Important

You are looking at the 1.5 documentation

Orleans 2.0 is a significant overhaul from the 1.x versions. You can find 2.0 documentation here.

Adventure

A simple multiplayer text adventure game inspired by old-fashioned, text-based adventure games.

Instructions:

  1. Build Adventure.sln
  2. Start your local Silo from a command window using command file #1.
  3. The game map initialization script, #2
  4. Start the client #3
  5. Reminisce about the good old days before graphical user interfaces

Overview

The AdventureSetup program reads a game description ("map") from AdventureConfig.txt.

It sets up a series of "rooms" e.g. forest, beach, caves, a clearing etc . These locations are connected to other rooms to model the places and layout of the game. The sample configuration describes only a handful of locations.

Rooms can contain "things" such as keys, swords etc.

The AdventureClient program sets up your player and provides a simple text based user interface to allow you to play the game.

You can move around rooms and interact with things using a simple command language, saying things such as "go north" or "take brass key".

Why Orleans?

Orleans allows the game to be described via very simple C# code while allowing it to scale to a massive multiplayer game. For this motivation to be meaningful, the labyrinth of rooms needs to be very large and need to support a large number of simultaneous players. One value of Orleans is that the service can be designed for growth, the overhead of running it at a small scale is not significant, and you can remain confident that it will scale if the need arises.

How is it modeled?

Player and Rooms are modeled as grains. These grains allow us to distribute the game with each grain modelling state and functionality.

Things such as keys are modeled as plain old objects - they are really just simple immutable data structures that move around rooms and among players; they don't need to be grains.

Things for you to do if you are so inclined

  1. Make the map much, much, bigger
  2. Make the brass key unlock something
  3. Allow players to message each other
  4. Make eating food and drinking water possible and meaningful