Received: by CMUCCVMA (Mailer R2.04) id 1874; Tue, 24 Oct 89 20:34:40 EDT Date: Tue, 24 Oct 89 15:58:28 -0700 Reply-To: MORIA Discussion Sender: MORIA Discussion From: "James E. Wilson" Subject: A Moria History To: Cornelius Caesar Sorry about that, here is what I meant to send the first time. I originally sent this to the Usenet rec.games.moria group, and though people on this list might be interested too. In article <526@ra.cs.Virginia.EDU> gnf3e@uvacs.cs.virginia.edu (Greg Fife) writes: >If I understand correctly, there are two basic versions of Moria: a VMS >version coded in Pascal, and a Unix version written in C. Is this correct? >Is this complete? Where does Amiga Moria and its "Weapons of Lordly Might?" >fit in? What are the major differences between the versions? Yes. There are so many differences between the VMS and UNIX versions, that it is hard to pick out the major differences. Most differences are minor, and not noticable unless you are an expert player; there are very few differences that I would call major. This question is asked often, though, so I have finally sat down and wrote up a history of Moria, which I have added to the Umoria sources. Any corrections or additions to this history would be welcome. ************************ A History of Moria: written by Jim Wilson this history is somewhat biased towards the Umoria versions because those are the versions that I am most familiar with, info for the VMS versions may be inaccurate VMS Moria 4.8: last version by original authors, R.A. Koeneke, etc., developed at Univ Oklahoma in VMS Pascal VMS Moria 5.0: developed at Univ Buffalo, VMS Pascal; has a Black Market where one can purchase enchanted magic items at 100 times normal value, a few bug fixes over 4.8 Moria, some new monsters VMS Moria 6.0: under development at Villanova by Rick Greene; some more bug fixes over VMS 5.0 (some borrowed from Umoria 4.87), more new monsters, reduced map display (borrowed from PC-Moria) UMoria 4.87: developed by Jim Wilson at UC Berkeley; very many bugs and inconsistencies in 4.8 fixed, rewritten in C for better portability, Atari/Mac/UNIX versions identical, character rerolling, no help facility like the VMS versions, etc. PC-Moria 4.873: developed by Don Kneller; same as Umoria 4.87 except the sources will compile on machines with 16 bit integers, reduced map display Amiga Moria v3.0: bitmapped graphics unlike ascii graphics of other versions, has weapons of Godly Might and other changes that make it far far easier than all other Moria versions BRUCE Moria: developed by Christopher J. Stuart at Monash University, somewhere in Australia; monster memories, look any direction code, settable options, better run/find code, can center character on screen, stat code rewritten to fix bugs, rudimentory help facility added, plus many other enhancements, experimental version, source never publicly released UMoria 5.0: under developement by Jim Wilson at UC Berkeley; unified source for UNIX/IBM-PC/Atari and hopefully others, many new features borrowed from BRUCE Moria, more bug fixes, all floating point code eliminated, many changes that affect play balance (hopefully for the better), many type/structure changes Vertical position indicates roughly when the versions were made available, although the scale is not very accurate. 1985 Moria 4.8 (VMS) / \ 1987 UMoria 4.83 ------ ---------------- / \ \ / --------- PC-Moria 4.83 | UMoria 4.85 | | / | \ | Moria UB 5.0 (VMS) 1988 /------ | ------ | | / | UMoria 4.87 | | | BRUCE Moria \ | | Amiga Moria \ PC-Moria 4.873 | 1989 --------\ | | \ | | \ | Moria 6.0 (VMS) 1990 Umoria 5.0 Jim Wilson BITNET: wilson@ucbernie wilson@ernie.Berkeley.EDU ...!ucbvax!ucbernie!wilson Vila: I've got this shocking pain right behind the eyes. Avon: Have you considered amputation? -- Blake's 7