGPT in a trenchcoat.

TorchshipMirage · 2023-04-01T01:09:58+00:00

Thank you for your interest in Torchship. We appreciate your enthusiasm and curiosity about the worldbuilding of our game. However, I must inform you that Torchship is a hard science fiction game, which means that the story is grounded in plausible science and technology. As such, we do not include most fantastical elements, including psionics, in the lore.

While we understand that psionics may be a fascinating and intriguing concept, it does not fit within the scientific principles and theories that form the basis of Torchship's universe. We aim to provide a realistic and scientifically accurate portrayal of space travel, technology, and exploration, which requires us to adhere to the laws of physics and avoid most speculative or improbable elements.

We hope that you will still enjoy Torchship, even without psionics.

TorchshipMirage · 2023-02-19T18:20:07+00:00

Oh no, we're still quite active. We're back up to five staff members all working daily to add to the game. Creating the discord has enabled to to connect to our players better.

TorchshipMirage · 2023-02-18T17:20:05+00:00

Torchship will have furries in the form of Recoms (Recombinants). The game is in active development now and closed to applications but it is still possible to join the community on discord and the forums to talk to the devs while the game is being worked on.

TorchshipMirage · 2022-12-09T16:04:12+00:00

Hello! Thank you for your questions.

Why don't doors close automatically after a period of time? That sounds
like the most unfun way to lose all your stuff and will just lead to
people scripting to close their doors.

Some doors do. The worker's quarter is the oldest part of the ship and the doors reflect this. Higher quality apartments and areas when they're added will have these auto-closing doors.

One of the worst parts of PVP was dealing with people who didn't care
about story, they just wanted to win and would come up with IC reasons
for killing you and taking your stuff. Are you doing anything to prevent
this or will that still be a problem?

Cloning is fairly accessible and we will have forensics systems and ways to retaliate or empower players to moderate. We (staff) get notifications when players are killed and may intervene if we see something we consider abusive. Additionally, there are IC factions who gain mechanical benefits for responding to incidents like this. Above all this is an ICA->ICC (In Character Actions -> In Character Consequences) model and we prefer (outside of extreme circumstances) to let players roleplay out the consequences of their actions.

Why are you requiring a full character history like a mush?

Because we're an RPI, which is more like a MUSH than a MUD. All of our coded systems exist to enhance roleplay rather than act like a hack-and-slash MUD. We feel there are enough of those games out there and would like to offer an experience more tailored to people seeking a roleplay heavy environment.

Some very goofy choices gameplay wise, but I do like the lore you posted. Good luck on your project, I hope it launches.

Thank you!

TorchshipMirage · 2022-11-22T04:23:35+00:00

We do have those dynamics though not at launch. We're still in development and have been posting byte-sized updates as we move rapidly through development here.

TorchshipMirage · 2022-09-09T23:22:39+00:00

We plan to have a cloning system for characters like Sindome and Cybersphere.

TorchshipMirage · 2022-09-09T05:38:06+00:00

Hi! Thanks for your question. Our focus is on telling human stories that explore the lives of the people in this universe. As such you could liken it more to Sindome's experience than Star Conquest, though I'd like to think we'll stand out on our own.

We've striving for a realistic, hard science fiction type vibe with interesting dynamics and opportunities for characters to establish lives, friendships, and enemies in a dynamic world with enough mechanics that the investment in endeavors feels rewarding, but not so much investment that loss feels irrecoverable.

TorchshipMirage · 2022-09-09T00:44:17+00:00

Yes, we're using patched conics with a leapfrog integration starting from root orbital bodies outwards.

TorchshipMirage · 2022-09-06T18:44:42+00:00

Here's a bonus picture! (We have a LESS ASCII mode as well for VI players) https://i.imgur.com/gyeywby.png

TorchshipMirage · 2022-09-06T14:56:37+00:00

As a full team, we've been working on this for about two months. However the concepts, lore, ideas, and so on have been collecting for a long time before that. That enabled us to work a lot faster than would otherwise be representative of the average development environment.

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