Tell HN: 17 years on the same game • Hacker News Board

Re: Tell HN: 17 years on the same game

#21

Post by atsushin » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 5:21 AM UTC

Hey! I love MUDs, been playing since probably 2007 when I was in middle school. I've usually stuck around IRE's games (Achaea, Aetolia etc.) but also have enjoyed others such as Armageddon.

They've always been a reliable escape for me and only recently have I actually pulled myself away from them, but I thoroughly enjoyed building up my own character and a life of their own through roleplaying. It's sad to not have experienced MUDs in their heyday but I'm happy that a decent amount of people still play enough for some of these games to still be considered 'active'. Long nights and days have been spent totally immersed in their settings, and their influence on me as a person is something I have to acknowledge.

Re: Tell HN: 17 years on the same game

#22

Post by indigochill » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 5:30 AM UTC

JKCalhoun wrote: post #15

Awesome. Why didn't MUDs ever go rogue-like ... with simple 2D tile-graphics? I think a few tried and failed, but wondering why that was. Seemed like everyone jumped to Everquest(crack) when it hit the scene, we seem to have skipped the 2D.

EmpireMUD has a rogue-like top-down 2D ASCII tile interface as I recall. That's the world map on which you can construct features of your empire. It's not played that much, but I wouldn't call it a failure since it is still going and still has players and developers.

Re: Tell HN: 17 years on the same game

#23

Post by tlarkworthy » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 5:31 AM UTC

matthewwiese wrote: post #16

JKCalhoun wrote: post #15

Awesome. Why didn't MUDs ever go rogue-like ... with simple 2D tile-graphics? I think a few tried and failed, but wondering why that was. Seemed like everyone jumped to Everquest(crack) when it hit the scene, we seem to have skipped the 2D.

That is exactly something I'd play hours of! I love roguelikes, and have always wanted to get into MUDs -- I've tried many -- but they never hold my attention long enough. Even tiled ASCII characters would be a huge boon; I think it's the fact that I can't easily imagine the entire game area through text. If I was able to at least "see" the squares around my character, I could better spatially orient myself. Almost e…

I played a mod of rogue multiplayer and it was awful becuase the ticks were fixed in length. It felt like walking through treacle followed by very difficult combat with no time to browse ur inventory in the moment.

Re: Tell HN: 17 years on the same game

#24

Post by Whitestrake » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 5:36 AM UTC

atsushin wrote: post #21

Hey! I love MUDs, been playing since probably 2007 when I was in middle school. I've usually stuck around IRE's games (Achaea, Aetolia etc.) but also have enjoyed others such as Armageddon. They've always been a reliable escape for me and only recently have I actually pulled myself away from them, but I thoroughly enjoyed building up my own character and a life of their own through roleplaying. It's sad to not have e…

Likewise.

I'd go so far even as to say that IRE's MUDs made me who I am today. A commitment to integrity of role-playing my characters helped shape my identity while I was growing up, particularly as a social exercise. And my first exposure to scripting in the form of simple aliases and triggers led to the pursuit of programming skills. Without MUDs, I'd be a different person entirely, I have no doubt.

Re: Tell HN: 17 years on the same game

#25

Post by rgbrgb » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 5:37 AM UTC

I like this outsider HN post style. Rare treasure. But, I am concerned with you being in Discworld by Terry Pratchett for 17 years... it's a long time to spend in someone else's brain. Though when you really think about it, I guess we're all kind of in Discworld.

http://discworld.starturtle.net/lpc/decafmud/web_client.html

Re: Tell HN: 17 years on the same game

#26

Post by maxk42 » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 5:45 AM UTC

d357r0y3r wrote: post #2

Hey, I still play MUDs too! It's an underappreciated kind of game, but I understand why it's not accessible to most. I play over at Dead of Night (deadofnight.org) - pop in, the multiclassing system is ridiculous and awesome. I think MUDs vs. Visual Games is analogous to Books vs. Movies. Yes, movies will always be able to achieve a level of graphical impressiveness that a book can't. What a movie can't do is give a…

Wow. Blast from the past. I played Dead of Night 20 years ago.

Are psionists still useless at night?

Re: Tell HN: 17 years on the same game

#27

Post by versteegen » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 5:52 AM UTC

tlarkworthy wrote: post #23

matthewwiese wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is exactly something I'd play hours of! I love roguelikes, and have always wanted to get into MUDs -- I've tried many -- but they never hold my attention long enough. Even tiled ASCII characters would be a huge boon; I think it's the fact that I can't easily imagine the entire game area through text. If I was able to at least "see" the squares around my character, I could better spatially orient myself. Almost e…

I played a mod of rogue multiplayer and it was awful becuase the ticks were fixed in length. It felt like walking through treacle followed by very difficult combat with no time to browse ur inventory in the moment.

There have been a bunch of MMO roguelikes. Some of the major ones are Mangband and ToMENet (the latter is a fork of the former, made to closely resemble ToME3). There have been a few different attempts to solve the MMO turn-based problem. The most interesting IMO is interhack [1] (not to be confused with the interhack tool for nethack) which originally used "surreal time": depending on whether players were near it other it would switch between them taking turns within the same turn-based game, and running the game logic separately for each player so they didn't wait for each other. There's was a long writeup about it. It's a very complicated system. Never had an active playerbase. nhdaniels told me years later that he considered Surreal Time a failed experiment, and switched to something simpler, which still prevents players from having to wait for each other, but I don't know how it works.

[1] http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=I...

Unfortunately the download for Interhack is gone, as is its original website.

Re: Tell HN: 17 years on the same game

#28

Post by ryan-allen » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 6:01 AM UTC

automathematics wrote: post #10

Bummer, the link on their page to download clients from a list is broken :( https://dotthis.com/homesite/mud_clients.html

There's a discussion on Reddit from Feb 2017 about current MUD clients, though it focuses on Windows [0], however the first recommended client is cross platform.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/MUD/comments/5uzx3z/list_of_current...

Re: Tell HN: 17 years on the same game

#29

Post by ryan-allen » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 6:04 AM UTC

JKCalhoun wrote: post #15

Awesome. Why didn't MUDs ever go rogue-like ... with simple 2D tile-graphics? I think a few tried and failed, but wondering why that was. Seemed like everyone jumped to Everquest(crack) when it hit the scene, we seem to have skipped the 2D.

> Why didn't MUDs ever go rogue-like ... with simple 2D tile-graphics?

That's not to say that there is still room for something like this! There are heaps of great indie games on Steam that are lightweight and deep.

If you don't mind graphics, I'd recommend checking out Streets of Rogue and Death Road to Canada, though they are not RPGs per-se and more Roguelites.

If you want something a bit more hardcore I'd check out Caves of Qud, still haven't managed to figure that one out.

Also, see Rimworld, an accessible Dwarf Fortress like game.

Re: Tell HN: 17 years on the same game

#30

Post by txsh » Wed, Apr 04, 2018, 6:09 AM UTC

JKCalhoun wrote: post #15

Awesome. Why didn't MUDs ever go rogue-like ... with simple 2D tile-graphics? I think a few tried and failed, but wondering why that was. Seemed like everyone jumped to Everquest(crack) when it hit the scene, we seem to have skipped the 2D.

We played MUDs through BBSs. It was a different experience than the internet. Everything was text. You dialed up someone’s house and created an account to join a community which gave you access to a specific set of resources. The people playing the game with you were usually people in your area code.

Upgrading from ASCII to graphics would mean kicking out all your friends with older modems, those with poor phone lines, those without Win 3.1, etc.