But what happens if your hero is in a directory when a "rmdir" is issued? It also seems like "~/Desktop" should be a tavern or something. Is sftp the equivalent of a teleport? So many possibilities.

"The room begins to crumble around you. You barely escape the earthshaking rmdir."

Dotfiles are invisible unless you use a Flag of True Seeing. (-a)

The player could collect and execute scrolls like teleport.bash (provided they have high enough permissions to execute the file).

Bard players could charm (chown) hostile enemies to make them friendly.

I sense something off in the room... I cast Detect Magic and invoke ls -l

"Something off in the room" could be mismatched file count, unusual memory footprint, or processes targeting that path.

Really hope the user can fight and/or summon daemons too.

Final boss could be Zalgo, who slowly corrupts your shell and makes it harder and harder to accurately type commands.

Brilliant.

dont try to level up too far thou:

    hero[160]@/home
    hp:[xxxxxxxxxx] -2085599079/-2085599079
    xp:[xxxxxxx---] 40302/60715
    att:-1989316420   def:6   spd:697466
    equip:{sword[1],shield[1]}
    item:{escapex15}
    5947886g

You become undead?

This is fixed now.

reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation:_Inner_Space except cli and a rpg :P

I thought of lose/lose http://www.stfj.net/art/2009/loselose/

That game is a hidden gem. I e-mailed Software Dynamics about 15 years ago asking them to release it for free so it wouldn't be forgotten (I had already bought a license), but they replied saying they had stopped game development. Oh well.

A friends housemate had a computer, very fancy, dual floppies think it was branded as "SuperBrain" or something. He showed me Modula-2 which would would render Pascal obsolete and assured me CPM would never be replaced as there were too many programs already written for it. It was all way over my head, but he had this game "Adventure" on it ... about a week or two later it dawned on me that navigating the cave and saying magic words all by typing was really no different than navigating the file system and issuing commands and if I could do the one I could do the other. Stopped playing that game and started this one, no regrets.

Throw in a redis client or similar and you could have multiple players battling it out. (Assuming you don't want to put stuff into the actual folder on a per-player basis)

I was thinking about using ssh somehow to turn it into multiplayer.

A local, cheaper alternative is to just have different player profiles (with different data files) and make them battle when they both happen to be on the same directory.

I'd assume ssh to get onto the server but you still need a way for the rpgcli instances to talk to each other. Like I already wrote, you could dump files into the folder each player is in, but I'm thinking something like redis or similar would give you messaging/events. This would avoid the need for temporary files recording where each player is in the folder structure; as well as having to clean them up.

This would allow an event to be generated when players are in the same folder; allow them to be aware of each other; allow interaction, eg they could draw swords; or interact with the creatures therein. Objects dropped could be seen by both and once picked up are taken by one player etc. Monsters could wander around as well.

I'm not referring to messaging / events for just chat purposes even though you could naturally enough do that as well.

Very cool! http://psdoom.sourceforge.net/ is worth a mention as well where you shoot demons to kill your processes.

Reminds me of that one old PC game “Virus: The Game”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus:_The_Game

This is great! I spent so much time playing MUDs that I often imagine navigating in CLI as playing a MUD.

I recently became a MUD coder again after a 30 year absence, and it’s honestly occasionally a bit confusing. It’s kinda a shell, you’re doing some directory manipulation, but obviously nothing works the same.

reminds me of fpsfs (fuse-fps? dont remember the exact name) from the mid 2000's, which was a 3d ftp game with dirs as rooms and files as blocks which you could shoot and so delete :)

edit: it was Brutal File Manager - thanks, folmar

In a similar vein, psdoom as an FPS for process "management": https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/chi/chi.html

I want this same concept, except you have to learn vim commands to win battles

reminds me of the Brutal File Manager

This is really creative, nicely done!

LOVE this!! Well done :)

This is cool as heck!