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Is there some youtube channel covering some interesting stories from MUDs? From dev, player POV and everything in between. Craving for some emergent storytelling of MUDs to listen to while falling asleep
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I played for 1000+ hours on https://www.aardwolf.com more than 20 years ago. Looks right it's still being updated.
Me too. Every now and then I think of going back, but ever since Aardwolf I've had a personal rule that a game has to have an end. Which has successfully kept me away from all MMORPGs and other endless time sinks.
It's been thirty years and Sauron is still alive and the war is still on?
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.
Oh wow! Didn’t expect to see this piece of my childhood on the front page! I used to spend hours on telnet playing this game with my friend. What a fun blast to the past!
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.
If 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.
All in all, I'd say the MUD was a terrific place to learn to code. You could literally write a few lines of code, and see their effect immediately. "I want to code an orc." Inherit stdmonster, call a few API functions to set name and description, and BAM! - you've got an orc! And so on. Motivation never ran dry because - hey, I was adding features I wanted to a game I loved! Feedback (of varying quality, sure) was immediately available in the built in chat channel. Code was hot loaded/reloaded, so iteration cycle time was approximately zero. Emacs + angeftp (later replaced by tramp) to the host machine, you were literally editing the live code all the time (who needs pull requests when you have C-x C-s, eh?), so lots of instructive oops moments. It was amazing.
Have a whole bunch of friends with a similar story.
Anyone out there still playing MUDs? Any good ones to recommend?
Professor Richard Bartle recently retired, but he regularly assigned his students to play MUD2 in his Computer Game Design and Virtual Worlds classes at the University of Essex! He and Michael Lawrie co-created the original MUD1 at Essex in 1978. https://www.essex.ac.uk/people/BARTL01006/Richard-Bartle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bartle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Designing_Virtual_Worlds https://www.mud.…
Did you see this, a few days ago? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44403639
There was a MUD hosted at Essex in the '90s, but I can't for the life of me remember.... Archipelago!
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Wow, this is still a thing! I lost two university friends to the Discworld MUD. As in, their whole lifestyle, hours, and activities changed to be working on and playing it all night long in the uni labs, and they no longer did anything else apart from attend a bare minimum of classes. I just checked the “About” page, and one of them (“pinkfish”) is at the top of the Administrators list.
I thought pinkfish wasn’t a player so much as the lead programmer in the beginning.