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Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play

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Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play

#11
How many of you rushed home from school to get your daily turns in? One that I played (maybe called Dikumud?) had some turn based aspects that would reset everyday. Would fly to my room after the school bus to fire up the modem and the IBM clone PC to get connected and get my action in!

Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play

#12

MUDs may be history to most people, but at Iron Realms we still have five commercial MUDs running live with dedicated paid staff on each constantly working to improve the gameplay and enlarge the already massive worlds. Honestly, it's pretty surprising to me, as when I launched our first one - Achaea - in 1997 right around when Ultima Online launched, I gave us five years. https://ironrealms.com

Are any particularly tuned to playing together in small groups or pairs?

My love of MUD/MUSE/MOOws largely around such experiences.

Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play

#13
A good friend of mine was really into Carrion Fields [0], back in the 90s early 00s. Amazingly, it is still around! I also played for a while, mostly doable even on the slow internet connection we had at the time (good ol' 14/28k at best). It was amazing how big and popular some of these were, before Everquest/Ultima/WoW made such ideas really mainstream.

Anyway, I did enjoy playing it, though big multiplayer games weren't quite my thing, it was fun to have a friend to play with. He had lots of online buddies through the MUD. For me, it got me further into coding as I worked on modifying a MUD of my own, but I can't remember the codebase I started with.

[0] https://www.carrionfields.net/

Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play

#16
My favorite mud was Frontier Mud - not sure when it went down. Back in college I was writing an LPMud called MirrorMud that featured a mystical mountain. You'd appear to finish your quest to the mountain top, but then when you'd return to town, the description of everything and everyone around you would be different, and evil, almost like everyone had been replaced by evil versions of themselves. I was playing with lex and yacc to make parsers like the Swedish Chef parser, so that any other player's speech would be re-parsed live to look evil (without their knowledge). Meanwhile, from the perspective of the other players, a player returning from the mountain would have his speech re-parsed (without his knowledge) to look delusional or drunk somehow. The idea is that you'd need another quest to put things back to normal, and in the meantime all the players could have fun messing with the people returning from the quest. That was about as far as I got, because one of the campus administrators found the mud running on my account and deleted my files. Argh campus administrators!

Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play

#17

MUDs may be history to most people, but at Iron Realms we still have five commercial MUDs running live with dedicated paid staff on each constantly working to improve the gameplay and enlarge the already massive worlds. Honestly, it's pretty surprising to me, as when I launched our first one - Achaea - in 1997 right around when Ultima Online launched, I gave us five years. https://ironrealms.com

This is fun, thanks! Minor bug report, this asset is missing (404 - found it broken while creating a character): https://www.achaea.com/local/client_data/classes/psion.jpg?v...

Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play

#19

MUDs may be history to most people, but at Iron Realms we still have five commercial MUDs running live with dedicated paid staff on each constantly working to improve the gameplay and enlarge the already massive worlds. Honestly, it's pretty surprising to me, as when I launched our first one - Achaea - in 1997 right around when Ultima Online launched, I gave us five years. https://ironrealms.com

As someone who was a volunteer Admin/coder for a while on a MUD during college (Fires of Heaven, yes based on the Wheel of Time) keeping a MUD going with paid staff in this age is incredible. Well done!
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