MUD Gaming

#1 I've been involved in running and developing MUDs for about a decade, everything from combat Dikus to Battletech MU*. My team is currently actively running a PvP MUD called 'Basternae: Kingdoms at War' ... Our playerbase isn't as large as it would have been six years ago, but we probably have a couple hundred unique players, two weeks after re-opening.

#2 MUDs and their variations are hugely popular niches even to this day- and not just by oldskoolers.

My son plays a game that is similar to Nethack (the graphical version). I don't remember the name of it offhand. But its a mess of text panels, stats and chat windows. The graphics are super simplistic and occupy maybe 25% of the screen. There are hundreds of users- most of them are highschool and junior high. A few he knows personally.

While I don't quite understand the appeal to the game, he plays it more often than any other. He even tried Everquest and blatantly said "that game sucks compared to the game I am playing now".

My son is more or less an expert on MUDs now. The first time he mentioned it, it shocked me. Certainly not a genre you would expect a Junior High (he's now High School) student to be interested in.

#3 I am one of the architechs and programmers of Overdrive way back when. My handle was Lestat. As far as I know that MUD is still open, but I haven't logged in for some time.

#4 I played for _ages_. Started playing Shadowrun and Battletech in the early 90's and really just shook my habit within the last year. A lot of the games have lost populations and you'll see a handful left where people congregate and you get a hundred or so folks, the rest seem to have only a few folks.

I don't think your Dev time was wasted since most of the code is C based and it rolls over into a ton of stuff, including Torque.

Speaking along those lines. I'm kicking around the idea of building an online RPG with Torque and wondering if using an LPMud as the base code would be a good idea. I'm wondering if there's hooks that will allow me to push information to Torque to render the underlying mud commands on screen. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

#5 I only really know one person into MUDing, and he is addicted to the core. He played for 500 hours over the summer break. He plays Carrion Fields, and he says that theres a few hundred people who play.

#6 Heh..Realms of Despair (SMAUG prototype mud) was my first mud. Went on to run Shades of Evil, and implemented the ACK!MUD code base.

There are a few of us "old heads" dabbling at possible MMOG development, my project is just starting out now, initial design phase.

Nice to see someone from the past :)

#7 I've started development on quite a few mud projects myself. Using Nightmare and Lima mudlibs on MudOS, never really finishing any of them. I would love to see what could be done with the combination of MudOS and Torque...
It seems the similarities between TorqueScript and MudOS would primarily consist of implementing MudOS features into the TGE...any good C/C++ programmers out there interested? This would really be fun to play with =)
I believe the license restrictions on MudOS would disallow their code from being used but I see no reason an enterprising individual couldn't make their own code to make TGE do the same things with TorqueScript that MudOS does with LPC. I'm sure all the oldschool mud coders could modify their mudlib work to blend in. I thing somebody with the talent for it could probably implement most of it with TorqueScript, such as heart beats, player inventory, etc.

LPC data types would be nice, mappings, arrays, strings, I suppose that type of thing would be changes and additions to the engine itself.

Sorry for the long winded post I was just excited to see this thread in my browsing =) I've been dreaming of something like this... no really... at night... while sleeping... TgeOS... *drool*

(Edit: I meant to include this above just as an example of what I mean:

TGEmud 'wizard' or 'creator' or whatever you prefer logs into the game.
To test a new script he just uploaded to the server he types into the console:
LPC("update ~/wep/laser_gatling.cs");

it returns :

/w/adminuser/wep/laser_gatling#13045
updated and loaded.

he then types LPC("clone ~/wep/laser_gatling");
it returns:

Object Laser Gatling Cannon cloned and moved to your inventory.

He then types:

LPC("unwield handguns;wield laser cannon");

And it says;

You lower two .45 calibre handguns.
You wield the Laser Gatling Cannon.

He then proceeds to mow down all the poor innocent newbies standing in the new player login room.

#8 I was digging around looking for muds the other day and came across this site: http://discworld.atuin.net/lpc/
it's been going since the early 90's and is, according to some, the largest mud around atm.

#9 Just a quick plug for OpenSRD which is intended for use in MUDS and allows commercial exploitation... which most current MUD codebases prohibit.

#10 I used to help admin on ArmageddonMUD, a Diku based RP oriented MUD. They're still alive and kicking today, actually (www.armageddon.org) though I don't have the time to hang out there any more.

But you're right in saying the 'new' MMOGs are mostly (if not exactly) MUDs with graphics instead of text. I'm not entirely convinced as yet that that is even an improvement. So much more could be conveyed in a text format that won't (if ever) be conveyed visually/audially for some time to come.

#11 I remember the days when I'd log thousands of hours of play on a single character in some of my favourite MUDs.

I started learning to program MUDs in C with the Smaug codebase. Then I went to ResortMUD which was derived from Smaug and ended up ripping out like 85% of its base code to write my own mud up from the base network code. I eventually learned some network programming and started writing my own codebase from scratch. I had a lot of huge ideas for that codebase. I may still finish it someday, I'd like to see a lot of my ideas finally implemented. My ideas ranged everything from unique emote systems, to dynamic channels, dynamic buildings, a unique flying system allowing for flying pets and even floating islands that moved around in the sky, player ran towns/clans/guilds, player crafted/forged items/weapons/armour,with dynamic world expansion ran soley by the players and their economy. Not to include a sweet unique map system. :) It was basicly centered around a player ran world, large scale battles, and unique roleplaying tools/elements. I'll get it done someday.

I was also contracted to develope for a commercial MUD, but the project fell through.

But right now I just dont have time for MUDs. Torque is my main focus at this period in time.

-Jase

#12 I did a lot of development on the Shattered World back in the early 90s. It's now the longest continually running MUD in the world. As I recall MudOS was originally based off some of our code, though it diverged greatly after that. The Shattered World now has its own LPC compiler and virtual machine which performs much better than the original one and has much more advanced language features. The things we do for games.

Those were the days - I used to roll into my postgrad office at uni at around 4pm, work on the MUD through the night and wander off home when I noticed the daylight. Strangely not much work got done on my thesis at the time :)

It was a huge lot of fun and I made loads of friends. I'd love to do it all again!