Roblox is a MUD: The history of MUDs, virtual worlds and MMORPGs • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by BryantD » Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 4:23 PM UTC

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #67

Scarblac wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that different from LPMUDs? LPC sounds exactly like that language.

As I recall there are some important differences between LPC and LambdaMOO. More philosophical differences showing the background of the people who worked on them. Original LambdaMOO inspiration from the TinyM* world (if I vaguely recall Stephen White aka ghond the original MOO author came out of that community) plus was worked on by some Lisp and Smalltalk/Self inspired people (Pavel Curtis the maintainer worked at…

Yep, ghond was part of the Tiny* community.

I think you've nailed the distinctions quite well. There was a strong academic bias in the Tiny* world -- James Aspnes, author of TinyMUD, was a CMU professor. "Fuzzy" Mauldin was also working at CMU post-PhD when he wrote Julia, the primordial TinyMUD bot (and before he went off to found Lycos). Which is not to say that there weren't a bunch of rowdy college students on TinyMUD (oh hi, that's me), and as I recall MUD itself was written while Richard Bartle was an undergrad.

-- Garrett (#17086)

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

#82

Post by manfredo » Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 4:25 PM UTC

matt_heimer wrote: post #80

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…

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…

There's undoubtedly an appeal to exercising one's own imagination. But any text based interface locks off a huge amount of options for interaction. You'll never have a racing Game, a shooter, a flight simulator, any kind of visual puzzles, etc. in a text based game. The constraints are enormous and there's little question as to why there are so few text based games today. And those few that do exist and are popular like Dwarf Fortress, Tales of Maj'Eyal, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, etc. all support graphical tiles.

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

#83

Post by cmrdporcupine » Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 4:28 PM UTC

BryantD wrote: post #81

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I recall there are some important differences between LPC and LambdaMOO. More philosophical differences showing the background of the people who worked on them. Original LambdaMOO inspiration from the TinyM* world (if I vaguely recall Stephen White aka ghond the original MOO author came out of that community) plus was worked on by some Lisp and Smalltalk/Self inspired people (Pavel Curtis the maintainer worked at…

Yep, ghond was part of the Tiny* community. I think you've nailed the distinctions quite well. There was a strong academic bias in the Tiny* world -- James Aspnes, author of TinyMUD, was a CMU professor. "Fuzzy" Mauldin was also working at CMU post-PhD when he wrote Julia, the primordial TinyMUD bot (and before he went off to found Lycos). Which is not to say that there weren't a bunch of rowdy college students on Ti…

Thanks. I never played much in the TinyM* world, pretty much went straight to LambdaMOO. Some really interesting community there, though, and I was always intrigued by the MUF forth in TinyMUCK as kind of a different model to MOO in LambdaMOO.

-- Karl Porcupine (#18502 originally then #49702 later). Just logged in, looks like it's been 2 years as there were two birthday cakes waiting for me in my mail :-)

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

#84

Post by freediver » Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 4:28 PM UTC

biddit wrote: post #75

freediver wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I suppose you could say so. But also depends on the perspective, I am very passionate about MUDs obviously :)

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

#85

Post by em-bee » Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 4:33 PM UTC

warpspin wrote: post #78

em-bee wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 troub…

oh bummer. writing native c bindings for pike is not to hard though. maybe that is an option.

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

#86

Post by dr-detroit » Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 4:34 PM UTC

hoseja wrote: post #31

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…

Have you heard of Space Station 13?

yeah its the newest game I can think of that is like a MUD

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

#87

Post by astrobe_ » Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 4:41 PM UTC

codeulike wrote: post #37

codeulike wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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=...

lol, quite a story going on in there > Yeetlock investigates the ancient assembly language. You find that the ancient language was originally used to create a holographic image inside the robot's spherical eye. Now that you are very close to the robot, the image becomes visible to you. The image in the robot's eye is actually a portal into a deeper dimension. You can see and hear the screams of a thousand ghosts scre…

IBM 5100 appears in Stein's Gate... We probably have some Star trek and some Asimov there in that infamous mix.

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

#88

Post by stOneskull » Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 4:51 PM UTC

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…

thank you for saying that and for the game link. i think MUD should stay as meaning a multiplayer text adventure. you and this whole thread gets me inspired into making a MUD.

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

#89

Post by stOneskull » Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 4:56 PM UTC

manfredo wrote: post #79

freediver wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

i made a text based horse-racing game. it's just different. a different medium and experience. i remember an old DOS professional wrestling game that was text and i found it more fun than the wrestling arcade game. my memories of it have better graphics even.

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

#90

Post by HeadsUpHigh » Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 5:03 PM UTC

nvarsj wrote: post #19

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…

Your experience is very similar to mine. I got most of my early programming chops doing C programming on a MUD. I also had the experience of a very religious mother throwing away all of my DnD / fantasy related games, because of the craze about satanic symbols that swept through the US in the late 80s/90s. I wish my kids would play DnD together - I can't imagine a more wholesome activity to be honest. Haha. I also mu…

>I enjoyed WoW, especially with friends, but it felt a lot more like a skinner box with nice graphics.

That's exactly what WoW aims to be: A themepark and the player is there for the ride. Whatever rough edges existed in vanilla are nothing compared to games before it, the games' goal always was to be as polished as possible.