Dan Lawrence's "DND" What is DND? - One of the first CRPGs. Arguably the first. Probably the second. - In this game, you murderhobo your way down to the bottom of a dungeon, to fetch the Orb, and then murderhobo your way back out. - The best way to play D&D. - Originally written in BASIC 2+ on a PDP-10 running TOPS-10. - By Daniel M. Lawrence. - Also ported to VMS BASIC, VMS Pascal, DOS Pascal, and Unix C. - Gave rise to a few derivatives/fan works, which we will talk about later. Idea that it was the first comes from an incorrectly sourced and cited internet article claiming that it was written in 1972. This is amusing, because original tabletop D&D, upon which it is based, didn't come out until 1974. Earlier game, also called DND, on PLATO system. Written in 1974 by Flint and Dirk Pellet and later expanded by Gary Wisenhunt and Ray Wood. Mention all the "theft" drama around this after Lawrence's death, and why I don't give a fuck. - Earliest date of 1976 in extant source files of Lawrence's game. - Similar UI and macguffin, but entirely different maps and mechanics from PLATO DND. - Lawrence's DND is obviously inspired by PLATO DND, but cannot be considered a "copy" any more than a Chevy can be considered a copy of a Ford, or Westwood's Eye of the Beholder can be considered a copy of FTL's Dungeonmaster. - It's ancient history at this point, and I am interested in preserving, playing, and improving the game. I credit PLATO DND as the earlier game and the inspiration for Lawrence's, but beyond that I don't want to hear any dick waving about PLATO DND. - If interested in Plato DND, it can still be played on the cyber1 PLATO system. - Drama is kind of amusing anyway. The only reason the game is remembered is because of the DOS version, which was "borrowed" from the VMS Pascal version, which was "borrowed" from Lawrence, who was inspired by the PLATO version, which itself appears to be borrowing a huge amount of stuff, without permission, from TSR's tabletop D&D game. - So, let's just but all this dumbfuckery behind us and focus on preservation and improvement. Originally from Arizona, Dan Lawrence died of a heart attack in 2010, at the age of 52, in Lafayette, Indiana. - He attended Perdue university in the mid 1970s, which is likely where he was exposed to PLATO DND. - Better known for the later "Telengard" RPG on 8-bit microcomputers. - But I think that DND is the superior game, as the dungeon designs are more interesting, not completely random like in Telengard. - Lawrence originally wrote the game on TOPS-10, probably at Perdue. - Later went on to work for DEC, where he ported the game to VMS Basic. - DEC employees (possibly assisted by Lawrence) later ported the game to Pascal, and improved it. - Around this time, Lawrence wrote the 8-bit "Telengard" on the Commodore PET, and began negotiating with Avalon Hill to publish it. - During these negotiations, there were legal rumblings which forced DEC to remove the DND games from their systems. - Fortunately this guideline was only loosely followed, and the game survived. - Bill Knight got hold of the Pascal source while working as a contractor at DEC, and ported it to the PC. He released this version as shareware, much to the consternation of the DEC employees who had largely written it. - Sometime later, Knight apparently rewrote the entire game, again in Pascal, and re-released it as "Dungeons of the Necromancer's Domain", with entirely different (and not as good) dungeons. - Once you see the extant source code, you will understand why he would have done this. - None of the Pascal sources are known to have survived. The only extant source code comes from Chuck Cranor, who backported the 3.0 VMS BASIC version back to TOPS-10 while he was in high-school, and then later in college ported it to C. - We have sources for the original VMS BASIC 3.0 version, Cranor's backport, and Cranor's Unix port. - Although the code is ugly enough to make children scream and women weep, it still compiles on Linux with only minor changes. There were also some derivative fan works. - Justin Rancourt, who used to run a tripod website about the game, partially completed a very interesting fan work called "Return to the Necromancer's Domain". - His site disappeared years ago, but I have it mirrored in the SVN repository linked below. It is used without permission, as I have no way to contact Justin. - Steve Segreto wrote a very nice fan work called "ADND", which later became "The Valley of Neustria". - Valley of Neustria eventually morphed into a 3d game and no longer uses any of the original DND dungeon maps as far as I know, nor emulates any of the gameplay style of the original. - I have Steve's permission to reproduce his DND-related games in the SVN repository linked below. For his later works, see his youtube channel, also linked below. - Several other similar and possibly derivative works on several ancient platforms. -See the Tripod site mirror in the SVN repository for details. - We'll examine these derivatives more closely in later videos. Although we might consider this to be an early "Roguelike" game, it predates Rogue, and differs greatly from the traditional roguelike. - For one, all of the dungeons were designed by humans and are static, rather than random like we see in most Roguelikes. This, in my opinion, makes the dungeons more interesting, as they often seem to have a design to them rather than just being a chaotic jumble of locations. - Secondly, the UI is all context sensitive, and prompts the player helpfully. You start a fight, you get a menu of actions. You interact with a dungeon feature, you get a menu of actions. There is none of the "memorize a gigantic and often nonsensical keymap" as we see in many Roguelikes. It makes the game much more approachable to the new player. Alright, now that the history is out of the way, what are our plans for this shit? - Reverse engineer the data files from the various version, and compare them, the maps in particular. - This is already done, I just need to make a video about it. - Reverse engineer the game mechanics from the extant source sode. - This is partially complete. - The extant source code is an absolute nightmare, but a general understanding of how the original is supposed to work will be helpful in our reimplementation efforts. - Then, we will rewrite it in ANSI C. - Make it all as portable as possible. - Try to make it as modular and extensible as possible. - At least initially, make sure that it will compile and run on old iron. - Minimum initial spec to be 8-bit CPU, 64k RAM, single floppy drive, and a 40 64 or 80 column text display. - Even though the original won't run on such a system, there is no reason that it can't be written on such a system. We'll just only be able to load/simulate one dungeon level at a time, and wait on disk access while moving between levels. More on that in later videos. Next time, we'll talk about the data format of the map files, and compare the map data from different versions. - That will probably be boring af for you to watch. In the meantime, you can poke through the source code and data I've collected so far through the SVN repository linked in the video description. You can also play the DOS version of DND using the link in the video description. - https://www.classicdosgames.com/online/dnd_121.html - In my opinion, this is a better version than the one on Internet Archive, because being the older release it still contains the same maps as the VMS version. Also, for those of you coming into this video series later, I'll try to keep a table of contents of future videos linked up in a pinned comment below. Done.