[HN Gopher] Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How t...
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Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play
Author : niDistinct
Score : 103 points
Date : 2021-02-28 06:26 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (medium.com)
| pantulis wrote:
| Anyone here played Ancient Anguish?
| steerpike wrote:
| Yep. Build several popular areas for it and it triggered my
| love of programming
| followben wrote:
| 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.
| nvarsj wrote:
| 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.
| dbish wrote:
| 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.
| MrLeap wrote:
| 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 :)
|
| Right now it's very single player.
|
| https://twitter.com/LeapJosh/status/1366083915946094596
| aurelius12 wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://ironrealms.com
| Twisol wrote:
| 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 ^_^;
| atsushin wrote:
| 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.
| dleslie wrote:
| Are any particularly tuned to playing together in small groups
| or pairs?
|
| My love of MUD/MUSE/MOOws largely around such experiences.
| lrem wrote:
| Wait, so people not only still play, but also actually pay for
| MUDs?
|
| OTOH, I managed to find the price list and seems to be quite
| heavily pay to win...
| Twisol wrote:
| (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.
|
| What was the code word... "Duanathar"?
| atsushin wrote:
| Yup, Duanathar. It was especially fun when the Clouds were
| strategically used during raids and skirmishes, people
| found a lot of creative uses for it.
| iron_ball wrote:
| 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.
| stonesweep wrote:
| This is fun, thanks! Minor bug report, this asset is missing
| (404 - found it broken while creating a character):
| https://www.achaea.com/local/client_data/classes/psion.jpg?v...
| kwk1 wrote:
| 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.
| runevault wrote:
| 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!
| mdaniel wrote:
| 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
| joe_the_user wrote:
| 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?
| georgeoliver wrote:
| 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.
| tectonic wrote:
| Anyone here play BatMUD?
| hazeii wrote:
| 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!).
|
| [0] http://games.world.co.uk/shades/
| OakNinja wrote:
| Thank you for sharing, awesome read!
| drzaiusapelord wrote:
| Pre-90s dial-up MUDs sound fascinating to me. Do you know of
| any others?
| bitexploder wrote:
| MUDs were transformational for my life. I was an often lonely kid
| growing up with ADHD and a love of video games. I got into MUDs
| in 94 when we got our first PC right around my freshmen year of
| high school. I loved AD&D and this was the closest you could get
| on a computer. I became obsessed and learned Linux because they
| had the C compilers and Unix was how you hosted MUDs. I taught
| myself C with "C for dummies" vol 1, and 2, K&R C book, and
| Beej's guides to networking, just released around that time. As
| well as learning every in and out of the CircleMUD code base, a
| Diku mud derivative. I spent a good chunk of my high school life
| building a MUD that got pretty popular (50+ users on the
| weekends). Coding new systems, learning creative writing. This
| led to me getting real jobs in web app dev in 98. The rest is
| history. I learned how to fix gnarly memory leaks with my own
| memory allocator and tools like libefence. Taming memory leaks
| meant my server could stay up longer, etc. I learned about graph
| theory, other algorithms, multi user networking. I never
| considered how hard or easy any of this was. It was just what I
| was obsessed with, so the difficulty had no real bearing on my
| mindset. MUDs gave me so much and for that I am grateful.
| fuckthemachine wrote:
| 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 ;)
| Vaslo wrote:
| 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!
| shostack wrote:
| 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.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| Here's a little plug for my first and only MUD I ever seriously
| played: VikingMUD
|
| 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
| podiki wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://www.carrionfields.net/
| joemazerino wrote:
| By which name do you wish to be mourned?
| OakNinja wrote:
| Any ideas on a mud experience that would work in a co-op after
| work setting?
|
| 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.
| jscheel wrote:
| 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.
| peckrob wrote:
| I've posted this before, but I figure I'll share the story again.
|
| 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.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLVq0IAzh1A
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znNciln7qwY
| forkLding wrote:
| 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
|
| http://discworld.starturtle.net/lpc/
| keithnz wrote:
| I played that in the early 90s, my gf at the time was addicted
| to it and was a admin/creator and worked on the world of the
| gnomes.
| fuckthemachine wrote:
| Who was that? ^_^ I was a fluffy creator around then,
| discworld terminology for a visiting mud creator via the old
| inter-mud system
| fuckthemachine wrote:
| Lawks!
| isoskeles wrote:
| 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/.
| zlynx wrote:
| 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.
| kibwen wrote:
| My MUD of choice was DiscworldMUD
| (http://discworld.starturtle.net/lpc/), based on the works of
| Terry Pratchett and which has been actively developed for nigh on
| 30 years. The setting is wonderfully flavorful and the world is
| huge and lovingly detailed. It's such great fun to get lost in
| one of the giant towns and see what you stumble across.
|
| 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 only in-game map shows your
| immediate local surroundings, so keep this site bookmarked:
| http://dw.daftjunk.com/ ).
| tunesmith wrote:
| 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!
| dmurray wrote:
| Sounds like a great and very creative idea for a game! Shame it
| never saw the light of day.
| sircastor wrote:
| 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.
| karmicthreat wrote:
| I spent probably too much time playing
| https://www.realmsofdespair.com/ in college.
| defanor wrote:
| 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.
| fuckthemachine wrote:
| Wotcher!
| fuckthemachine wrote:
| Does anyone remember the intermud system ?
| https://muds.fandom.com/wiki/InterMUD
|
| Back in the day we hooked all our muds together so people could
| communicate across realities.. things were more open back then.
| georgeoliver wrote:
| For sure! There even is an everything-old-is-new-again
| iteration of that called Grapevine.haus
| molesy wrote:
| 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.
| trevorishere wrote:
| And this is how I find out that macOS no longer includes telnet.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Found out as well.
|
| brew install telnet
|
| ...and then I jumped into a MUD.
| haolez wrote:
| 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.
| georgeoliver wrote:
| 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.
| macintux wrote:
| 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!
| gota wrote:
| Hey those kinds of rad handles are making a comeback. You
| should consider adpting Wolflord again
|
| - gota, previously NukeBombz
| macintux wrote:
| What replaced them?
| Jemaclus wrote:
| 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!
| bradleyjg wrote:
| Wow, that's a blast from the past. I played on that MUD for a
| couple of years in the mid to late 90s. Never got too far, but
| had fun playing.
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