Games - Furcadia

	Games - Furcadia

Furcadia is an MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online Game), set in a fantasy world inhabited by anthropomorphic animals. The game is based on user-created content, socializing and free-form roleplaying. It is not a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) in the strictest sense; the game has no built in RPG continuity or a combat simulation system. However, these components of MMORPGs that the game itself does not provide are very often added by the players through the powerful customization system.

History

Furcadia is one of the oldest still-running graphical MMOGs. It was developed by Dragon's Eye Productions, Inc (DEP), and was opened to the public on December 16, 1996. Furcadia's engine was first developed in 1995 for a preliminary graphical MUD project called DragonSpires. DragonSpires featured a very simplistic real-time combat, and used a DOS-based client limited to the 16 EGA colors. At its release, Furcadia featured a graphical improvement: art with a 256 color "VGA" palette.

The original programming and design of Furcadia was done by Felorin/Dr. Cat and Talzhemir. Two additional people have since been credited as part of the creative team for their significant contributions: Emerald Flame (Katie Bazor), who developed (and coordinates) the Beekin volunteer staff project, as well as being the game's producer, and sanctimonious (Aleksi Asikainen), who created the game's editors and is now heavily involved in coding the client and the server as the game's lead programmer.

The developers make several minor updates to the code per year. Major updates to the code (such as the addition of new character avatars or improved DragonSpeak commands) occur approximately once per year. As of 2006, the game remains in alpha development stage.

Playing Furcadia

Characters

The character avatar on Furcadia is generically called a "furre", which could be pronounced as either "fur" or "furry". The in-game avatar can be set to one of several species of anthropomorphic animal:

Feline
Canine
Lapine
Equine
Musteline
Squirrel
Rodent

A furre can be one of three genders: male, female, and unspecified.

The furre avatar is composed of two parts. The walkabout is a basic walking animation with the ability to stand, sit, and lie down. The walkabout is customizable by species and colors, but not gender. The portrait or 'port' is a 95x95 portrait image. The portrait by default shows the head of the furre, and it is customizable by species, colors, and gender. Players can customize their avatars by choosing colors from a palette and can edit a brief character description that is viewable by other players. Furcadia offers several items for purchase that allow further customization of the avatar, including the ability to replace one's portrait with custom art.

As of early 2006, Furcadia has over 60,000 active players and regularly sees between 3,500 and 4,100 players at peak times, depending on the day of the week. The record number of players on Furcadia at once is 4305 on January 5th 2005.

Dreams

The primary focus of Furcadia is user-created content. To this end, the Furcadia game download includes an art editor and a map creating program. Users are encouraged to create their own virtual worlds, called Dreams, using these tools. These Dreams can be uploaded to the Furcadia server and used for a variety of purposes, such as role playing, a place to hang out with friends, or simply to show off. Dreams remain open to the public area in which they are uploaded so long as it is inhabited, and, if unoccupied, it eventually unloads automatically. Dreams can include the use of MIDI (.MID), .WMA, .OGG, .MOD, and .S3M format music files (to name a few), and .WAV sound files as well.

Most Dreams take advantage of a relatively user-friendly coding language known as DragonSpeak or "DS". Dragonspeak allows the users to develop interactivity into their dreams, ranging from a simple action like opening a door to far more complex uses, such as a complete game of chess or laser-tag.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Furcadia ]

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