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Roblox is a MUD: The history of MUDs, virtual worlds and MMORPGs

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Re: Roblox is a MUD: The history of MUDs, virtual worlds and MMORPGs

#71

Post by biddit »

freediver wrote: post #63

Roboblox could not be farther from MUDs and only people who played MUDs can appreciate the difference. Lets start with the obvious - MUDs use text and "text is the highest bandwidth medium for our imagination" (quote by Bartle, co-creator of first MUD). I recommend everyone watching this video to understand why is text so superior to any other medium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zctp972y_Eg Incidentally the lockd…

I both built and played MUDs from 1994 - 2003. From your comments is seems like you didn't read the article.

Of course Roblox is not a text-based MUD. Not even the author is arguing that. Mechanically, it's incredibly similar in social dynamics, creativity and difference of worlds, and the fact that you can design your own world/mechnaics so easily.

Re: Roblox is a MUD: The history of MUDs, virtual worlds and MMORPGs

#72

Post by codeulike »

codeulike wrote: post #25
waprin wrote: post #6

MUDs are what got me into programming. I was obsessed with them as a kid, although they were associated with DnD which was considered satanic so I had to hide them from my parents and teachers, who both forbid me from associating with DnD or MUDs. Besides playing them, I actually spent more time as a "builder" than a "coder", which was an intermediate step in the hierarchy. As a builder, I would write hundreds of roo…

I'm not sure if there's any experience like it left on the internet Multiplayer AI Dungeon? Powered by GPT2 https://aidungeon.page.link/?link=https://play?playPublicId=...

Pastebin of the story 5 hours later, with various HNs taking part

https://pastebin.com/BUNPBQTL

Re: Roblox is a MUD: The history of MUDs, virtual worlds and MMORPGs

#73

Post by freediver »

biddit wrote: post #71
freediver wrote: post #63

Roboblox could not be farther from MUDs and only people who played MUDs can appreciate the difference. Lets start with the obvious - MUDs use text and "text is the highest bandwidth medium for our imagination" (quote by Bartle, co-creator of first MUD). I recommend everyone watching this video to understand why is text so superior to any other medium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zctp972y_Eg Incidentally the lockd…

I both built and played MUDs from 1994 - 2003. From your comments is seems like you didn't read the article. Of course Roblox is not a text-based MUD. Not even the author is arguing that. Mechanically, it's incredibly similar in social dynamics, creativity and difference of worlds, and the fact that you can design your own world/mechnaics so easily.

I understand that. The author does make the claim that "Roblox is a MUD for the TikTok generation."

I am making an important distinction in just one - and to me the crucial point - which I highlighted in the original comment above: text is highest bandwidth medium for our imagination. If a game is not using text but other mediums such as graphics, then regardless of social dynamics, creativity, difference of worlds etc it can not be put in the same context as MUDs.

Re: Roblox is a MUD: The history of MUDs, virtual worlds and MMORPGs

#74

Post by manfredo »

freediver wrote: post #63

Roboblox could not be farther from MUDs and only people who played MUDs can appreciate the difference. Lets start with the obvious - MUDs use text and "text is the highest bandwidth medium for our imagination" (quote by Bartle, co-creator of first MUD). I recommend everyone watching this video to understand why is text so superior to any other medium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zctp972y_Eg Incidentally the lockd…

Text is absolutely not the highest bandwidth medium for imagination. Think about what a textured polygon can convey about a character in just one glance: color, clothing, dimensions, facial expression, posture. It'd take paragraphs to convey all this information in text, but with graphics it takes but a glance.

If what this quote is referring to is the fact that text based mediums force us to use our own imaginations, it's actually because of the opposite: text is exceeding low bandwidth for communicating imagination, and because of that low bandwidth users need to fill in the gaps with their own.

Re: Roblox is a MUD: The history of MUDs, virtual worlds and MMORPGs

#75

Post by biddit »

freediver wrote: post #73
biddit wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I both built and played MUDs from 1994 - 2003. From your comments is seems like you didn't read the article. Of course Roblox is not a text-based MUD. Not even the author is arguing that. Mechanically, it's incredibly similar in social dynamics, creativity and difference of worlds, and the fact that you can design your own world/mechnaics so easily.

I understand that. The author does make the claim that "Roblox is a MUD for the TikTok generation." I am making an important distinction in just one - and to me the crucial point - which I highlighted in the original comment above: text is highest bandwidth medium for our imagination. If a game is not using text but other mediums such as graphics, then regardless of social dynamics, creativity, difference of worlds e…

> Roboblox could not be farther from MUDs

This statement is a bit extreme no? That's what I was addressing.

Re: Roblox is a MUD: The history of MUDs, virtual worlds and MMORPGs

#76

Post by freediver »

manfredo wrote: post #74
freediver wrote: post #63

Roboblox could not be farther from MUDs and only people who played MUDs can appreciate the difference. Lets start with the obvious - MUDs use text and "text is the highest bandwidth medium for our imagination" (quote by Bartle, co-creator of first MUD). I recommend everyone watching this video to understand why is text so superior to any other medium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zctp972y_Eg Incidentally the lockd…

Text is absolutely not the highest bandwidth medium for imagination. Think about what a textured polygon can convey about a character in just one glance: color, clothing, dimensions, facial expression, posture. It'd take paragraphs to convey all this information in text, but with graphics it takes but a glance. If what this quote is referring to is the fact that text based mediums force us to use our own imaginations…

Imagination is our mind's output about things that are not conveyed. Please watch the video as Bartle explains it so elaborately. Text -> low input, high output.

Re: Roblox is a MUD: The history of MUDs, virtual worlds and MMORPGs

#77

Post by mderazon »

VadimPR wrote: post #7

MUDs are still thriving to this day. I work on Mudlet ( https://mudlet.org ) which is a popular FOSS client to play them with.

Looks like a very nice client I used to play with ZMud which I think was popular "shareware" back then.

Are there any recommended web clients as well ?

Re: Roblox is a MUD: The history of MUDs, virtual worlds and MMORPGs

#78

Post by warpspin »

em-bee wrote: post #68
warpspin wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right of course, just tried to be concise with the description - it's basically how we always explained it to the players back then. A Java or Python comparison was not possible at that time - both did not even exist at the time while I was programming on an LPMud driver. It is a pity LPC4/µlpc/Pike did not gain more mainstream acceptance after its early success with Roxen, even installing it was a pain last…

A Java or Python comparison was not possible at that time - both did not even exist at the time hah, good point. yeah, roxen the company missed a window of opportunity there to promote pike when they hired the wrong type of management and fired hubbe, pikes creator. but i don't want to get into politics. what's your trouble with installing pike? i have pike running on most of my machines and don't remember any seriou…

It was already a while ago, stumbled across the hand coded i386 assembler in, if I recall correctly, nettle at that time. On a later attempt, getting the mysql driver into the thing was a pain on my Mac. It's not that it did not work with some debugging experience, just that each and every time I install it, something else is broken on first attempt.

And now, recently, SWIG removed Pike support, bringing future trouble to the one project we have running internally at our company based on Pike, as that used SWIG for bindings to some other third-party C software, so we can never update that again to a newer SWIG version without rewriting that stuff.

Re: Roblox is a MUD: The history of MUDs, virtual worlds and MMORPGs

#79

Post by manfredo »

freediver wrote: post #76
manfredo wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Text is absolutely not the highest bandwidth medium for imagination. Think about what a textured polygon can convey about a character in just one glance: color, clothing, dimensions, facial expression, posture. It'd take paragraphs to convey all this information in text, but with graphics it takes but a glance. If what this quote is referring to is the fact that text based mediums force us to use our own imaginations…

Imagination is our mind's output about things that are not conveyed. Please watch the video as Bartle explains it so elaborately. Text -> low input, high output.

Right, text is the lowest bandwidth form of communicating imagination. And to make up for that low bandwidth users have to exercise their own imagination. It's like storing actual vertices of a sphere, vs. having the client execute code to generate the vertices given a position and radius. This is as opposed to graphics where the creator has enough bandwidth to actually portray their imagination on the screen.

While there's undoubtedly an appeal to exercising one's own imagination, it introduces two key shortcomings. One, the users imagination doesn't always produce the expected output, and two by locking the interface into a text based interface a whole host of gameplay options are off the table. You're never going to have a text based racing game, or anything involving physics. There's a reason why almost all text based MUDs have a graph or grid based world and turn based gameplay: because that's all you can really do with a text based interface. You could build a racing minigame in a text based MUD but it's probably just be rolling checks against some kind of character stats rather than having the player actually guide a car around a track.

Re: Roblox is a MUD: The history of MUDs, virtual worlds and MMORPGs

#80

Post by matt_heimer »

manfredo wrote: post #74
freediver wrote: post #63

Roboblox could not be farther from MUDs and only people who played MUDs can appreciate the difference. Lets start with the obvious - MUDs use text and "text is the highest bandwidth medium for our imagination" (quote by Bartle, co-creator of first MUD). I recommend everyone watching this video to understand why is text so superior to any other medium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zctp972y_Eg Incidentally the lockd…

Text is absolutely not the highest bandwidth medium for imagination. Think about what a textured polygon can convey about a character in just one glance: color, clothing, dimensions, facial expression, posture. It'd take paragraphs to convey all this information in text, but with graphics it takes but a glance. If what this quote is referring to is the fact that text based mediums force us to use our own imaginations…

Isn't "fill in the gaps" the point? What exactly does a polygon character make a person imagine? Text like "He was a nefarious looking character dressed all in red" takes a very small amount of bytes but the resulting payload in someone's mind can be huge. I guess you could argue that images might be a better mechanism to transmit someone else's imagination but text is better to activate your own and I think that is what the quote was about.
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