Amazing game, really. So deep, such longevity, and so cool community. Can't believe it's still being developed with such passion, the active coders of the game are something else, in a positive way. Can't recommend this one enough if you want to learn coding either, they take players as coders and basically crowd source their engine to keep the game running.
The Two Towers MUD
101–110 of 112 posts
Re: The Two Towers MUD
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
There were several, all based off of the same live action map/cockpit/etc code. The granddaddy was 3025, followed. T 3056 - these were attenpting to portray the entire BT universe. So you’d sign up, join a faction, be assigned to a unit, train with your peers, and eventually go off to fight (though I don’t think either ever reached that point). World level scenario based spinoffs started to appear. Planet level battl…
Wow, I spent many hours on those Battletech Muds. It did have a cool realtime battle system but the faction vs faction wars never happened as far as I remember. There were several offshoots, including some that did 24/7 "live" battles that focused on one planet which was much more scalable. Organizing a scouting expedition was pretty fun. There was a Solaris world too. I ran the Kurita mechwarrior school for a while,…
oh hey I probably remember you as I do kind of remember knowing that the head trainer was TK!
I multi-factioned for a while (shame shame!) and had a low level character in the DC. The way you all did mechwarrior training was so much more hardcore than all the other IS factions (never played as clan). It was also the one major faction where I never even came close to getting a character into their SpecOps unit(s), not sure if you all realized how much better you were than everyone else skill-wise lol.
Eventually I wound up in charge of Marik and that ended all the time I had for multi-factioning.
Re: The Two Towers MUD
#103It's a bit surreal to see this on the frontpage. I'm one of the main developers working on new content and maintaining the existing content. Happy to answer any questions, if people have them. T2T is a very interesting place. It's been contributed to by hundreds of volunteer developers over the years, some of which had zero coding experience when they started. Several have gone on to pursue software engineering or ot…
How can other developers help and participate in building, maintaining and operating the MUD? I've always wanted to be able to contribute to it. Am I correct that the source code isn't public?
Re: The Two Towers MUD
#104If we are talking MUDs, I have to plug the Discworld MUD, https://discworld.atuin.net/lpc/ I spent a lot of time on there growing up. Based on the copious writings of Terry Pratchett, it's full of whimsy and humor but also quite addicting and deep gameplay. It seems to have a pretty active player base, too.
That's weird, I don't think I've ever been on there before but it says "Welcome Mishra", linking to https://discworld.starturtle.net/lpc/secure/finger.c?player=... . A cookie is set with name User and value "mishra-1". Is this some kind of session leaking or does it automatically generate a user for you?
the former. the website is served up by the MUD itself so it's a little... quirky... sometimes.
Re: The Two Towers MUD
#105I owe my career in programming to a MUD. That's really where I learned to code (mainly by staring at and trying to debug tonnes of really bad code other clueless newbies like myself had written). That it turn, got me a spot as a sort of hang-around at a local ISP/consultancy shop whose staff intersected a lot with the people running the MUD. They eventually decided to hire me when a suitable contract showed up. All i…
When I was starting out with Python, I found a library that implemented a Python version of MOO. It was brilliantly named "POO" (although in later versions it lamentably changed its name to "MOOP"). The cool thing about it was the in-world coding language was also Python, so when you code for custom rooms and objects, etc., it was all Python. I had a lot of fun with it.
Re: The Two Towers MUD
#106Does anyone remember that type of early web form multiplayer games where you'd allocate resources by percentages and then fight against other 'countries' in turn based games? Do those still exist?
I used to play one of those back in 1999 or so, and amazingly it still seems to be going! Now on season 107… https://utopia-game.com/shared/ Terrifically addictive back when entertainment was scarce — I can’t imagine spending much time on such a thing these days. But it reminds me a bit of idle games.
I don't know if it was this one but the concept sounds familiar. Looking back, games like Clash of Clans have similar mechanics, in that while you're away, someone attacks your stuff and you lose a lot of stuff, lol. I do remember it as very much a "numbers go brrt" kind of game, definitely falls under the idle games umbrella.
Re: The Two Towers MUD
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty amazing that this is still around. I used to be active on Elendor MUSH, but as far as I know it's been dead for years - I poke my head in once every year or two and there are always 0 players online.
Is the server available anywhere or is that too lost to the sands of time? Sucks when MUD servers eventually shutdown and all of it is lost forever. I’ve found a few on github though and have been archiving as many as I can find.
Archiving is good; all of these games contain thousands of hours of creative writing, and it would be a huge loss if they were all lost to time.
I hope you and others are archiving them, so that at the very least they would remain available in a readonly fashion.
Re: The Two Towers MUD
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Think text-based World of Warcraft. In fact the heritage is the inverse: from MUDs we got MMORPGs
Coming from LP-mud love, I found it very noticeable how similar the text of actions was between MUDs and EverQuest. The text box of actions and world answers read very mud-like.
I can see the similarities; even today, the combat systems of MMORPGs are basically "perform action on enemy", where action is on a timer. A big difference is positioning and faster gameplay though. Even though I just went through the t2t tutorial and found that the game progresses faster than I can read. I think for my own sanity I'd prefer it to be turn based / adventure style, like 'press a button to continue', but that's not ideal for multiplayer.
Re: The Two Towers MUD
#109> Online continuously since 1994 It's been thirty years and Sauron is still alive and the war is still on?
A persistent online world with an always progressing historical timeline would be a really interesting concept to explore. Complicated though, as for example you don't really want new players to join when the world is on fire (unless that is your setting).
Some MMORPGs handle this alright (although tbh I only really know FFXIV at this point), where every player goes through their own timeline of sorts - you are The Warrior of Light, and as you progress through the story, you're pivotal in some great events like the defeat of the big bad or preventing the world from ending. That kinda thing. But the world is persistent, so it's only you that unlocks new areas and, in some cases, only you see some changes in the world or some NPCs. It's mostly through what NPCs tell you though.
Re: The Two Towers MUD
#110It's a bit surreal to see this on the frontpage. I'm one of the main developers working on new content and maintaining the existing content. Happy to answer any questions, if people have them. T2T is a very interesting place. It's been contributed to by hundreds of volunteer developers over the years, some of which had zero coding experience when they started. Several have gone on to pursue software engineering or ot…
How can other developers help and participate in building, maintaining and operating the MUD? I've always wanted to be able to contribute to it. Am I correct that the source code isn't public?
We have an in-game application process that can be used, though typically we are targeting players that already have knowledge of the game and how certain systems work.
You are correct that the source code isn't public. There are two levels of source code, the in-game code (quests, regions, etc., written in LPC in our case) and the MUD driver code (C). The in-game code has been leaked a few times by some of the developers, and so many of the people that want it have it by this point.
The MUD driver we started with (TMI-2 1.1.1 on MudOS v22pre8 if you want to look it up) is heavily modified now, but the original source is out there.