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Roblox is a MUD: The history of MUDs, virtual worlds and MMORPGs

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Re: Roblox is a MUD: The history of MUDs, virtual worlds and MMORPGs

#41

Post by stevesearer »

I spent an embarrassing amount of time playing MUDs beginning in high school all the way throughout and after college.

Perhaps all MUDs did this, but my MUD of choice (Revenge of the Jedi RotJ) tallied your total playing time in your player stats.

The way I got started was that a few friends from school were playing and talking about it. It sounded dumb at the time (no pictures + typing) and I decided I would start playing just to kill them in the game.

Little did I know that I would need to spend a lot of time to improve my level, acquire skills, and get better equipment. In addition I didn't know that PKs were mostly frowned upon.

Re: Roblox is a MUD: The history of MUDs, virtual worlds and MMORPGs

#42

Post by cmrdporcupine »

Roblox is more like LambdaMOO than a MUD. LambdaMOO and its succesors were 100% programmed in a prototype based object-oriented programming language with only minimal world-support in the C portion of the server itself. The entire world was composed using the programming language and most users ended up being at least builders if not programmers in it. The focus was authoring, not RPG. Some people (including myself) wrote up some RPGs in MOO but they never really caught on.

Re: Roblox is a MUD: The history of MUDs, virtual worlds and MMORPGs

#43

Post by brlewis »

ephaeton wrote: post #18
waprin wrote: post #6

MUDs are what got me into programming. I was obsessed with them as a kid, although they were associated with DnD which was considered satanic so I had to hide them from my parents and teachers, who both forbid me from associating with DnD or MUDs. Besides playing them, I actually spent more time as a "builder" than a "coder", which was an intermediate step in the hierarchy. As a builder, I would write hundreds of roo…

Same here. MUDs got my unix / network / C programming up to par (and to this day, decades later, I still work in the field). Incidentally, "my" MUD still runs (some 25 years after its start), although it's not thriving by any means. More like 2-3 concurrent players at a peak (we used to be small anyways, our max concurrent players peaked at some 40 in the late 90s and early 00s). There's still new people picking it u…

I think a link to your MUD would be on topic in this thread.

Re: Roblox is a MUD: The history of MUDs, virtual worlds and MMORPGs

#44

Post by orthoxerox »

seneca wrote: post #38
kieckerjan wrote: post #35

I have a company. Our first employee (twenty years ago) had a serious MUD addiction. While a decent and hard-working fellow, he couldn't resist playing his MUD on the job. That was easy enough for him: one of his many terminals was dedicated to it and he would enter a command every few minutes or so. He got a couple of formal warnings before refraining from that behaviour (or he got better at hiding it). Before he ca…

Yeah, MUDs were very much the spiritual precursors to the modern MMORPG. Both have the same extremely addictive property.

Everquest was basically a Diku/ROM/Circle/Smaug MUD in 3D.

Re: Roblox is a MUD: The history of MUDs, virtual worlds and MMORPGs

#46

Post by nsxwolf »

chaostheory wrote: post #9
waprin wrote: post #6

MUDs are what got me into programming. I was obsessed with them as a kid, although they were associated with DnD which was considered satanic so I had to hide them from my parents and teachers, who both forbid me from associating with DnD or MUDs. Besides playing them, I actually spent more time as a "builder" than a "coder", which was an intermediate step in the hierarchy. As a builder, I would write hundreds of roo…

I wouldn't say Roblox games have polish either. There's also a lot of weirdness that only adolescents and tweens would fully understand because in many cases it's made by those same kids. I wouldn't consider it a MUD either. None of the games I've seen so far even have RPG traits. It's more of a powerful sandbox than even Minecraft imo

Some are quite polished. Take a look at Phantom Forces, an FPS that plays as well as Call of Duty.

Re: Roblox is a MUD: The history of MUDs, virtual worlds and MMORPGs

#48

Post by squeaky-clean »

AnonsLadder wrote: post #14
waprin wrote: post #6

MUDs are what got me into programming. I was obsessed with them as a kid, although they were associated with DnD which was considered satanic so I had to hide them from my parents and teachers, who both forbid me from associating with DnD or MUDs. Besides playing them, I actually spent more time as a "builder" than a "coder", which was an intermediate step in the hierarchy. As a builder, I would write hundreds of roo…

My journey to programming all began with RuneScape private servers in mid school. It was my perfect creative outlet because I always wanted to get into programming, I loved MMOs, and it just so happened that RuneScape had a legit full-on underground private server reverse-engineering community. What better way to program than learning how to create your favorite MMO from complete scratch? (With all the documents prov…

One of my friends I met during college ran his own private and modded RS server. He charged a monthly subscription fee for access, with price tiers that went from simply being able to access the server, all the way up to monthly "gifts" of what were essentially lootboxes.

I thought what a crazy idea, who would pay for that? And a few months later he bought himself a new Alienware laptop with his RS server income.

Re: Roblox is a MUD: The history of MUDs, virtual worlds and MMORPGs

#49

Post by Brendinooo »

I got into a MUD around 2003. Lensmoor. Our high school laptops didn't block Telnet, so it was something to do.

I was obsessed with the game until I gradually realized that the best players were there for thousands of hours, and I didn't have that kind of time for it.

Re: Roblox is a MUD: The history of MUDs, virtual worlds and MMORPGs

#50

Post by jmoiron »

snikeris wrote: post #45

Any current or former Gemstone players out there? It used to be on AOL but switched to the regular internet at some point. I still drop in from time to time, brings me back to my childhood.

I played from 1995~2001/2ish. Probably to this day the most rich online gaming experience I've had; the book version of a succession of inferior films.
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