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The Two Towers MUD

t2tmud.org

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Re: The Two Towers MUD

#81

Post by vildoran »

teroshan wrote: post #53

As someone that never touched a MUD (but plenty of ASCII roguelikes), I see that MUD clients are recommended [1] to be used. Any other clients I should be looking at, for this particular MUD but also others? Are they generic enough to be used with multiple games? [1] https://t2tmud.org/clients.php

KBtin is the one I use, partially for its TLS support (though most MUDs don't offer that). If you use it for T2T, you can connect using '#sslses t2t t2tmud.org 444'

You can also just SSH in (ssh towers@t2tmud.org), though honestly that isn't the best experience...

Re: The Two Towers MUD

#82

Post by vildoran »

SeanAnderson wrote: post #8

Wow! The front page shows a list of updates being made to the game. Lots of recent changes. Then I clicked into the MUD, just to have a look, and the intro page said "celebrating 31 years online!" It's cool to come across software that's both historical and current!

It's been a really interesting exercise trying to develop content that's more modern, but for this sort of environment. Lately I've been working on procedurally-generated dungeons (for the sake of replayability) and seeing where we can integrate LLMs into our creative process. In some ways LLMs are great, but it's always pretty obvious a description for something was written by an LLM. If nothing else, it's a nice starting point for that sort of work.

Re: The Two Towers MUD

#84

Post by scbrg »

codingdave wrote: post #76
scbrg wrote: post #47

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…

> tonnes of really bad code other clueless newbies like myself had written... 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…

Absolutely! Every single line (my own included) was truly a work of passion. We were all there coding because we loved the game, and wanted to make it even better (although opinions varied, of course, on exactly what would make it better). We all did our best, and we all just wanted things to be (even more) awesome.

We didn't even have any version control. Everybody was logged in, editing the same files over ftp, and reloaded the code on the running instance. It was chaotic and hilarious. I eventually ended up in charge of the "mudlib" (essentially the standard library). I learned so much from reading, debugging and trying to improve that code and, eventually, being a sort of mentor to a slightly younger batch of newbies.

I've never been a guru when it comes to clever algorithms, and I'm pretty shit at math, so I've had to find some other role fit on a team. I believe my main strength to this day is debugging weird and messy code, and much of the reason for that is the years I spent trying to get that wonderful mess of a code base to work.

Re: The Two Towers MUD

#85

Post by anthk »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #66
mdtrooper wrote: post #32

In spanish there are some very old muds: - Balzhur: https://balzhur.org/ is have been running from january 2000 - Medina: medinamud.top sometimes was offline but it have been running from 1995

I started playing Balzhur 5 years ago to practice Spanish. Ended up befriending a blind guy from Venezuela and wondering if most people still playing MUDs might be blind. I logged on a few weeks ago and noticed he still plays, but I forgot the commands to do anything so I never left him a message. There's also: - rlmud.org 23 https://www.reinosdeleyenda.es/ -- Still relatively popular for a MUD in Spanish - mud.simau…

On Cyberlife, there's more than Madrid, but you need to get a vehicle.

Also, on MUDs, I do the same as a native Spanish speaker but in English, with Cybersphere, as reading almost technical English it's just "Tuesday" to me.

Re: The Two Towers MUD

#86

Post by kibwen »

distances wrote: post #39
hboon wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My rule is that a game needs to have an end (or at least a realistically achievable goal to work towards), or it needs to be a social experience that I exclusively play with my friends.

Re: The Two Towers MUD

#87

Post by anthk »

Inviz wrote: post #40

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

More than listening, Nethack (better with Slashem) allows a lot of emergent gameplay.

Also, Cataclysm DDA:Bright Nights.

Re: The Two Towers MUD

#88

Post by nerevarthelame »

astronads wrote: post #2

Anyone out there still playing MUDs? Any good ones to recommend?

I'm heavily involved in DragonRealms [0]. Its older brother GemStone is still kicking around too.

Players of both games built an open source Ruby-based scripting engine called Lich [1] that allows insanely complex levels of automation. When I "play" the game I'm usually writing scripts to share with the community and optimizing my training configuration.

Both games have 30+ years of dedicated development and insanely deep lore and history. They've embraced micro-transactions to stay financially solvent, but participating in that is absolutely not necessary.

[0]: https://www.play.net/dr/ [1]: https://github.com/elanthia-online/lich-5

Re: The Two Towers MUD

#89

Post by imzadi »

I used to be heavy into this MUD in the 90s. It's where I learned to program and made some good life-long friends (and even more life-long enemies lol).

Re: The Two Towers MUD

#90

Post by Cthulhu_ »

scbrg wrote: post #47

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 suspect that in another 10 years or so - or probably today already - we'll see similar stories coming from people who started with e.g. Minecraft or Roblox, which are in a sense just as much programming, user generated content games as MUDs are. Maybe a bit more visual.
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