This post is great. I love MUDs so much. I fell in love with them in the late 90s when I was finishing up high school. My favorite MUD was A.V.A.T.A.R., which I think is still around. (Update: I checked. It's still there!) The best part of a MUD is, like the article says, the multi-user aspect. It was an MMORPG before it was cool!
Whenever I learn a new programming language, my go-to project is to write a MUD from scratch. I try to make my area loader compatible with the Merc/Diku codebases, so I can start off with a fully realized world. I'm in the middle of writing one in Go. It's pretty dang fun, and there are sooooo many things to make that you really kind of never finish writing.
If anyone reading wants to check a MUD out, just type this into your terminal:
telnet avatar.outland.org 3000
(I have zero relation to Avatar other than being a fan/player.)
It's free, it's fun, and it's easy! The author of this article links to a bunch of ways to find new MUDs, if you enjoyed Avatar, there are tons of different kinds of MUDs, different themes, and so on. Enjoy!
Multi Undergraduate Destroyers was the acronym I heard attributed to it
Back on topic, I learned a little while back that Diku's source code appeared online, and while digging up some relevant supporting links, I just learned today that they have created Diku III which uses HTML and websockets: https://dikumud.com/
The journey of that source code into my modern eyes is meaningful to me because at the time I was playing MUDs, I didn't have enough programming chops to understand the C source, but now I can have enjoyment from the nostalgia and from the source
I give Gemstone III and Dragonrealms full credit for my current typing speed. And I remember setting up a local TinyMUD instance for my friends on the school network then creating all sorts of weird items and creatures to mess with them.
It's funny... These games largely didn't have graphics (you could argue some of the more advanced interfaces like with Simutronics stuff did). Yet I have vivid memories of specifics places, creatures, items, etc from my experiences. A true testament to the power of imagination.
Sadly, both it and I have changed. It's just not the same now for me. I've tried going back, and I've tried to find other things to recapture that feeling, but it's just not happening.
Gemstone is still going strong! There were over 1000 characters logged in at times during the recently-concluded festival.
It has profited a lot from a pay-to-be-uber kind of model. You can level up just fine with ordinary gear, but people pay as much as $25000 (in equivalent game currency )for the most expensive items auctioned nowadays.
MUDs were great, and they were partially responsible for me being able to work up my knowledge, experience, and confidence to start up a career in software engineering. I learned a lot from trying to make my own MUDs (from using ROM 2.4, some tiny codebase called CVagrant, and from scratch), as well as a little bit about Linux.
This is all aside from playing. I somehow convinced many of the right people in middle and high school to play a Tolkien-based MUD with me. It was really great back then, but I don't play any more nor does anyone I know. There are only a handful of MUDs that have the playerbase to make them interesting.
Also, I'm not sure if it's still the best place to browse what MUDs exist, but many can be found on http://www.mudconnect.com/.
Tolkien's Lord of the Rings was a huge influence on fantasy and MUDs. I don't know which one you used to play. I used to play MUME (currently at https://mume.org/ )
My brother still plays sometimes. He has a lot of friends there. Sometimes they have over 30 people on at the same time! Heh. It used to be hundreds.
I used to spend quite a bit of time on the #emacs Freenode IRC channel, but then discovered Discworld MUD, which is like #emacs on steroids: more NPCs (though less advanced ones), more puns (not a fan of those personally, but they create an amusing atmosphere), more locations. It can be quite a time sink, but indeed a fun one. I'm finding it rather strange that those are not more popular, and would recommend to try them too.
I've only played a little with MUDs, but I believe they are due to a big comeback as AIs like GPT-3 gets cheaper and more convenient to use. The possibilities for human vs AI interaction and also worldbuilding are endless.
I don't know about a mud comeback per se but I think this comment is very on point. There even was a mud (Written Realms I think?) that got into the GPT-3 beta. They have some interesting blogs on their experience.
MUDs may be history to most people, but at Iron Realms we still have five commercial MUDs running live with dedicated paid staff on each constantly working to improve the gameplay and enlarge the already massive worlds. Honestly, it's pretty surprising to me, as when I launched our first one - Achaea - in 1997 right around when Ultima Online launched, I gave us five years.
As someone who was a volunteer Admin/coder for a while on a MUD during college (Fires of Heaven, yes based on the Wheel of Time) keeping a MUD going with paid staff in this age is incredible. Well done!
Former player of Achaea here (if anyone recognizes the name Soludra) -- can attest, the Iron Realms MUDs are top-tier. I tried to get into volunteering, but my work ethic wasn't really up to snuff at the time. Sorry ^_^;
(context: I played Achaea without access to a source of cash)
Back when I played, you could buy "artefacts" with real money, but they were less "pay to win" and more "pay for convenience". They were definitely far more than mere cosmetic items, but it was more than possible to play without ever buying one.
Though I was always, always jealous when I saw somebody using wings. Those things took you to a kind of cloud teleportation hub where you could immediately jump to a number of places.
Depends on the item. Some of them were quite powerful, but even then, generally you'd get a 10% edge or an ability from another class. And people would often have macros to unequip all their artifacts for a fair duel.
The Lasallian Lyre is named after my character, but strangely enough, I never mastered the timing to make the best use of it. (A playable class was later based on some fiction I wrote for the official history, which arguably the most impact I've ever had on a product vision...)
Never thought I'd see Achaea discussed on HN. It was a deep influence on me, though my active time was a lifetime ago. Hi, Sarapis! Figured you'd like to know that Achaea, and of course Avalon before it (you were... Orthwein?) really did have a long-lasting impact. These games have always been deeply participatory: player-run guilds, player-run cities. At least at the time I played, you literally couldn't even get class abilities without joining a group and inheriting its political positions, friends, enemies. And although there were PvE quests, the majority of the game was about conflict between players, at the level of people, guilds, cities. That's a far cry from the theme-park nature of modern multiplayer RPGs like WoW.
I tried Achaea after I got too frustrated with MUME. What turned me off wasn't the way people could pay to avoid grind, but rather how you absolutely needed a client script for combat. If you didn't have some kind of script that provided automated reactions, PVE was really hard and you couldn't even consider PVP. And, of course, people who made the best scripts were charging for them.
That's true! I did very little combat overall -- I spent most of my time on the social side of the game -- but I did build a few of my own convenience scripts anyway, so the criticism is well-founded.
You can get by in PvE without anything overly complex, and it's honestly more fun to figure out how to deal with the damage and affliction patterns from individual monsters yourself than relying on an autocure system. (Achaea has strict rules on what goes beyond the line of "botting", too.) But yeah, PvP essentially required some automation to let you focus on tactics instead.
Yeah, I remember the rules about "botting", too. I don't know if they changed a lot since I played, but back then they basically amounted to "don't automate your character to farm while idle". In light of the pay-to-avoid-grind system, it didn't take me too long to conclude that the rules were pretty much "don't affect our bottom line, anything else goes".
Because botting is basically impossible for us to detect algorithmically (we're a tiny company and don't have the resources to engage in that kind of battle with botters), our line boils down to, "If we come and talk to you and you don't reply, you're not playing the game and that's not allowed."
It's the only standard for botting that works for us.
True, but not strictly true. I played with 100% manual attacks and cures, but made heavy use of color coding to recognize threats in the rapid scroll of incoming text. It wasn't any harder than playing a competitive puzzle game: recognize colors, make matches, try to throw sand in your opponent's gears and make combos faster than they can.
Iron Realms games are pay to win enough to make every publisher jealous. Though they are some of the most involved/integrated communities of players/developers/tool-makers in likely any game at the moment.
The combat system in Achaea was always so fascinating to me in terms of balance, but back when I was still playing it I was on bad dialup or satellite internet, which gave me a pretty big disadvantage against other people.
Same. It really amazes me how cool combat was in a game that was purely text. Even if it was almost a decade since I played a lot of it. I remember it fondly and still recommend it if for nothing else but novelty.
The hundred or so debuffs and the concept of truelock still fascinates me. If a new, (more graphical perhaps) game dared to come even close to that I'd be so happy to give it a spin.
Woah, Sarapis! I've seen MUDs discussed here on HN before but never Achaea. I wouldn't be who I am today without having played that game. Thank you for so many years of fun.
Since you run the place, I'll state here that it would be nice if I could look at your web site and decide if I'm interested before being hit with a pop-up window asking me to sign up for a newsletter.
How do I know if I want your newsletter, if I haven't figured out what your product is? Window closed. Sale lost.
How many of you rushed home from school to get your daily turns in? One that I played (maybe called Dikumud?) had some turn based aspects that would reset everyday. Would fly to my room after the school bus to fire up the modem and the IBM clone PC to get connected and get my action in!
I'm actually surprised that I don't remember any turn-based elements from any of the many, many M*'s I played given the strong relation to traditional RPGs - the only big time-based event was when servers reset.
Archmage (magewars.com, probably the first really big browser game) was the first game I remember waiting for my next turn to be available on. Apparently there's a "reincarnation" of it running today. https://wiki.the-reincarnation.org/Archmage
A good friend of mine was really into Carrion Fields [0], back in the 90s early 00s. Amazingly, it is still around! I also played for a while, mostly doable even on the slow internet connection we had at the time (good ol' 14/28k at best). It was amazing how big and popular some of these were, before Everquest/Ultima/WoW made such ideas really mainstream.
Anyway, I did enjoy playing it, though big multiplayer games weren't quite my thing, it was fun to have a friend to play with. He had lots of online buddies through the MUD. For me, it got me further into coding as I worked on modifying a MUD of my own, but I can't remember the codebase I started with.
I loved playing on MUDs in the 90s. My friend and I were wizards on one that was called Shadow something-or-another. It was awesome to be able to script new adventures and play online with friends as a kid in middle school and high school.
Chanced upon MUDs as a millennial due to the Discworld novels and the Discworld universe, spent my childhood laughing and playing in Discworld MUD, RIP Terry Pratchett
My favorite mud was Frontier Mud - not sure when it went down. Back in college I was writing an LPMud called MirrorMud that featured a mystical mountain. You'd appear to finish your quest to the mountain top, but then when you'd return to town, the description of everything and everyone around you would be different, and evil, almost like everyone had been replaced by evil versions of themselves. I was playing with lex and yacc to make parsers like the Swedish Chef parser, so that any other player's speech would be re-parsed live to look evil (without their knowledge). Meanwhile, from the perspective of the other players, a player returning from the mountain would have his speech re-parsed (without his knowledge) to look delusional or drunk somehow. The idea is that you'd need another quest to put things back to normal, and in the meantime all the players could have fun messing with the people returning from the quest. That was about as far as I got, because one of the campus administrators found the mud running on my account and deleted my files. Argh campus administrators!
Yup - huge fan 20yrs (!!) ago. Great community with plenty of players back then. I still log into my main character every couple of years just to check they’re still going.
Yes and it was simultaneously a fantastic experience and a waste of time.
I say a fantastic experience because I played lots of people from around the world, some of whom I eventually visited in their home countries. I also improved as a developer. It was a great thrill one day to meet a friend-of-friend who loved some of the code I'd written.
I say waste of time because I spent endless hours in my early 20s glued to a telnet session. In retrospect I would have been better taking up a pass time that let me meet people in person. I've been better at avoiding addictive games since.
MUDs are great, and I think the gameplay of the best ones is still untouched by modern MMORPGs. Implementing new features, scripting new interactions, and so on takes much less work after all, being text based. You also have incredibly rich text descriptions, and the lore can get very deep as a result. Many hours of my youth were spent playing and hacking on various MUDs. I added MCCP to CircleMUD for example, and honed most of my C skills on MUD code bases.
I think there's a game type somewhere between today's MMORPGs and MUDs that can bring some of these features and text based interactions to an MMO. For example, I started prototyping a game a last year that was old school cyberpunk-ish style where you had a console that you can interact with a internet-like network, and this console let you do a lot of the mud-like text interactions and automation, but there was also a part of the game to visualize and let you interact with the network without the console.
I've been making a thing called Tentacle Typer for the last 6~ months I'm hoping it'll be a basis for something like you're describing eventually. I've created lots of systems that can enable it. Prolific content creation is the largest mountain to climb as an indie solo :)
I played around 96-98. After that I continued hanging around as a wizard (coder) for a few years. Created some areas and relaunched the Barbarian guild (For Groo)
Way back in the day (1985) I was figuring out how to do timeslicing on a 4MHz Z80, and once I had it working on multiple terminals I slung a simple MUD on it (Shades). Connecting it to a couple of modems (this was the days when BB's were the thing) got people playing, at which point British Telecom's Prestel/Micronet decided they'd like to run it on their system.
The demand was sufficient that it kept crashing the entire national network, and one of my prize memories from back then is the night I was working late in this huge multistorey BT building (Baynard House) in London stuffed with big cabinets filled with computers and modems, and as I was huddled over my little Z80 the double doors burst open and the shift leader stormed in, shouting "There is NO WAY I'm going to put up with your system taking down the entire network". So I looked down my little Z80 box, then looked up at the seried ranks of GEC computers in their 48U cabinets, and did my best to puzzled, in a "Who, little ole me?" kind of way.
Ok, so it was 1200 baud max per user but we did get up to 128 users spread over 2 Z80s, each with 256Kb bankswitched RAM and 2Mb hand-made RAM disks.
The rest of it is a long story but it's still around [0] and I know a few people on here remember it (fondly I hope - though I do still feel guilty about those bills!).
Hi! Those meets were great fun (though one or two did get a bit out of hand :) )
Just logged and checked, your account is still active on Shades. Quite a few of the old names log in from time to time, maybe we'll have to organise a virtual meet one of these days.
I played a Transformers MUSH when I was a teenager. It was great fun and some great memories with friends I’ve never met IRL. It’s a sort of play that becomes culturally less acceptable after a certain age.
My first mud experience was TFE back in the 90s at uni and I tanked psychology because of it. I decided to learn how to make my own (incidentally how I ended up in software engineering!) which never had a single player but 30~ developers for a period of 2-3 years hacking away on areas.. MUDs were the original community-coded-projects!
I have OFTEN considered the idea of writing a new MUD with the intention of bringing in a whole new realm of users to the genre but have never really worked out how to make it viable (I cannot see anyone funding a team to build a MUD startup)
I have some ideas though.. I think telnet is too intimidating for new players. The barrier to entry is too high. They need to work on mobile, they need to probably be some kind of browser-based experience with font styling and the lightest touch UI beyond the old '>' prompt.
If anyone's keen on dropping some coin I have 30 years of thinking on the subject and would happily leave my day job ;)
As one of the most annoying kids in the CD/LPMud scene I am likely still responsible for more MUDs being banned from InterMud than anyone else - I would wiz just about anywhere I could to stalk and occasionally harass friends and enemies alike. (The name Moles has been banned on most remaining CD muds since 1994.)
The one place they could never ban was the TMI/MudOS development MUD - I don't even remember what it was called, but looking at what the folks from there are doing today... boy, I should've spent a lot more time actually trying to get to know them instead of bugging the people I played with elsewhere.
I learned C and OO programming on LPMuds, and wrote my first reasonably large, widely-used software that I believe was used on a few different sites: hands.
When I helped launch a new MUD (name lost to time) I was disappointed at how poor the out-of-the-box support was for syntax like "take bag from chest".
Unfortunately my software engineering skills were non-existent, so I'm sure when I finally retired from MUDding there were still plenty of bugs, but I have vague hopes my code is still floating around out there. If anyone sees the name "Wolflord" in LPC code related to game object handling, please let me know!
Viking started out in the good old days on MudOS, and later moved to DGD, after an extremely long porting process. Both drivers implement the LPC language, but DGD is a lot more minimal in what it provides out of the box, and has a few concepts that MudOS doesn’t, like an easy way to save the state of the running game, and dynamic recompilation, so you theoretically should never have to reboot the MUD.
I still remember making my first character into a wizard at level 20, and playing my first character up to max player level (29). A lot of the old items have been supplanted by newer stuff (Great Hammer of War and Anduril, I will miss you!), but it was still a fun game last I played. I don’t think there are many players online anymore, but I’d love to see the game revived.
i didn't realize that MudOS didn't have runtime compilation. i thought all LPmuds had that. it was the feature that i miss the most from newer programming languages, and it's a reason why i still prefer pike (which is based on LPC) and old languages like smalltalk and lisp which also offer that.
oh, i see. that was good enough for most cases though, but it doesn't help if players stay connected for long and keep objects from updating.
i agree, that's a good feature to have. smalltalk does it, and i think lisp too.
open-steam, a development platform written in pike solved that problem by implementing proxy objects which would point to the actually compiled object which can be replaced by pointing to a new version.
So I have been running a PbP ("Play by Post") Pathfinder game at Paizo.com during the whole lockdown situation. This is basically a D&D-type game played standard forum posts - play episodically (normally, players post once a day and then the GM posts what happens and repeat). I love the approach for the expression it allows. Players and gm can riff off each other's writing, etc.
Still, what I'd be curious about I'd be curious about whether there are systems that allow something like a fusion of the most "manual" approach of PbP and an automatic system like a MUD? For example, allow players to interact with a room but have their interaction stop when they leave and then allow the GM narrate. Or things like that? Anyone know any software/sites like this that exist?
There is a cool sort-of PbP-mud hybrid server called AresMush. You would have to code the Pathfinder rules yourself most likely, though it's possible someone has done so. I think Ares is written in Ruby fwiw.
134 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadWhenever I learn a new programming language, my go-to project is to write a MUD from scratch. I try to make my area loader compatible with the Merc/Diku codebases, so I can start off with a fully realized world. I'm in the middle of writing one in Go. It's pretty dang fun, and there are sooooo many things to make that you really kind of never finish writing.
If anyone reading wants to check a MUD out, just type this into your terminal:
telnet avatar.outland.org 3000
(I have zero relation to Avatar other than being a fan/player.)
It's free, it's fun, and it's easy! The author of this article links to a bunch of ways to find new MUDs, if you enjoyed Avatar, there are tons of different kinds of MUDs, different themes, and so on. Enjoy!
Back on topic, I learned a little while back that Diku's source code appeared online, and while digging up some relevant supporting links, I just learned today that they have created Diku III which uses HTML and websockets: https://dikumud.com/
The journey of that source code into my modern eyes is meaningful to me because at the time I was playing MUDs, I didn't have enough programming chops to understand the C source, but now I can have enjoyment from the nostalgia and from the source
It's funny... These games largely didn't have graphics (you could argue some of the more advanced interfaces like with Simutronics stuff did). Yet I have vivid memories of specifics places, creatures, items, etc from my experiences. A true testament to the power of imagination.
Sadly, both it and I have changed. It's just not the same now for me. I've tried going back, and I've tried to find other things to recapture that feeling, but it's just not happening.
It has profited a lot from a pay-to-be-uber kind of model. You can level up just fine with ordinary gear, but people pay as much as $25000 (in equivalent game currency )for the most expensive items auctioned nowadays.
This is all aside from playing. I somehow convinced many of the right people in middle and high school to play a Tolkien-based MUD with me. It was really great back then, but I don't play any more nor does anyone I know. There are only a handful of MUDs that have the playerbase to make them interesting.
Also, I'm not sure if it's still the best place to browse what MUDs exist, but many can be found on http://www.mudconnect.com/.
My brother still plays sometimes. He has a lot of friends there. Sometimes they have over 30 people on at the same time! Heh. It used to be hundreds.
https://ironrealms.com
My love of MUD/MUSE/MOOws largely around such experiences.
OTOH, I managed to find the price list and seems to be quite heavily pay to win...
Back when I played, you could buy "artefacts" with real money, but they were less "pay to win" and more "pay for convenience". They were definitely far more than mere cosmetic items, but it was more than possible to play without ever buying one.
Though I was always, always jealous when I saw somebody using wings. Those things took you to a kind of cloud teleportation hub where you could immediately jump to a number of places.
What was the code word... "Duanathar"?
The Lasallian Lyre is named after my character, but strangely enough, I never mastered the timing to make the best use of it. (A playable class was later based on some fiction I wrote for the official history, which arguably the most impact I've ever had on a product vision...)
Never thought I'd see Achaea discussed on HN. It was a deep influence on me, though my active time was a lifetime ago. Hi, Sarapis! Figured you'd like to know that Achaea, and of course Avalon before it (you were... Orthwein?) really did have a long-lasting impact. These games have always been deeply participatory: player-run guilds, player-run cities. At least at the time I played, you literally couldn't even get class abilities without joining a group and inheriting its political positions, friends, enemies. And although there were PvE quests, the majority of the game was about conflict between players, at the level of people, guilds, cities. That's a far cry from the theme-park nature of modern multiplayer RPGs like WoW.
Glad you have such fond memories!
You can get by in PvE without anything overly complex, and it's honestly more fun to figure out how to deal with the damage and affliction patterns from individual monsters yourself than relying on an autocure system. (Achaea has strict rules on what goes beyond the line of "botting", too.) But yeah, PvP essentially required some automation to let you focus on tactics instead.
It's the only standard for botting that works for us.
The hundred or so debuffs and the concept of truelock still fascinates me. If a new, (more graphical perhaps) game dared to come even close to that I'd be so happy to give it a spin.
How do I know if I want your newsletter, if I haven't figured out what your product is? Window closed. Sale lost.
It might also hurt your SEO as well
Archmage (magewars.com, probably the first really big browser game) was the first game I remember waiting for my next turn to be available on. Apparently there's a "reincarnation" of it running today. https://wiki.the-reincarnation.org/Archmage
Anyway, I did enjoy playing it, though big multiplayer games weren't quite my thing, it was fun to have a friend to play with. He had lots of online buddies through the MUD. For me, it got me further into coding as I worked on modifying a MUD of my own, but I can't remember the codebase I started with.
[0] https://www.carrionfields.net/
http://discworld.starturtle.net/lpc/
brew install telnet
...and then I jumped into a MUD.
I say a fantastic experience because I played lots of people from around the world, some of whom I eventually visited in their home countries. I also improved as a developer. It was a great thrill one day to meet a friend-of-friend who loved some of the code I'd written.
I say waste of time because I spent endless hours in my early 20s glued to a telnet session. In retrospect I would have been better taking up a pass time that let me meet people in person. I've been better at avoiding addictive games since.
Right now it's very single player.
https://twitter.com/LeapJosh/status/1366083915946094596
-Runeaxe Tuneaxe
The demand was sufficient that it kept crashing the entire national network, and one of my prize memories from back then is the night I was working late in this huge multistorey BT building (Baynard House) in London stuffed with big cabinets filled with computers and modems, and as I was huddled over my little Z80 the double doors burst open and the shift leader stormed in, shouting "There is NO WAY I'm going to put up with your system taking down the entire network". So I looked down my little Z80 box, then looked up at the seried ranks of GEC computers in their 48U cabinets, and did my best to puzzled, in a "Who, little ole me?" kind of way.
Ok, so it was 1200 baud max per user but we did get up to 128 users spread over 2 Z80s, each with 256Kb bankswitched RAM and 2Mb hand-made RAM disks.
The rest of it is a long story but it's still around [0] and I know a few people on here remember it (fondly I hope - though I do still feel guilty about those bills!).
[0] http://games.world.co.uk/shades/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD1
LTNS I remember playing on shades (TG and Prestel) and going to some of the meets with Cuthulu (we both worked for Telecom Gold / Prestel)
I was Mouser on Shades I believe
Just logged and checked, your account is still active on Shades. Quite a few of the old names log in from time to time, maybe we'll have to organise a virtual meet one of these days.
I have OFTEN considered the idea of writing a new MUD with the intention of bringing in a whole new realm of users to the genre but have never really worked out how to make it viable (I cannot see anyone funding a team to build a MUD startup)
I have some ideas though.. I think telnet is too intimidating for new players. The barrier to entry is too high. They need to work on mobile, they need to probably be some kind of browser-based experience with font styling and the lightest touch UI beyond the old '>' prompt.
If anyone's keen on dropping some coin I have 30 years of thinking on the subject and would happily leave my day job ;)
Back in the day we hooked all our muds together so people could communicate across realities.. things were more open back then.
The one place they could never ban was the TMI/MudOS development MUD - I don't even remember what it was called, but looking at what the folks from there are doing today... boy, I should've spent a lot more time actually trying to get to know them instead of bugging the people I played with elsewhere.
When I helped launch a new MUD (name lost to time) I was disappointed at how poor the out-of-the-box support was for syntax like "take bag from chest".
Unfortunately my software engineering skills were non-existent, so I'm sure when I finally retired from MUDding there were still plenty of bugs, but I have vague hopes my code is still floating around out there. If anyone sees the name "Wolflord" in LPC code related to game object handling, please let me know!
- gota, previously NukeBombz
https://www.vikingmud.org/
Viking started out in the good old days on MudOS, and later moved to DGD, after an extremely long porting process. Both drivers implement the LPC language, but DGD is a lot more minimal in what it provides out of the box, and has a few concepts that MudOS doesn’t, like an easy way to save the state of the running game, and dynamic recompilation, so you theoretically should never have to reboot the MUD.
I still remember making my first character into a wizard at level 20, and playing my first character up to max player level (29). A lot of the old items have been supplanted by newer stuff (Great Hammer of War and Anduril, I will miss you!), but it was still a fun game last I played. I don’t think there are many players online anymore, but I’d love to see the game revived.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LPMud
https://mud.fandom.com/wiki/LPMud
https://mud.fandom.com/wiki/LPC
https://mud.fandom.com/wiki/MudOS
https://muds.fandom.com/wiki/Dworkin%27s_Game_Driver
i agree, that's a good feature to have. smalltalk does it, and i think lisp too.
open-steam, a development platform written in pike solved that problem by implementing proxy objects which would point to the actually compiled object which can be replaced by pointing to a new version.
Would be awesome to experience an interactive story like this with your colleagues!
Dragonrealms was awesome, however I didn’t have a CC so I had to restart from scratch every seventh day or something.
Still, what I'd be curious about I'd be curious about whether there are systems that allow something like a fusion of the most "manual" approach of PbP and an automatic system like a MUD? For example, allow players to interact with a room but have their interaction stop when they leave and then allow the GM narrate. Or things like that? Anyone know any software/sites like this that exist?
And PS, I'm not wedded to the complex Pathfinder rule system to any degree really. I mention it primarily for context.