71–80 of 112 posts
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.…
I 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…
I'm the same, but from the other side. I learned to code clients/bots that would play the MUD. I had a fantastic fighting script, that basically fought optimally, one that used two characters at the same time to solve some complicated maze, and I even wrote a headless bot runner that was compatible with the files of the MUD client I used. It was all great fun, and I also owe my extensive regex experience to it.
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.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm the same, but from the other side. I learned to code clients/bots that would play the MUD. I had a fantastic fighting script, that basically fought optimally, one that used two characters at the same time to solve some complicated maze, and I even wrote a headless bot runner that was compatible with the files of the MUD client I used. It was all great fun, and I also owe my extensive regex experience to it.
me too. that's how I learned Perl (scripting language of mmc). What was your mud client/language?
I 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 first looked at MUD code, I had not yet learned to code. I thought that the folks who wrote the code must be so smart, and felt intimidated by it. Fast forward a few decades, and I recently looked at MUD code again. I spent a week porting ROT 1.4 to a node server, mostly just as a personal coding exercise, and found myself realizing just how bad that code actually was.
Yet we need to be fair. As you said, it was written by newbies, mostly students. It was written before modern tech stacks, before modern practices. And despite all the critique we could throw at it... it worked. It stills works. It was shared, copied, modified, and kept on working for many people, over many years. And it definitely inspired people to learn and try new things.
I spent many hours hogging the phone line to play btech 3056 back in high school. It was so cool talking to people all over the world. I wasn't very good at the actual game, however. I do remember encountering a bug where I was placed on a level-4 high building and I couldn't get off of it because my mech wouldn't let me intentionally fall.
There was a Battletech MUD??? That's so cool :) MechWarrior 2 is what got me into it as a kid
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 battles between multiple factions. Same deal as above except you would leave base with your unit to a shared hex map and could encounter other opponents.
All in all a much truer experience to TT than the MW games, but less so than Megamek
I spent many hours hogging the phone line to play btech 3056 back in high school. It was so cool talking to people all over the world. I wasn't very good at the actual game, however. I do remember encountering a bug where I was placed on a level-4 high building and I couldn't get off of it because my mech wouldn't let me intentionally fall.
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 other technical jobs, which I've always found really cool.