[HN Gopher] 1980: MUD
___________________________________________________________________
1980: MUD
Author : TheLocehiliosan
Score : 97 points
Date : 2021-03-11 12:35 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (if50.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (if50.substack.com)
| v01dlight wrote:
| If anyone wants to try something less fantasy themed, I strongly
| recommend hackmud
| (https://store.steampowered.com/app/469920/hackmud/), in which
| you play as a recently sapient program in the ruins of a network
| long devoid of human users. The community is very savvy and have
| implemented some complex stuff in and out of game, including
| bridges between all the popular text channels and mirrors of them
| on Discord (https://discord.gg/h5K5fYuuMj), so you can monitor
| and even play the game without being logged in (to hackmud, you
| would still need to be on Discord).
| alexellisuk wrote:
| Who remembers nightfall? It still seems to be up at nightfall.org
|
| It's how I learned that telnet isn't encrypted many years ago :)
| devindotcom wrote:
| What a fun bit of history.
|
| Incidentally, I was looking into the possibility of hosting my
| own MUD a while back and it seemed rather complicated for someone
| without web deployment experience. I do wish there was a simpler
| way to do it and customize your own world for a few friends to
| play around in. I guess we could just invade a less-active MUD
| but it seems more up our alley to roll our own so we can make a
| few extra areas ourselves and so on.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| We have to go back.
| fuball63 wrote:
| I'm hoping maybe some experience MUD players can help me out with
| this: every time I try to get into a MUD, the text just moves
| past the screen too fast and I feel like I miss important parts,
| and then I can't see it again. Or if I run a command, before I
| can interpret the output it flies off the screen in favor of some
| non important text. I can't imagine combat in text mode, trying
| to figure out what command to type while also trying to race
| against the buffer.
|
| I've tried several different MUDs over the years because I like
| text based games, but they never stick.
| tristor wrote:
| If you can get it to run, the best way to play MUDs is using a
| MUD client. My favorite was always GMud because it could fit on
| a floppy disk with a world file, but ZMud was kind of the de-
| facto standard/best client, although paid. You can use a normal
| telnet client, but it needs to support ANSI colors and have a
| screen buffer to render most MUDs properly.
|
| Also, it depends on the MUD codebase they use, some of the
| older codebases are more friendly to very basic clients, newer
| codebases typically rely on using a telnet client like TinTin
| or a MUD client.
| sea6ear wrote:
| I don't know if it will work for all MUDs but for the one that
| I play on, I usually run telnet in an shell buffer in Emacs, so
| that I can always scroll back up to see what I've missed.
|
| There are (or were?) MUD clients for Emacs, but I haven't used
| one for a long time - just having Emacs and the buffer
| available has been enough for everything I've wanted to do.
| crooked-v wrote:
| Try MUSHclient (Windows), Atlantis (Mac), or Mudlet (multi-
| platform) for dedicated MUD clients that separate input and
| output areas and give you scrollable output, as well as various
| features to turn matched text into live-updating status bar
| bars and other info displays.
| StavrosK wrote:
| I believe MUSHClient is cross-platform nowadays, or at least
| I remember running it on Linux for the nostalgia. Definitely
| should run fine under Wine.
| legohead wrote:
| Funny you mention that. I started playing MUDs @ 2400 baud. You
| could literally watch each letter being written out. When 16.8k
| came out, my first thought was "how can anyone read this fast?"
| I thought MUDs were doomed...
|
| but, you get used to it. You will figure out what's actually
| important and what can be ignored. Someone else mentioned the
| 'brief' command, which shortens room descriptions, and that is
| a good start. After you log in, just take your time, there's no
| rush...
| [deleted]
| yawn wrote:
| Some muds support a "brief" mode, which will limit the room
| description to one line.
| rendall wrote:
| That's a matter of having a telnet client that has a screen
| buffer. I haven't tried this one, but try it?
| http://tintin.mudhalla.net/
| Jtsummers wrote:
| There are some mud clients (I can't remember the one I used on
| Windows, but it did this) which parses out a lot of information
| and lets you have a multipane/window view of the text. This can
| help. It's also possible to turn many of the notifications off.
| Also, you usually start in something like a common room/town
| and those tend to be _very_ active with people moving in and
| out constantly or carrying on non-shouted conversations. Once
| you get out of those areas the speed of text tends to drop off.
| Finally, with room descriptions you can always "look" again. I
| became very good at reading 1-3 lines of text before it
| disappeared, pulling it up, and starting right where I left
| off. But honestly that didn't happen too often.
|
| In combat, depending on the MUD and the class of character you
| may not need to type frequently during combat. Usually you will
| attack automatically once it begins. Spells, healing commands,
| and other things are all you need to type and usually not every
| round (which is about 1-3 seconds usually). Every MUD I played
| on had some form of alias, and if not the client did, which let
| me take a 5 word command down to 1-5 letters. `draw crysknife`
| became `dc` for my Fremen character. I had similar aliases for
| putting it away and drawing other weapons or switching to other
| attack strategies.
| nickelcitymario wrote:
| As audio increasingly becomes a platform in-it-of-itself,
| experiences from the CLI world will become more and more
| relevant. Because audio as an interface has a lot more in common
| with the command line than it does with GUIs.
|
| If it doesn't already exist, I could see a serious market for
| audio-based MUDs.
| VadimPR wrote:
| It already exists. Modern clients like Mudlet
| (https://mudlet.org/) support both old (MSP) and modern audio
| protocols:
| https://wiki.mudlet.org/w/Standards:MUD_Client_Media_Protoco...
|
| There's games like StickMUD that make use of this, too.
| em-bee wrote:
| that seems to only go one way though.
|
| for a real audio based mud, the players voice input needs to
| be interpreted as commands but also sent to the other players
| in the room so you can have real voice based interaction.
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| Starfinder have done this on Alexa just say "Alexa Play
| Starfinder"
| em-bee wrote:
| i wish i could play this on a real computer. not interesting
| in getting alexa or any other of these 'assistants'
| rjsw wrote:
| I used to play on the Essex MUD from home using a 300baud
| accoustic coupler, this would have been 79-81.
| pjsg wrote:
| I used to play the Essex MUD as well from probably 80-82 -- I
| can recall the huge speed boost when we got a 1200/75 dialup
| modem! I got to be a wizard (Gorpli) and I did meet a couple of
| the other wizards IRL.
|
| Fun times.
| newsclues wrote:
| I played iconoclast in the early 2000s
| DoomHotel wrote:
| I wrote a frontend for CompuServe's British Legends using
| Crosstalk Mk.4's scripting language CASL. It had a complete
| dungeon map and let me navigate using the PC's numeric keypad for
| directions. An onscreen keymap with labels for each number key
| showed where pressing that key would lead. It even randomized
| choices, so if NW and W both led to the same place it would pick
| one randomly if you hit either key. (This was to confuse wizards
| who could tell who you were by your habitual choices.)
| mattowen_uk wrote:
| I used to mod /r/MUD on reddit - if you fancy getting back into
| MUDs that's a great place to start.
|
| For my sins, I became very addicted to Shades on Prestel back in
| the day. Due to this, I prefer MUDs that are not deep on class
| progression, and just easy fun.
|
| A lot of the still running MUDs have deep learning curves, due to
| some of them having been running for a good few decades. To the
| new or casual player, this makes them impregnable.
|
| Whereas I don't think we need to change the beauty of the text
| based medium, I do think that the genre needs updating to make
| new MUDs more accessible.... Even D&D finally accepted it needed
| to simplify again to gain new players.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| > I do think that the genre needs updating to make new MUDs
| more accessible
|
| I know what you're saying. Iron Realms MUDs are a good example
| of a MUD with modern conveniences.
|
| But on the topic of a different sort of accessibility, you can
| play MUDs with a screen reader. I was playing
| http://www.balzhur.org/ (Spanish) two years ago and found out
| most of the people I was meeting in it were blind. Just using a
| stock screen reader to read out the game at incredible speed.
|
| Aside, playing a MUD in the foreign language you're learning is
| a fun way to get daily drill. Especially once you try to engage
| socially ingame. Having someone depend on you in real time in
| the game really makes your brain gain levels quickly.
| gtr wrote:
| I remember playing Shades an awful lot as a young teen. That
| was until my parents saw the phone bill!
| samizdis wrote:
| Wow, Shades on Prestel (while using a BBC Micro). That brings
| back memories - especially of getting screamed at and
| grounded/penalised for racking up huge phone bills.
|
| I remember two characters getting "married" on Shades. A scene
| that was usually described as a derelict church with a grim,
| cold interior, was for the occasion bedecked with flowers etc -
| and rather than being empty save for a random player perhaps
| wandering in when my character was there, it was full of
| people. Date/time for the ceremony had been widely
| disseminated.
|
| Cracking game.
| mattowen_uk wrote:
| > _getting screamed at and grounded /penalised for racking up
| huge phone bills._
|
| Not just me then. XD
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| Surprising the number of ex shades players on here - I used to
| play a bit but via the internal network (I worked for telecom
| gold back in the day)
|
| Later on we had an ex phreaker working in TEC who had been
| busted for Prestel hacking, one day the Internal Security guy
| who had busted him - met him at work and almost had a heart
| attack.
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| 3rd and path finder are a lot simpler to the complex method AnD
| 2nd became
| rocky_raccoon wrote:
| Here I am, about 90% done with a completely custom approach to
| a classless system in a MUD, and you've got me worried that I'm
| overcomplicating things all of a sudden.
| ytjohn wrote:
| It's not a game, Roguelike made a MUD inspired online
| conference for their conference. I keep coming back to this.
| While they built it for a time-limited conference, I could see
| variations for long-running online communities, or even
| "modern" MUD games.
|
| https://dev.to/lazerwalker/using-game-design-to-make-virtual...
| bovermyer wrote:
| So basically the brutal Lord of the Flies-esque culture that
| dominates multiplayer survival games like Rust and Conan: Exiles
| is nothing new.
|
| From the article:
|
| > I worked out how to login (not easy), I worked out how to load
| the game and... I got killed. I tried again, I got killed again
| and eventually, when people were bored of killing me, I tried to
| talk to a wizard about how the game worked and was told to bugger
| off and then killed again. ...This was most people's initial
| experience of MUD.
| ycombinete wrote:
| I've been playing a bit of Discworld and Aardwolf MUDS lately.
| Just to try out the genre, and I've had the opposite
| experience. In Discworld, you have to assign yourself as a
| "player killer" in order to both kill or be killed by other
| players. Perhaps this is idiosyncratic to Discworld. I know
| early RuneScape has the same setup.
|
| I'm brand new to MUDs and 100% of my interactions have been
| ether helping or being helped by other players to learn and
| play the game.
| bovermyer wrote:
| I'm speaking specifically of the original, and not of the
| thousands of MU*s that have come into being since.
|
| There are some MU*s that have no combat at all, and are
| closer to shared creative spaces than anything else.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Holy shit, Aardwolf is still around? I think I remember
| playing that somewhere around 2001 -- incredible that it's
| still around.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| Not only is it still around, but according to
| http://mudstats.com/Browse it appears to be currently the
| largest free to play non-"adult"-themed MUD.
| peddling-brink wrote:
| long live styx.dk
|
| But seriously, if anyone knows how to reliably contact the admins
| that took it offline, I'd love to know.
| sedatk wrote:
| Turkey had its share of MUDs in the 90's too. Turkish players
| would play on Bitnet on a MUD server hosted in Greece (IIRC),
| using 3270 terminals, before Internet arrived. There later came
| BizimMUD, a customized version of CircleMUD, hosted at Middle
| East Technical University in Ankara. I used to play there a lot
| back in 1995. There was permadeath and PvP was always open which
| made it quite exciting. Then, the last one I remember was opened
| up at ADANET, a local ISP in Ankara. It was a stock DikuMUD
| instance. It might be called "Darkwood" but I'm not sure.
|
| My favorite international MUD was Mirkwood, which was still up
| and running recently.
|
| I was also enamored by MUSH servers as how detailed they can be,
| but could never get to play them for long.
| boring_twenties wrote:
| The best MUD hands down was Armageddon.
|
| Oh shit, it still exists.
|
| I kind of wish I hadn't realized that.
| NateLawson wrote:
| My university had terminal labs in the early 90s, tables full of
| Wyse terminals hooked up to the central UNIX cluster. PCs and
| Macs were common in other labs, but a terminal lab was still a
| convenient place to check email or get on IRC between classes. I
| would log into two terminals next to each other in order to have
| a screen for IRC while coding on the other one.
|
| One early morning, I walked into a lab that was vacant except for
| one person. He was slumped over the keyboard with a hand around
| an empty Coke can. The amber screen was scrolling upward every
| few seconds: YOU ARE HUNGRY... YOU FEEL
| TIRED... > YOU ARE HUNGRY... YOU FEEL TIRED...
| >
| dvwallin wrote:
| After 20 years I still play on Discworld MUD on a regular basis.
| I find there being a strong community - if a bit smaller than it
| used to be. The one thing I enjoy most with playing on the MUD
| (apart from the people) are the fact that I feel less limited in
| the game play compared to most graphical games.
| ycombinete wrote:
| I'm just starting out in Discworld, and I have trouble
| interacting with the NPCs. For instance I've just signed on as
| a thief, but when I go to the guild building to train, I cant
| get OST the initial interaction with them.
|
| I've also been blown away by how friendly everyone I've
| encountered has been. It seems like a great community
| dvwallin wrote:
| In almost any room containing a named NPC you can simply type
| "say help" and they'll give you hints on how to continue.
|
| And yes, most people on Discworld are really friendly and
| helpful.
| ycombinete wrote:
| Thank you. I'm going to hop on now and try this out.
|
| edit: I tried "say help" but that didn't do anything. "help
| here" got me the help that I needed
| drummojg wrote:
| I was very sad my character got scrubbed for not logging on
| enough. Alas and alack, another relic of life passes because of
| old age and inattention. The last time I'd logged on was the
| night PTerry died, and that was a fine capstone for a long
| career as a Feef on the Disc.
| Diederich wrote:
| Have you looked at https://mume.org/ ? I've been playing that
| one off and on since the early 1990s. It's a pretty amazing
| experience.
|
| EDIT: Just logged in again, and saw this message from a couple
| of months ago:
|
| The Third Age of the Sun is over: the War of the Ring was
| fought; the One Ring was been destroyed; the Ring-Bearers and
| the last of the Noldor have departed from Middle-earth. For the
| eleventh time in the history of MUME, the clock starts over.
|
| Again, it is the year 2850 of the Third Age. Gandalf has just
| obtained the key of Erebor from Thrain in the dungeons of Dol
| Guldur. The events told in "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the
| Rings" are ready to happen.
|
| - Dain
| AaronM wrote:
| Was really bummed when my character got wiped there.
| beardedwizard wrote:
| Shout out Cthulhumud
| [deleted]
| markus_zhang wrote:
| For anyone who has had extensive experience in MUD and early
| MMORPG, including Ultima Online, is there anything you would like
| to be implemented in modern MMO and is technically possible? For
| example I heard from time to time that people claim UO is
| actually more complex than modern MMORPG, but because I don't
| play either I'm wonderig what's missing here.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| I guess it depends upon what you mean by complex. UO was a 2D
| world, MUDs are text worlds, and modern MMORPGs are 3D - that
| right there is going to make any given feature more complex in
| a modern MMORPG than UO or a MUD.
|
| What I think they mean is MUDs and early MMOs were more
| sandbox-style. This can create complex and unplanned
| interactions in the game. But the market has mostly decided
| they don't like these style of games. So you won't get a AAA
| developer making them because the money just isn't there.
|
| Many people loved these interactions. But even more hated them.
| These days you have options. Back then you didn't. Back in
| 2000, if you wanted to play an MMO, you had 3 options. Nowadays
| you have dozens.
|
| MUDs also have the benefit of not having millions of dollars on
| the line. And a million monkeys typing all at once. There's
| literally thousands of MUDs out there. Most of them are really
| bad and uninspiring.
|
| It's funny to think about how things have shifted. Back when
| WoW was released, instancing was controversial. Some didn't
| completely consider it an MMO because it let you opt out of a
| shared experience with others you don't know.
| rsync wrote:
| "... is there anything you would like to be implemented in
| modern MMO and is technically possible?"
|
| I don't play any games like this anymore but I did play a lot
| of MUDs and, later, years of UO.
|
| What I always wanted were procedurally generated _items_ - like
| weapons and armor and so on.
|
| roguelike games randomize the names and colors of items, but we
| all know what they all are and there are a fixed set of them.
| UO was even worse - you knew exactly what every item was and
| what it did and that was that.
|
| It seems obvious to me that a very enjoyable and delightful
| aspect could be added to games like this if _every time you
| picked up an item_ you had no idea what it might be, or what it
| did, or how it could be used.
|
| Obviously there would be some kind of templating involved and a
| number of attributes that could be randomized, etc., and
| perhaps even some kind of generalized discovery mechanism where
| you could divine exactly what this plain looking sword does.
|
| Bottom line: I, as a brand new player, just outside the
| beginner town, should get a plain old short sword off of this
| dead orc 99 times out of 100. But 1 time out of 100 I should
| get a short sword that glows blue when I get close to undead
| creatures and has +X against wolves. Or whatever.
|
| To put it another way, there should be an infinite number of
| different items I can run into throughout the game and they
| should do lots of unexpected and fascinating things (albeit
| rarely).
| jakestevenson wrote:
| In my time with a MUD, my absolute favorite parts were: 1.
| Social interaction 2. Automation!
|
| Maybe not all MUDs allowed it, but the one I played was
| absolutely fine with you using specialized clients such as
| tintin++ and writing scripts. I started with smaller scripts to
| automate movement between zones and managing inventory, and I
| moved on to full bots in there that would take "spoken"
| commands from trusted players.
|
| From what I hear, that'll get you banned in most MMORPGs these
| days, which is a shame.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Thank you. This is very interesting. I know some MMORPG
| provides you plugins for automation but many new games don't
| give you solutions for scripting.
|
| I'm wondering if there is any MMORPG that actually gives some
| serious scripting to players for building their own worlds
| and sharing with others. It's going to be a hell lot of job
| to balance out but could be really fun.
| duskwuff wrote:
| In older text-based gaming: MUCKs tended to be more
| oriented towards creation and social interaction than MUDs.
| Many MUCKs would allow players to create their own areas,
| with a limited degree of scriptability.
|
| In modern gaming: Second Life, VRChat, Roblox, et al.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| thanks, those are interesting games. I'll check out the
| MUCKs and see how they balance things (or maybe they just
| didn't care).
|
| The game Neverwinter Nights(2001) introduced a powerful
| editor so that players can create their own world and
| join servers. But those servers have to be separated
| because of different scripts. It would be really
| fascinating if somehow we can have a connection center
| (thinking the Sigil city in Planescape) and players can
| join different "worlds" which maybe have completely
| different sets of rules (but have the same meta rules to
| make the connection possible).
| duskwuff wrote:
| MUCKs tend to be primarily social; any "game mechanics",
| beyond absolute core functionality like movement and
| communication, exist only by consent of the players. Game
| balance isn't really a concern.
|
| Second Life and VRChat roughly follow this model as well.
| Roblox worlds are more isolated, kind of along the lines
| of what you're describing for NWN.
| myko wrote:
| The game I played (NCMUD) allowed this and it had a lot to do
| with me becoming a programmer (MUDs in general did really).
|
| At one point I wrote something to generate zones somewhat
| randomly using the editor the game had built-in - it would
| transition from "zones" of a particular type
| (forest/water/desert) and take a few random strings to create
| (hopefully) reasonable descriptions of a place that could
| exist.
|
| Not the most interesting zone but it allowed me to create
| blank canvasses to put more interesting elements into.
|
| All done with ZuggScript
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I also thought about some MMORPG that have events, but no
| real quests. You can figure out whatever quests you want in
| an event. Events could even be triggered by players. You
| setup the rules (by powerful scripting) and wait for players
| to trigger them.
|
| For example, maybe some player discovered a summoning book,
| read a page, and somehow opened a maw to another plane and
| attracted an endless stream of demons. This is a player-
| triggered event and other players can do whatever they want.
| They can ally with the demons, they can fight them and craft
| items from their remainings. The game designer just make sure
| that every event doesn't break the whole game.
|
| Maybe I went too far there with my imagination, lol.
| PebblesRox wrote:
| There are some fun stories by u/Patches765 on reddit about
| MUD scripting. I especially like this one:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/patches765/comments/5euzt2/intellig.
| ..
|
| And if you scroll past the D&D links here, he's got a whole
| series of stories from his time on the Shadowdale MUD though
| I forget if they involve any scripting.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/patches765/comments/5isji2/intellig.
| ..
| ianbicking wrote:
| It would be cool to use automation to turn yourself into an
| NPC.
|
| I almost wonder if you could train an RNN or something on
| player action and have it start to clone behavior...
| savingGrace wrote:
| I couldn't focus on the article after I read about Tom showing
| up. How did Tom help him move the bookcase?
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| oh right I should log into my LambdaMOO account to check what's
| up, it's been a long time
|
| telnet lambda.moo.mud.org 8888
|
| learned to program on that thing
| filchermcurr wrote:
| LambdaMOO is mostly people being idle. There is, however, a
| spiritual successor called ChatMUD. It's based on a fork of a
| fork of the original LambdaMOO server called ToastStunt (forked
| from Stunt). It seems to have a bit more pep in its step if
| you're looking for a semi-active social / programming MOO.
|
| https://chatmud.com/ https://github.com/lisdude/toaststunt
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| played a huge part in my programming evolution, too. learned OO
| from programming in it, and then learned C from hacking on the
| server and various offshoots of it
| ntoll wrote:
| Me too
| real-dino wrote:
| I played a bit of MUD II. Did anyone know how to get the 2
| crowns? The one in the swamp vs the one in the tower? They forbid
| us from telling each other as it was one of the easiest ways to
| get experience in the game.
| hderms wrote:
| Great article. Messing around with MUDs in the late 90s was
| probably one of the factors that got me deeper into computers.
| Graphical games were super impressive, but there was something
| really cool about playing in a multiplayer simulated world that,
| by virtue of the fact it was text based, you could envision the
| underworkings of a bit more easily.
| uglygoblin wrote:
| My first experience with an online service was Prodigy sometime
| around 1995 or 1996 and one of the first things I stumbled across
| was the MUD Gemstone 3.
|
| It blew my mind that hundreds of people were all existing in a
| shared world. I directly attribute my love of computers and
| software development career to MUD's.
|
| Also, Gemstone is still running: https://www.play.net/gs4/
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(page generated 2021-03-11 23:01 UTC)