Tales of Zalanthas
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Not sure if anyone else saw this, but Armageddon Mud is coming back as Tales of Zalanthas. The home page has some good changes listed. It might be a fun return to form.
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I was reading through all the quality of life improvements and theme changes and feeling increasingly optimistic until I got to:
ERP will not be supported. The focus of Tales of Zalanthas is swords and sorcery; exploration, ambition, danger, and survival in a harsh world. Intimacy may exist off-screen as part of story, but explicit sexual content or sexual violence will not be part of the game or allowed.
NO SEX ALLOWED IN THE DESERT.
I don’t know if that kind of policy in 2026 is gonna play out how they want.
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What surprises me is that they say they use AI in their code development process, and their code is over 120,000 lines. As a direct comparison, the code for Silent Heaven is only 44,625 lines, including comments. Both projects use Evennia. Something feels off, like their AI character that has a hand coming out of its leg as it rides a hotdog that has a second skin.
I’m not calling them out or anything. It just doesn’t line up with my experience.
Game-runner of Silent Heaven, a small-town horror MU.
https://silentheaven.org -
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@Jumpscare said in Tales of Zalanthas:
What surprises me is that they say they use AI in their code development process, and their code is over 120,000 lines. As a direct comparison, the code for Silent Heaven is only 44,625 lines, including comments. Both projects use Evennia. Something feels off, like their AI character that has a hand coming out of its leg as it rides a hotdog that has a second skin.
I’m not calling them out or anything. It just doesn’t line up with my experience.
I don’t have any coding experience, but they’re trying to recreate a diku derivative, simulation (and combat specifically) heavy game, so that may have something to do with it. It’s likely going to be a pretty crunchy game, as RP games go, with a focus on combat and mechanical capabilities vs storytelling (no matter what they say). Probably not enough to explain this exact margin, but it can probably explain a bit of it.
I never played Armageddon, I was always put off by the community and the tagline talking about murder and betrayal (and I don’t think I’ve ever heard or read a single story about the game that’s ever made me go “wow I want to play this”, even as a person who does like a crunchy, lots-of-levers-to-pull sort of game at times). But I read over their weird not-official forum sometimes, and the community doesn’t seem great. So I’m assuming that even if the code is well done and good (which doesn’t seem likely, if the gap between a pretty technically slick game like Silent Heaven and their unfinished game is so wide), the game will probably either eat itself alive, or just devolve into desert PVP, or chud finding ways to make people’s lives more difficult without technically breaking any rules.
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@Clarion said in Tales of Zalanthas:
I was reading through all the quality of life improvements and theme changes and feeling increasingly optimistic until I got to:
ERP will not be supported. The focus of Tales of Zalanthas is swords and sorcery; exploration, ambition, danger, and survival in a harsh world. Intimacy may exist off-screen as part of story, but explicit sexual content or sexual violence will not be part of the game or allowed.
NO SEX ALLOWED IN THE DESERT.
I don’t know if that kind of policy in 2026 is gonna play out how they want.
Well our president seems to want to beef with the Pope like a French king from the 1300s so may as ban the sexy times in the Year of our Lord 2026
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@Jumpscare
Based on what I’ve seen of how AI codes, this does not surprise me. -
@NotSanni said in Tales of Zalanthas:
I don’t have any coding experience, but they’re trying to recreate a diku derivative, simulation (and combat specifically) heavy game, so that may have something to do with it. It’s likely going to be a pretty crunchy game, as RP games go, with a focus on combat and mechanical capabilities vs storytelling (no matter what they say). Probably not enough to explain this exact margin, but it can probably explain a bit of it.
They also point out that it includes “2200 test cases” which, as well as being a weird thing to have in your ad copy, could also lend itself to a decent amount of code bloat. That’d be like me including all of the data entry in PyReach as “code I’ve written” when it’s just hundreds of lines of merits because White Wolf/Onyx Path is ceaselessly wordy. Like it is technically correct, but also just something that’s kind of required for what I’m doing? I would assume the same of trying to emulate an automation-heavy DIKU MUD. Idk. I usually delete test cases once things come out successfully and relatively bug free, so could also just be doing that incorrectly.
