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
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"?
My love of MUD/MUSE/MOOws largely around such experiences.
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.
For instance, I'd love rooms that could be populated with sounds, images, environmental effects, day/night cycles, and text effects. This would be purely ornamental and could be done in a way to support backward compatibility with text-only views, as I'd want to keep this fully accessible to the blind.
I'd also love better tooling for designers and writers to easily make quests, objects, and NPCs. Ideally a library of templates and then the writer/designer can fill in the details. Think no-code or low code tools like Hypercard/Airtable/etc that empower artists, writers, and designers, not just engineers.
Finally I'd love to see interfaces that support mobile/touch devices, not just keyboard. Short quests in narrative games like MUDs are a great match for mobile devices, but this requires breaking out of the CLI/terminal mindset that originally bore these games. Of course chat can still be keyboard based, but typing in commands on a mobile device is a dead-end.
If there's serious interest in this I'd be happy to offer some further design guidance
In MUD the text interface gives impression that anything is possible. Even if you are using same 10 verbs for 99% of interaction, there's still illusion of so many actions and verbs to be discovered. Any idea how to capture this magic on mobile interface?
I'd love to collaborate on something if you're interested
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!).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Check out this map of what its biggest city, Ankh-Morpork, looks like: http://dw.daftjunk.com/Ankh-Morpork.png (external maps are a great aid for new players, the in-game map only shows your immediate local surroundings, so keep this site bookmarked: http://dw.daftjunk.com/ ).
I had at least one character in every guild and each time waking up fresh in the mended drum was like being born again.
Doing "The Run" as an assassin was just the right amount of stress and excitement and when your Wyrm sword finally stops being limp as a warrior.
Having player-character witch friends you could call to fly in on their brooms and drop off healing potions for you was old-school-cool.
I've been a gamer all my life, but nothing will, or has ever compared to the experience of playing the Discworld MUD. It's been 15+ years since I played so I don't know if it's still there, or what it's like now, but I'll never go back.
I obviously found the game very enjoyable and memorable. If I had more free time, I'd love to pick it up again someday.
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
Right now it's very single player.
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.
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!
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.
Once the graphical MMORPG came out and folks started to have broadband and their own computers MUD/MUX usage dropped a ton. The MUD/MUX games were much better setup to play from your shell account on your university lab systems at the time. Even today I'm bummed a MMORPG BattleTech never came out that rivaled the 3065 MUX experience.
That said, NLP could widen the already broad possibilities of interactions with NPCs.
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.
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
brew install telnet
...and then I jumped into a MUD.
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
Solace MUD (Dragonlance-based MUD), first a player, back in school times, and then a core developer, in uni/grad. Maintaining a messy 100k-lines C codebase without proper skills for it was a challenge on its own and taught me quite a lot. Good times...
(still have the codebase lying around somewhere and the folks on the forums are still asking to revive it from time to time...)
If anyone is interested in a modern / updated LamdaMOO server check out ToastStunt: https://github.com/lisdude/toaststunt
For whoever played MUD long enough (say a couple of years), what do you think modern MMORPG is missing from MUD and is implementable? By saying modern MMORPG I'm refering to any MMORPG starting from Ultima Online.
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 ;)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jackson_Games
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOO
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/19961226202638/http://www.io.com...
The early talkers were similar to MUDs with most of the complex game machinery stripped away, leaving just the communication level commands – hence the name "talker".
https://h2g2.com/edited_entry/A1010106
Early Talkers included Cheeseplant’s House, Elsewhere, Surfers (ewtoo), Foothills, Tower, Resort. World, etc.
Some are still online, here: http://list.ewtoo.org/
I just tried one — login worked, last logged in April 2003. That means that site has been online ~30 years.
In the late nineties, I distinctly remember internet cafes and the rise of Everquest which was inspired by diku mud. You had a bunch of young people playing console games, some mtg players, some pc players, etc.
Good times, it makes me sad for kids these days where mobile games are mostly gacha p2w slot machines.
The thing that always ends up turning me off from them though is the roleplaying aspect. I know for some people that is the main draw, but I've never had any interest in it. Does anyone know of any active MUDs that don't have any roleplay requirement?
Dimensions MUD thought me to code and build my own toys.
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.
Had lots of fun running my own modified DikuMUD for a while. It’s a great outlet for creative writing.
If anyone would like to get in touch, please join Gitter.im/fluffos
I was a big player of MUDs back in the 90s. I probably spent way too many hours staring at green text (when I should have been studying), but I wouldn't trade those hours for anything. Some of my best computing memories of that era are from playing various MUDs, and even 20+ years later I still keep up with some of the friends I met in the games. Some were even at my wedding!
Many of the MUDs I played on are sadly long gone, but a few are still around. I still connect every so often and chat with folks, maybe do a little light RP. Some of those same friends I've been playing with, on and off, for since the early to mid 90s. Even though we're scattered all over the world, it feels like we grew up together. I suppose, we kinda did.
The connected player base is just a fraction of what it once was. Which always struck me as odd, seeing as how there are massively more people using the Internet now than there were in the 90s. Even accounting for cultural changes and technology moving on, it always struck me as there should be enough new people interested in the old ways to keep the population level, but alas that doesn't seem to be the case.
I'll go walking around the old worlds, remembering the epic battles involving dozens of players and hundreds of NPCs. These days, most spaces are almost completely abandoned. If you've ever seen the music video for Sting's song Fields of Gold [0], it captures the mood of walking around the old rooms perfectly. It seems like just yesterday we were all having a grand time RPing, but everyone's gone now.
Towards the end of 2005, one of the MUDs I had played on quite a bit from the mid 90s on decided it was time to call it a game. I had been with the game through multiple server moves over the years, but the player base just wasn't there anymore.
So on the last night, a handful of us gathered one last time. I thought it was going to be a bit like a funeral, but it ended up being a whole lot of fun. We spent hours that night reminiscing about old plots, talking about old characters, remembering all the good times we had spent together, and swapping contact information. Some of us had been playing together for years; it almost felt like we were saying goodbye to a dear friend in the best way we knew how.
Most of us were there until the final minutes. We all raised our [virtual] glasses in a toast. Then, the lights went out, the server shut down and the game was no more. In retrospect, it reminded me of the final minutes of Babylon 5 [1].
I stopped playing a lot in the late 90s when I left for college. I would still connect occasionally, but I just didn't have the time to devote to it like I did when I was a teenager. In the intervening years, Warcraft, Second Life and other MMORPGs sucked most of the people I played with away, and I could just never get into either. They're kind of overload for me, and, frankly, just not very interesting. For some reason, my brain just works best with the simple text and freeform world that MUDs provided.
Games like these are by definition social constructs. They take on a life of their own. And like all things, the end will eventually come. But rather than mourn its passing, I prefer to remember all the good times and treasure all the friendships that I made (many of whom I still keep up with to this day). The game may be gone, but the memories will always be with us.
Walking around the old worlds is sad, true. Nostalgic. But also some happiness. I'm glad I got to be part of that era, and glad for the friendships I made.
