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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

#91

Here’s a little plug for my first and only MUD I ever seriously played: VikingMUD https://www.vikingmud.org/ Viking started out in the good old days on MudOS, and later moved to DGD, after an extremely long porting process. Both drivers implement the LPC language, but DGD is a lot more minimal in what it provides out of the box, and has a few concepts that MudOS doesn’t, like an easy way to save the state of the runn…

i didn't realize that MudOS didn't have runtime compilation. i thought all LPmuds had that. it was the feature that i miss the most from newer programming languages, and it's a reason why i still prefer pike (which is based on LPC) and old languages like smalltalk and lisp which also offer that.

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

#92
post #78

Old-school MUDs are alright, but I'd love to see a modern reinterpretation of them that rethinks the interfaces and offers more democratized tools. For instance, I'd love rooms that could be populated with sounds, images, environmental effects, day/night cycles, and text effects. This would be purely ornamental and could be done in a way to support backward compatibility with text-only views, as I'd want to keep this…

i am interested in creating an audio-only MUD. (like what an audio-book is to books). keep the text, but get a narrator with a dramatic voice. add sound effects, different NPC voices, voice input.

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

#94
post #56

My MUD of choice was DiscworldMUD ( http://discworld.starturtle.net/lpc/ ), based on the works of Terry Pratchett and which has been actively developed for nigh on 30 years. The setting is wonderfully flavorful and the world is huge and lovingly detailed. It's such great fun to get lost in one of the giant towns and see what you stumble across. Check out this map of what its biggest city, Ankh-Morpork, looks like: ht…

I was really, really into DiscworldMUD for a while. I played as a wizard, and had so much fun casting brassica oleracea ambulata on NPCs, then watching the cabbage follow them around. Then I'd equip Collatrap's Instant Pickling Stick and zap it into coleslaw, which I would feed to my loyal chicken. I'm not sure whether that accomplished anything, but I thought it was hilarious.

I obviously found the game very enjoyable and memorable. If I had more free time, I'd love to pick it up again someday.

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

#95

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

Since you run the place, I'll state here that it would be nice if I could look at your web site and decide if I'm interested before being hit with a pop-up window asking me to sign up for a newsletter. How do I know if I want your newsletter, if I haven't figured out what your product is? Window closed. Sale lost.

What sale? If a newsletter popup prevents you from actually looking at the site, you really need that time machine back to 1995.

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

#96

Does anyone remember the intermud system ? https://muds.fandom.com/wiki/InterMUD Back in the day we hooked all our muds together so people could communicate across realities.. things were more open back then.

For sure! There even is an everything-old-is-new-again iteration of that called Grapevine.haus

GrapeVine is great!

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

#97
post #91

Here’s a little plug for my first and only MUD I ever seriously played: VikingMUD https://www.vikingmud.org/ Viking started out in the good old days on MudOS, and later moved to DGD, after an extremely long porting process. Both drivers implement the LPC language, but DGD is a lot more minimal in what it provides out of the box, and has a few concepts that MudOS doesn’t, like an easy way to save the state of the runn…

i didn't realize that MudOS didn't have runtime compilation. i thought all LPmuds had that. it was the feature that i miss the most from newer programming languages, and it's a reason why i still prefer pike (which is based on LPC) and old languages like smalltalk and lisp which also offer that.

You can recompile an object in MudOS, but only new clones of that object get the recompiled code.

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

#98
MUDs (MOOs specifically) were super formative for me. Learned to code from playing with LambdaMOO and helping develop Sindome (www.sindome.org)

If anyone is interested in a modern / updated LamdaMOO server check out ToastStunt: https://github.com/lisdude/toaststunt

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

#99
post #92
post #78

Old-school MUDs are alright, but I'd love to see a modern reinterpretation of them that rethinks the interfaces and offers more democratized tools. For instance, I'd love rooms that could be populated with sounds, images, environmental effects, day/night cycles, and text effects. This would be purely ornamental and could be done in a way to support backward compatibility with text-only views, as I'd want to keep this…

i am interested in creating an audio-only MUD. (like what an audio-book is to books). keep the text, but get a narrator with a dramatic voice. add sound effects, different NPC voices, voice input.

There are a few audio games like this on Amazon’s Alexa platform. When I was looking at it a couple of years ago, there was a level a framework for building them with such narration. I don’t know how you’d work in the multi user angle though.

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

#100
post #4

I give Gemstone III and Dragonrealms full credit for my current typing speed. And I remember setting up a local TinyMUD instance for my friends on the school network then creating all sorts of weird items and creatures to mess with them. It's funny... These games largely didn't have graphics (you could argue some of the more advanced interfaces like with Simutronics stuff did). Yet I have vivid memories of specifics…

I had a lot more patience with repeatedly hunting the same thing in DR than I do now. I discovered it through Microsoft Gaming Zone back in the day.
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