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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

#101

Post by ephaeton »

brlewis wrote: post #43
ephaeton wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn't dare.. you can find us (me? aka Benden) at multimud.net:4242 ;)

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

#102

Post by lostmsu »

manfredo wrote: post #82
matt_heimer wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't "fill in the gaps" the point? What exactly does a polygon character make a person imagine? Text like "He was a nefarious looking character dressed all in red" takes a very small amount of bytes but the resulting payload in someone's mind can be huge. I guess you could argue that images might be a better mechanism to transmit someone else's imagination but text is better to activate your own and I think that is…

There's undoubtedly an appeal to exercising one's own imagination. But any text based interface locks off a huge amount of options for interaction. You'll never have a racing Game, a shooter, a flight simulator, any kind of visual puzzles, etc. in a text based game. The constraints are enormous and there's little question as to why there are so few text based games today. And those few that do exist and are popular l…

> You'll never have a racing game, a shooter

We had a variant of each genre in uni, designed for checkered paper.

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

#103

Post by shostack »

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…

I'm curious how much "productivity" is lost from employees chatting about non work related things in Slack. I also wonder how it would compare to the time this person spent in his MUD.

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

#104

Post by shostack »

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.

Yep, made my way through most of the Simutronics games. Recently tried Dragonrealms again but struggled to get into it. I also think their subscription pricing is way too high.

But I have fond memories of farming gold rings from Harpies in GS3, and popping boxes in the thieves guild in DR. Cyberstrike was also ahead of its time and was surprisingly enjoyable despite the horrendous lag.

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

#105

Post by manfredo »

lostmsu wrote: post #102
manfredo wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's undoubtedly an appeal to exercising one's own imagination. But any text based interface locks off a huge amount of options for interaction. You'll never have a racing Game, a shooter, a flight simulator, any kind of visual puzzles, etc. in a text based game. The constraints are enormous and there's little question as to why there are so few text based games today. And those few that do exist and are popular l…

> You'll never have a racing game, a shooter We had a variant of each genre in uni, designed for checkered paper.

And how did you aim the reticule against your opponents in this checkered paper game? Gameplay ran in realtime? I'm sure you mean to say that you created a pen and paper game that had shooting as an element, but backed by some kind of dice roll. This is conforms to what I said were the constraints of text based games: graph or grid based worlds with turn based or pseudo turn based simulation. Shooters in these kinds of games do exist: https://store.steampowered.com/app/722730/Cogmind/ but they exhibit the same constraints I mentioned

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

#106

Post by lostmsu »

manfredo wrote: post #105
lostmsu wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You'll never have a racing game, a shooter We had a variant of each genre in uni, designed for checkered paper.

And how did you aim the reticule against your opponents in this checkered paper game? Gameplay ran in realtime? I'm sure you mean to say that you created a pen and paper game that had shooting as an element, but backed by some kind of dice roll. This is conforms to what I said were the constraints of text based games: graph or grid based worlds with turn based or pseudo turn based simulation. Shooters in these kinds…

Of course it was not real time. You just picked a shooting direction along one of the two axis.

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

#107

Post by catacombs »

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…

How did you find out your employee was on a MUD at all?

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

#109

Post by dwheeler »

Teckla wrote: post #99
dwheeler wrote: post #29

Wow, it even includes Scepter of Goth! I maintained Scepter of Goth, but because it's no longer available it's now often forgotten. I'm very happy to see it included. I think one of the key tricks and Scepter of Goth was the follow command. As a text adventure, you could say "follow X" and from then on, whenever X moved then you would move with X. That was a key trick to making it easy to create parties so they could…

https://github.com/shelches/scepter

Excellent, thanks for the pointer. I've added that to my document on the history of the Scepter of Goth. It looks like I'll be able to (eventually) post other things, too!!

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

#110

Post by kieckerjan »

catacombs wrote: post #107
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…

How did you find out your employee was on a MUD at all?

Well, at that time we all shared a small office and the screen was pretty recognizable.
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