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Games Entertainment

MUDs And The People Who Love Them 125

Posted by Hemos from the selling-my-eq-stuff-actually dept.
Warrior-GS writes "They were the early versions of EverQuest, Ultima Online and Asheron's Call. But how many people remember the beginning of Multi-User Dungeons? GameSpy is tracking the history of MUDs in a three-part series beginning today. The author will also talk to Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle, the founding fathers of the genre."
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MUDs And The People Who Love Them More

MUDs And The People Who Love Them

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  • Of course, you can always just go to The Mud Connector [mudconnector.com] as well.
    --
  • I've been running a MUD for the last 6 years or so. As a tool for communicating with a few dozen friends, I've found nothing online that offers a comparably rich ability to express emotion and body language.

    Humans, sitting in a room together, expect something a little more from each other than monotonous speech: laughter, smiles, a little of what amounts to slapstick comedy. IRC offers "/me", which lets you speak about yourself in the third person. But if it takes longer to type out an emotion than to feel it, people generally won't. Thus in chat rooms, there are a few well known acronyms that express a bit of body language: LOL, ROFL, the ever-present smileys, etc.

    Hanging out in a "room" in the psuedo-reality of Ishar [ishar.com], although still being text based, allows for a much wider range of non-speech interactions. Thus I at least feel "closer" to the friends on the other end of the long piece of wire.

  • Heh, I still have a huge 3-ring binder with printouts of as much of the core code I had access to of the MUD I was a wizard on (EotL), circa 1995 or 1996, somewhere around then. I have no idea why I keep lugging the hefty book around, maybe I think that someday I'll actually have a use for ThingCode and MonsterCode and whatnot in a project of my own :)

    Synthe AKA Nardo
  • OK, so rumor has it that you got involved with Linux in order to help build a better server for Aber to run on. So ... still doing anything with Aber, Alan, or is hacking the Linux kernel keeping you too busy? :-)
    --
  • > Mushes and MUDs are not dead, not by a long shot.

    I don't know about that. Whether from collapsing under its often hostile social atmosphere, building stagnation, lag-ridden server, or ill-thought ballots, LambdaMOO [mud.org] which once had more than 10000 players and 200 connected at once, still keeps roughly 150 connected at once (perhaps 100 active) but the playerbase is down to around 4500 and shrinking. Most other MOOs count themselves lucky to break double-digits in connected_players(). Perhaps if Lambda ran on something better than a museum piece (1 CPU of a sparccenter 1000) it might find new life ... but I doubt it.

    FurryMUCK does continue to amaze me, having on average over 300 people connected with roughly 200 active. It would seem to just be one freak instance though (in more ways than one).

    I have had in mind a project to create the next super-duper-driver-uber-alles, fast, scaleable, flexible, etc ... but for what? There are probably more people chatting right now on IRC than the entire player population of every last MOO, MUSH, MUX, or any of the other "social" VR's put together. The writing on the wall was never clearer to me.

    --
  • Dartmud, ahh, memories. I tested Dartmud and played up till the wipe when they went public. Jason the Rowan, best theif who ever lived. From what I hear, Jason is part of the game now.

    Dartmud is one of the oldest LP muds around. Btw, Dartmud has been "up" for longer than 7 years, when I joined in late 92' testing had been going on for at least 2 years already.

    I started playing it right after I started MUDing. Played Silly Mud (one of the VERY first DiKus, they are responsible for much of the base code and cities in DiKus) and later some of it's deviants.

    I remeber hearing,back then, that the govt of Australia had outlawed MUD'ing because it was using up 75% of their bandwidth. Text using up 75% of the bandwidth, my how times have changed.

    One word of warning for people who want to start playing a MUD, MUDing is more addictive than cocaine and makes IRC look like a caffine habit in comparision. It WILL make you anti-social, it WILL break up your relationships, it WILL lower your grades in school.

  • Yes. Islandia! Tree house.

    That was MUDding. None of this leveling up crap. Who needs levels when you have Lynx, Random, and the whole crew. (Julia the bot ... or was she just on TinyMUD and not on Islandia?)

    Met many good friends on Islandia. Still keep in contact with ... well only one of them, but hey....

    (went by the embarassing name of LongThorn)

    -D
  • Some folks DO have that problem. When Alma College [alma.edu] finally got connected to the Internet in 1990, I was one of the first people to bring in a MUD List and start passing it around by email. Within a year they were having to revoke people's Internet access for poor grades, due to obsessive MUD playing.

    Of course, any one who has been to Alma, MI [lib.mi.us] knows that there's nothing to do there anyhow.
    --

  • IF you've got an addictive personality and can't limit your mudding to more than a few hours here or there, then it CAN do all of those things you say. But your dire warning should have been "it CAN do x", not "it WILL do x."
    --
  • Mudding does not appear to be dying but we ARE seeing too many stock MUDs with nothing original going up on an almost daily basis. This leads to dilution of the player base; there's really only so many people who are going to play at all and the more MUDs there are to choose from, the less players your MUD is going to get.

    I think we're also seeing an evolution of sorts where certain MUD types are just going to keep getting less and less players because they do not offer the features that players want. The MUD codebases that aren't drawing new blood in are going to die.

    As for XML, I know of a number of servers being developed that use XML to store the game world ( locations, mobiles, equipment, and players ). There are probably some already out there in production as well.
    --

  • Right before I quit MUD'ing many years ago, I once stayed up 40 hours straight with a new character. A low 30's character helped me get up to level 8 (out of 50), he went to bed, woke up the next day and I was level 42, and soon there after made it to level 50.

  • MUDs (Score:1)

    by mszeto ( 133525 )
    Does anyone remember a MUD called Darkheart? I used to play it, I IMMed it, and I wouldn't mind finding the code again, just to muck around with it.

    mat - player on Avatar, Shadow of Terror, Darkheart, and Vault of Darkness ( in that order )
  • I don't remember Mordor, but I do remember AEK's Scepter which mophed into Milieu which was around until MTS went down. AFAIK, Scepter predates any MUDs by several years. It was up and running circa '83 at least, if not earlier.

    Milieu went "open source" (as in people got ahold of the source listings) about the time that MTS went down. Jeff Dean (where is he now, anyway?) ported it to a Sage IV micro. His working source was ported to true multiuser on a Vax cluster at the 3M science labs by John Ryan around ~85.

    AEK ported Milieu to XENIX(?) on some kind of pay-per-use local BBS system sometime circa 1985 or 86.

    Someone (AEK?) posted to a similar thread within the past couple of months about it still being run as a MUD off some old 486 someplace.

    Now, if only someone would port Combat or XTALK.
  • http://www.hakarren.mudservice.com On Elysium, players control all aspects of the game. Very interesting.
  • Anyone looking for a good MUD, telnet allanthya.org 4000 Well balanced, plenty of zones/eq/etc.
  • they got a free cool item evey week

    As a one year running premium member (in GemStone)... I wish! =)

    Actually Premium is little different than Basic. We're eligible for homes after 3 months (but still need to fork over the cash for it). We do get some premie only merchants, but they can't sell anything with an enchantment higher than 4x (+20) so its not unfair to Basic subscribers. When there's premie only alters, you can only get one every four months at most. We do have the weekly raffle in which something is given away, which is what you were probably referring to... but so many people show up and a 1 ticket limit means your chances of winning are slim to none.

    The locker space is nice. Another type ahead line is nice. The yearly gift is nice. 10% discount on quest prices is nice. All them extra character slots for playing with is nice... The queue by the way is a seperate queue from the Basic queue. So if there's 3 GMs on duty, they'll take care of the Premium queue only when its got a line, and Gorlash and Bhamma told me they'll at most only put one Host on the Premium queue, even if there's 4 or 5 hosts in game. However, I think this is all the perks and benefits we get. And overall, its not unbalancing (as in skills, equipment, and experience) at all. Just not everyone is willing to shell out the cash for it.

    Platinum is $70 or $80 for a reason... to attract only the most hardcore roleplayers. The people in which GemStone/DragonRealms is a major hobby. The people who go to SimuCon. The people who never slip out of character, who can sit in a bar for a few hours, etc. Platinum wasn't designed with everyone in mind, only a small group. Sure they get all the cool events and stuff, but then again, they're paying $70-80 a month!

    GS3 and DR were only free because AOL was shoving some serious cash and bandwidth at Simu to stay with them. A major reason that Simu moved is that the bandwidth provided (10Mbps) wasn't enough, and that AOL wasn't really paying the most fabulous rate in the world. Did Simu sell out by doing things themselves? I don't think so.

    Things have gotten better for the most part (in GemStone at least). Lots more public events than ever before, stricter policy enforcement to help set some people straight, and lots of new areas and critters. You should consider going back to DragonRealms... you KNOW you loved DR. What's $0.30 a day for basic service, anyways. ;)
    -----
  • 3k was great! I wizzed on that MUD back in the summer of ... was it 92? Ack I can't even remember, but I my wizards name was Gerin. Yep, staying up till 8 or 9 in the morning, skipping all my classes. Made the best internet friends on that MUD that I've ever had. Memories :).
  • There was just too much going on in different little isolated corners. Any history that purports to be definitive is probably wrong.
  • GSIII is great. Which is why I quit -- it was swallowing far too many hours of my time, and I couldn't seem to do it in moderation.
  • I've not had much experience with online text-based multiuser games--my boyfriend was an avid MUD-er for a short time, though. I'd like to know exactly what all these things stand for...MUD? MUCK? MOO? MUSH? I see them all here -- I think I've only had experience with MUD's, so I'd like to know what the differences are between them.

    Thanks.
  • You don't believe them when they said the re-wrote the code after (not sure which version, so insert version here)?

  • I've been thinking of dragging out the Pascal source to Scepter and transliterate it to C again, for historical interest. I sold the original C (QNX) translation to Interplay International in 1985. Being somewhat naive, per the agreement I destroyed all copies (really!).

    After Denny Flanders got busted by the IRS, everything went to the creditors. I suspect the creditors probably reformatted the drives and the diskettes.

    I have the original line printed source to Scepter's sequel, Screenplay, which went online about 3 months before Interplay went bankrupt. The source code was written in an object language (Lo), which generated K&R C, similar to C++'s old cfront translator. It had vestigal polymorphism and primitive kind of inheritance (single global superclass). Lo interpreted Hi, a scripting language. The Hi scripts manipulated the classes declared in Lo: Players, Objects, Containers (rooms), Automatons (actors), Events, and Scripts.

    Bob Alberti Jr. wrote two scenarios in Hi, a wild west town, and a weird noir/comedy Douglas Adams-esque town. During the latter scenario I remember getting a slip of paper from a beautiful redhead at the town bar. I looked and saw that it had her phone number on it. After she left I went to the phone booth and dialed the number. I was promptly dropped through the floor into the chair of a psycho dentist. He grinned and said "I see that Tina sent you," and proceeded to give me the full dental treatment a la Little Shop of Horrors.

    The cool thing about Screenplay is that the DM could jump into a script and improvise the automatons without the player knowing it. For example, the dentist would be drilling the player per the script. Then the player says "I like pain!". The script doesn't recognize the keywords, but the DM could puppet the dentist to make him express his surprise, and switch to tickling with feathers. Basically the DM could improvise and interact with the scripts.

    The main problem with Screenplay was that it was too slow. We upgraded from the 4Mhz PC XT to a 16Mhz Motorola 68000 but it was not enough. The interpreter bogged down terribly.

    Someday I'm going to resurrect Screenplay. After 16 years I have yet to see another MUD like it.

    -AEK
    Alan E Klietz
    alank@algintech.com

  • For those of you that want to play one of the first MUDs (created by Richard Bartle), it is available on the Internet at http://www.british-legends.com/ [british-legends.com] for free play.

    (Telnet address is british-legends.com port 27750)

  • Oh man.. I spent days and days on 3k, as a necro mostly.. with this name.. I got my nick from Apoc 4 (another mud which I fled to play 3k) and it has stuck with my until now..

    //Phizzy
  • I got hooked on MUDs in '91. They were why I got on the net in the first place. I still have friends on many MUDs, friends that are no less real because we've never met face to face.

    I'd spend 72 hours straight MUDding. Once, I had two dollars in my pocket, hadda walk a mile to get more money, hadn't eaten in two days, and for a split second I thought "I have 48,000 coins...".

    I never regret the time I spent becoming a 60th level Beastmaster :)

  • Doh...

    Call it a hangover...

    Starwars A New Threat can be found at starwars.pennmush.org 9999 not starwas...

    Runestar
  • Thanks alot, I almost volunteered as betatester for the game. And I don't really want to know what he would do with my mailadres.

    I kind of wondered how he wanted to achieve so much things in such a short time while his screenshots were still so crappy.

    Thanks again, greets

  • Re:MUD's (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    >first post!
    You cannot do that here.

    >go slashdot
    You wind the NetScape hand-crank, slowly the bloated monstrosity creaks into life. Mere hours pass before the repulsive livery of Slashdot appears in front of your sunken eye sockets.

    >first post!
    You cannot do that here.

    >read story
    There are many stories here. They seem to centre on anime and emulation, with Linux advocacy thrown in almost as a careless afterthought. The poor quality writing and editing reminds you of primary school. Waves of nostalgia buffet over you, as fond memories of shitting in the sand-pit return.
    After some deliberation you choose the topmost story: a blatent flamebait fest, attempting to proclaim (against all the facts) that Linux can be used on the desktop by the mythical average user.

    >first post!
    Alas, you are too late to accurately claim first post. Do you wish to post anyway?

    >y
    You submit a comment demanding first post. You are well aware that the first post was claimed long ago, but you add a self-congratulatory sentence - expressing your dominance over the rest of the world - regardless.
    Life is good.

    MUDs are nothing like this.
  • Make a Java based Mud Client that uses a GUI and translates the text commands into graphic icons on the user's screen. The Mud can stay in text mode (Cirle Mud, etc), but the user sees buttons and stuff. They can drag and drop weapons to player and monster names in the room and attack them. It should get the fun back into older muds and make them easier to play.
  • Anybody else remeber Islandia? That was one of my first experiences online. To think that you could connect to a virtual world and 'talk' with other people - live. It was way kewl. It was when Islandia went offline that I quit MUDding. Nothing against MUDs - I always wanted to write my own - they just took up too much of my time.

    Hmmm...I really wonder what my username was for Islandia - wish I could recall. Pehaps I could look through old email and find it? I remember the house I had built - it had a Star Trek-like peoplemover, a swimming pool in the basement, and a Van Halen shrine on the second floor (complete with signed guitars and a few picks). :)

    Those were the days.

  • For those of you who have tried MUDs and find them to be just repetitive hack and slash with little character interaction or development save levelling up (kinda like D2, IOW... =) ), check out some of their other brethren. I've recently become readdicted to one of the strictly role-play variations, TinyMUX. If you're interested, www.mudconnect.com is probably the best place to search for something that you might be interested in. They cover all genres, so there's bound to be someting that at least sounds interesting.

    If you like RP, hard sci-fi, and anthromorphized animals, give Startide a shot (and not just because I run it): jrwill.com:5125. Drop me a note if you do. =)

  • It's Primo Shit, Man... get you fucked up! (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 01, 2001 @10:24AM (#538279)
    I played MUDs. This is my story.

    It started out easily enough, my dad brought me a clipping from a local newspaper, it talked about these "Online Role Playing Games" called MUDs. I thought "What the hell..." This was the insidious beginning of a horrible tale of abuse and neglect.

    It didn't take much... just that first little glimpse of the Telnet screen, then I was hooked. That's how they getcha, first, it's just a login... then it's just one more level... pretty soon, I was needing four or five levels just to cop the same buzz. I was no longer satisfied with a simple hack and slash MUD, now I needed immersive automated Questing, and Spec_Proc MOBs that would deliver customer EQ designed in the OLC engine. There was no limit to my insane desire for more!

    I would stay up for days on end, just playing. Nothing mattered anymore. The whole world went away when I logged on, all my problems seemed to fade. My family started getting worried... asking why they never saw me any more... I was so ashamed. of my addiction. I just put some Visine® in my blearied, blood-shot eyes, and escaped to my terminal... to take another hit.

    I, fortunately, am a survivor. I eventually became on of the pushers. I made "IMMortal" status. After a while, I stopped using, just pushin'. I'd tell people at school, even people I hardly knew... anything to get a few more users. The first one was always free...

    Soon, I grew weary of this, and I started abusing my power, and the other Czars started to get angry. So what if I loaded sense_life MOB into a !PRIVATE room, and then switched into that MOB so as to vicariously partake in a not-so-private conversation? Is that so wrong?

    I was sitebanned. *gasp*gasp*. I didn't know what to do with my life, I needed a fix, I had no where to turn! I didn't want to learn a new engine! Fuck MUSHs! I need a buzz!

    Heeeeeeyyy... these computer things are pretty fuckin' cool... not bad... yeah, this is fun... I can make money doing these web pages... kickass...

    And with that, I had found it. My true calling. MUD-free, and on the straight-and-narrow (snicker, right), I was still a reclusive hermit rarely retreating from the cool glow of my CRT, but none the less... I was MUD-free.

    This is my tale of survival. If anyone else has anything to add, please, do. :)

    --The Kid (Formerly, Baldor) The Citadel [thecitadel.net]
  • That all sounds great, and it's a hell of an achievement, but reading about it reminds me of how I felt one day about five years ago... I'd been getting into MUSHing (Multi User Shared Hallucination - like a MUD but without the D&D style stuff), particularly on UKMush and Fantasia, and got quite into creating objects, rooms, etc. and generally "psychocoding"... But one day I realised that nothing I was creating was real, or at least that it had no reality outside of the game - and very limted "value" within the game. Once this hit me my compulsion to play the game just dried up. I felt quite sad about it. :-)

    Maybe it wouldn't be such an issue in a *really* big, rich environment like Magnus311X describes - maybe with an exp system and guilds that meant something I might have felt that my efforts had value. But in the end I jsut looked back on the hours I'd spent and said "waste".

    Having said that, what *was* worthwhile was the communication aspect... It was quite exciting to talk in realtime to some random guy in Singapore. And hell, it was my first Internet experience, so in that respect I guess it was great for me! :-)

    OK, I'm rambling now so I'll stop. :-)

    Oh, and Happy New Millenium, everybody!

    -Andy
  • Gosh - I used to play on the old MUD games at Essex (the very first). They were great fun but a little anti-social; they were only available from 02:00-06:00GMT and you got kicked off by the operators at 6am :-)

    This was pre the Internet per se - within the UK you needed to get access to a PAD (Packet Assembler/Disassembler) and know the number for the relevant machine (no DNS - and I had no access to systems which were NRS-aware although the orignal NRS machine lived under my desk for a while in my first job :-) and call it directly (a la telnet). It's terribly sad, but 15 years later I can still remember the number (0000496000001)!

    Happy times *grin*!
  • Good lord... i must have spent thousands of hours on that... the only thing that made me quit was when they super-nerfed mages :( No more Xp for me...

    -Elendale (and yes, i go by this name there to :P)

  • Here is arguably the best MUD site on the internet. It has listings for thouands of fantastic games. http://www.mudconnector.com
    Happy New Year!
  • Ah, if you found the Essex MUD anti-social, you might want to read the Confessions of an Arch-Wizard [arch-wizard.com] for some more insight into that... ;-)
    --
  • I used to play Essex MUD, the first one,
    between 2 and er... 5? 7? in the morning.

    I never made it to Wizard, but quite a lot
    of my friends did. Nouakchott was one of the
    mausoleum answers when I played.

    Sigh. firestone, broadsword, the swamp,
    the coracle. The appallingly clever way
    to get through the dwarf citadel by
    blinding and unblinding yourself and
    exploiting a bug in the "back" command.

    Those were the days. I've never played any
    of the later ones, for some reason.

    One of my favourite weapons in the game
    was the cricket bat in the attic.

  • muds and people with disabilities (Score:4)

    by MattW ( 97290 ) <matt@ender.com> on Monday January 01, 2001 @11:37AM (#538286) Homepage
    Another interesting point is that because MUDs use 'antiquated' technology, there's more out there to help people with disabilities. Years ago, I spent a lot of time coding to create the features that produced Avendar [ender.com], a MUD descended from the ROM (Rivers of Mud) code. A few weeks back, there was a post on our forum written by a player who had been in a party, out doing what parties do, and had a member moving slowly. He said something to the effect of, "I was getting impatient, asking him to cast X for the 3rd time. Finally, he said, 'Sorry, please be patient. I have to wait for the computer to read me everything and catch up, I'm blind.'" And so, the blind player was lagged because the leader had led them running through so many rooms. Apparently, the guy has voice software reading 400 words per minute. We were all duly impressed.

    Our own mud (which I really no longer have the time or inclination to spend working on, but still host) is home to hundreds of regular players, and is just one of hundreds more like that. I will say, too, that a well designed mud can not only be an incredible RPG (because you can still imagine from text a lot better than you can see from art on Everquest), but a much better balanced game, as well.
  • Going strong since 1991. We're one of the oldest. Remember Midgaard? Log in to see it alive and well.

    nilgiri.mythril.com 8888

  • MUDs, especially the small, more intimate games, are great places to foster limited and more intimate community than could -ever- be found in the behemoth that is IRC. For the most part, there isn't the rash of script kiddies and 3l3t3 hacx0rz, no one doing warez, and lots of opportunities for doing artful RP. I ran my vampire game [erisian.net] in the IRC for 18 months and the moment we moved to MUSH, everything improved. For what it is and what it does, it is a fine medium.

    There are also lots of improvements happening in the realm of the servers themselves, too. There is one group actively working to clear up some of the more ancient and venerable bugs. Some few of them, especially MUX [svdltd.com] have seen such profound changes in their performance and application(ie, used as intranet chat servers), that it's quite gratifying. The world turns anew for a lot of things and even if MUDs in general remain small communities, just about any community can be a good thing for the people in it.

  • On a *vaguely* related note - what about the more popular MOOS? like LambdaMOO or BayMOO? Are they still around, and as popular as (I thought) they were a few years back?
  • Not even close. GemStone was orginally owned by another group (IA) back in 1987 and around 1993 or 1994 I think Simutronics bought it out.
  • I think this is what seperates Simutronics' games from the rest of the MU*s. Hypothetical situation time to really discern the difference...

    I go back to town (there's only three major and two villages) with a dented oak chest I found on a stone troll. I head into the gate tower East because I'm aware that's where the rogues hang out. They gather there to pick the boxes of adventurers, not only for the experience, but for the customary monetary tip in exchange for their service. A rogue shouts she is available and I gladly hand over my box.

    Unlike most games, I don't need to worry of thieves, despite being in a room with a group of experienced rogues. Two reasons. If the 'locksmith' decided to run away with my chest, the constable could warrant an arrest, incarcerate her, and levy a fine. The second, is if anyone did try to steal from me, they would break a well known taboo among rogues, and would promptly be dragged outside the town gates and have their hands severed. Most healers would be wary of helping the teef out, aware of her act, letting her suffer and pay for her actions.

    Of course, this doesn't happen. My box is picked, and I always tip well. She gets experience and a handful of coins, and I get some coins, a few gems, and maybe a useful trinket or bauble to trade, use or sell.

    I pull a twisted wand out of the box. It contains the spell 'Mana Distruption'. A crush attack often used by sorcerers. I'm aware that young sorcerers lack the mana to hunt with the spell effectively, so I inquire in the Ether as to anyone who would like to purchase it. I find a young sorcerer and we agree on a price of 1000 silvers.

    We meet one west of the town bank, and exchange. I have no worries of this young sorcerer running off for two reasons. First the exchange command simultaneously swaps the agreed price and the item for us, preventing a scam. Second... I'm much older than he is and with a somewhat rare, exceptionally well balanced waraxe. I'm a rogue myself, and he's aware I could stalk him, undetected, and remove his hand (or arm, my call, I'm a well trained ambusher) to liberate the wand from him.

    It's a nice system, and Simutronics' strict policy against unwarranted and unwanted PvP works, and creating skills and an environment which not only encourages, but nearly requires a productive and cooperative society of roleplayers.

    Okay, I've rambled, so I'll end it here.
    -----
  • Last time I was on them - circa 1995, it was failing miserably. Everyone on there was too busy trying to flirt and kiss up to anyone with a female name.

    Or if you didn't follow what they though should be an exact protocol of hero-worship of some of the bigger players, it was as bad as camping in QuakeII. Online games crack me up in the attitudes that people develop in the games and how serious and real they think it is.

    BTW - when I was last on the mud it was because a very VERY close female friend from high school played on there, and I would make cut-ups about here that she though was funny, but all the people that worshipped her (she was a WEE bit flirtatous) were going one step shy of death threats with their responses to me. hilarious!
  • ive heard from many a people that Everquest was based off of CircleMud code, which the mud i play is based of, Ruins MUD [ruinsmud.com]....i was just wondering if anyone else had heard of this

  • I used to play AEK's Scepter here in Austin on a local system in the mid-80's...

    IIRC, the server was running QNX, and the software package that included scepter was "Gambit" or something along those lines.

    It's been years...

    -LjM

  • Re:What about the MOOs? (Score:3)

    by Kingfox ( 149377 ) on Monday January 01, 2001 @03:29PM (#538296) Homepage Journal
    Some of the popular MOOs are still around. But one sub-segment of MOOs (a sub-segment of a sub-segment, I know), the RPG MOOs, is still very much active.

    GhostWheel [nexus.net] and CyberSphere [vv.com] are both around and expanding. The former is a pseudo-fantasy post-apocalyptic game, with many MUDesque themes of hunting and rising in power. The latter is a cyberpunk post-apocalyptic game, which focuses pretty strongly on role-playing, while still leaving room for gritty futuristic urban violence. Both incredible games.
  • Every MUD player remembers at lesat one old school MUD, but the big question is, does anyone remember where they put the big-ass manual with the instructions on how to play it?
  • I've been mudding for a few years now and they can be really fun. If anyone wants
    to find a good mud or try one for the first time, another great site dedicated to mud
    listings and such is http://www.mudconnect.com [mudconnect.com] - The Mudconnector :)
    It's one of the best listings to my knowledge and it also has mudding resources and
    mud reviews.
  • Yes, I remember Lynx, and Random & Moira... Islandia required a rewrite of the original TinyMUD code because it was the first to pass 65536 objects, as I recall. Not to mention one of the first implementations of an '@recycle' command to uncreate objects and return used DBrefs to the available pool.

    Heck, I remember my first day on there, ending up in the middle of a food fight in the town square with, among several others, Mutant (aka Martin Terman, Mutant for Hire for thost people who read Usenet).

    I remember the days when the 'page' command couldn't have messages attached, so people would rename their rooms and send 'ErmaFelna has summoned you from: Want to meet by the post office for a tour?'

    I remember my first real online role-playing experience, a journey into the pouches of DreamWeaver to recover something I no longer remember, but which turned into an epic adventure, run almost entirely off-the-cuff by the people involved.

    I think the death of Islandia really started when it went down for a few days unexpectedly in mid-1990. The shock started some of the people looking for other places to spend time, such as Chaos (the first Random&Moira MUCK)... multi-mudding was more difficult in those days, since there weren't relatively sophisticated clients like TinyFugue yet. The original user base started filtering outward. And, eventually, Islandia sank beneath the waves.

    To those of us who remember those days, Islandia will always have a special place in our hearts.

    -- Bryan Feir

  • Google Has Tons of MUDs .. (Score:4)

    by citizenc ( 60589 ) <caryNO@SPAMglidedesign.ca> on Monday January 01, 2001 @09:30AM (#538300) Journal
    .. available in a listing, which is here [google.com]. (For the goatse.cx weary, http://directory.google.com/Top/Games/Internet/MUD s/Role_Playing_MUDs/)

    ------------
    CitizenC
  • GemStone III and DragonRealms are good games (well, actually, I don't know much about Dragonrealms, I only played it for a few days before deciding to stick with GS3)... they have remarkable depth. They are hack-and-slash-and-loot games, undeniably, but there is also plenty of room and oppurtunity for roleplaying if that's your thing. The game creates a terrific atmosphere... nearly everything is very well written, and the way things "happen" is wonderfully immersive and natural most of the time. Usually, its other players, not stupid game mechanics that hurt the immersiveness of that game. It's very easy to suspend disbelief. And the games are constantly expanding. GemStone III is very well balanced, as you say, although the system really starts to break around level 100+ (and actually sooner) when, unfortunately, combat is a pretty much hit-or-miss affair. Often you either die in an eyeblink due to a poor roll, bad timing, or just plain bad luck... or you win a fight in one move, by virtue of either good timing, a good roll, or good luck. And forming a group to hunt in GS3 is usually not particularly fruitful. Most classes actually do best when they are alone. I think its great that all the classes can solo, but it be better if it were more enticing to group up.

    Those are minor points though. GS3 is simply magic for a new player, and the flaws are minor enough that most veteren players don't seem very bothered by them.

    That said, I quit playing GS3... a lot of my other friends stopped playing, and a large part of the game is the social dynamic. I could've made new friends, but I wanted to try another online game (EverQuest.)

    EverQuest... heh. For a while, it was great fun, but now it is a complete bore... the only thing keeping me in that game are the friendships I've formed there. Verant, despite the fact that it is running a game that is about 1000 times more popular than anything Simutronics has created, seems to be only a tenth as professional and capable as Simutronics. EverQuest is littered with examples of poor grammer and spelling. It feels like I'm playing some college student's MUD, but with nice graphics on top, and a huge playerbase. EQ is balanced so poorly it's absurd. Certain classes and races suffer huge experience penalties that slow their advancement (by as much as 40% or more in some cases) but get nothing to compensate for this. The class that is generally considered to be one of the "weakest" in the game (rangers) are one of the classes that suffer this penalty. Ridiculous. And on top of that, EQ is still a rather buggy game. And Verant is fond of implementing sloppy "workarounds" as opposed to true bug fixes. For example, there was a bug on the PvP servers that would make it so a caster, who is disguised by an illusion, could cast a stun spell on another player, and the target player might end up permanently stunned. A fairly serious problem, but one that most people were unaware of, and it wasn't a bug that was being abused. Verant's solution was to implement a workaround: they made it so that whenever you cast a spell on another player, any illusion that you are under the effects of goes away. Talk about using a chainsaw rather than a scapel. This change had VERY serious game balance ramifications, and prompted several enchanters (whose powers include a wide range of illusionary spells) to quit their characters. These weren't people who were abusing the illusion-stun-bug, they were people who were using their illusions to hide their identity among other player characters... which they now cannot do, because if they cast on another player, their identify is revealed. A bug fix should not effect collateral game balance issues in such a major way... that is such a simple design principle, but one that Verant apparently can't grasp, or decided to ignore. This is just one example of Verant's clumbsy approach to "fixing" issues--it is by no means the only example one could give. Still, EQ is an undeniably awesome achievement... with such a big project, I guess problems are inevitable.

    On the other hand, Simutronics has impressed me a lot. I don't think any company has ever done a better job creating and maintaing a multiplayer online game. Most of their games don't have a huge number of players or subscribers (well... their numbers are respectable, but they aren't 'massive' like EQ's) but I still think that the boys at Simu know a lot more about game design principle than a lot of the people making and running most online games today.

    Simutronics apparently has been developing a game called Hero's Journey, what is to be a graphical MMORPG... if it ever becomes a reality. Their developers were posting left and right on discussion forums throughout the Internet a while back, and things were looking promising, but there there was a drought... now we seem to be hearing from Simu a bit more, which is a great sign, but I'm skeptical about if HJ will become a reality. IGN has information about it at The Hero's Journey Vault [ign.com].

  • Gah, MUDs kill me - nothing like em for exam avoidance and saying goodbye to any sort of learning. They scare me and so do you
  • What about things like KARNATH? Or was that only single-player? I don't remember... :-( Clay's CCOMBAT (MU,CCOMBAT,USMK031) was written in COMPASS, which I suspect would make a port a bit harder. He still has a tape, though, I think. I have no idea what the classic COMBAT I used to play on MTS around 1980 (MU,COMBAT,USMK001) was written in. MUMNF? Personally, I enjoyed MTC and MMT more than XTALK, but it really depended on the people who were on at the time. *GILDOR*/UN=H7LT263
    --
    -Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Win95, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
  • You are sitting alone in a darkened room. The only light is the warm glow of your CRT. You hear whe low hum of your CPU fan, but otherwise the room is devoid of sensory input. Your obese stomach is littered with Pringles crumbs and forms a roll of fat that rests on your computer desk. You don't currently have a girlfriend. Your skin is sallow and pasty from sitting by the computer for months on end. What will you do?

  • Warning!!! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Link does NOT go to goatse site.
    I repeat: that link does NOT go to goatse site!!!
  • We used to play Colossal Cave on a PR1ME. There'd be six or seven guys in the terminal room, all exchanging maps and info with each other as they played through the game.

    Who needs character interaction when you can have the real thing.
  • I remember long hours playing Perilous realms from when it was small to the expanded 300 players type of thing. Nearly failed my degree because of that game. And its still going (pr.com). This was going back 8 or so years, what fun.
  • The following bits of insight were copied by me from "Commandant's Ultimate Warrior Guide [wehnimer.com]" (an excellent warrior/general gameplay guide for warriors in the game GemStone III [gemstone.net]... which was in turn copied from a post by GameMaster Gorlash on the game's official message board on in December '98... though the content of the list was originally created by Ralph Koster, the lead designer of Ultima Online, with insight from other friends who have worked on online games, such as Meridian59's Mike Sellers. I think it's all very interesting, and should be required reading for anybody creating a MUD, or online game of any type or scale.

    I am copying this word for word, but am fooling with formatting a little so it's a little more presentable. It's pretty long, so brace yourself. Without further delay, here we have it:

    Any general law about virtual worlds should be read as a challenge rather than as a guideline. You'll learn more from attacking it than from accepting it.

    Persistence means it never goes away. Once you open your online world, expect to keep your team on it indefinitely. Some of these games will never close. And closing one prematurely may result in losing the faith of your customers, damaging the prospects for other games in the same genre.

    Macroing, botting, and automation: No matter what you do, someone is going to automate the process of playing your world.

    Game systems: No matter what you do, players will decode every formula, statistic, and algorithm in your world via experimentation.

    It is always more rewarding to kill other players than to kill whatever the game sets up as a target. A given player of level x can slay multiple creatures of level y. Therefore, killing a player of level x yields ny reward in purely in-game reward terms. Players will therefore always be more rewarding in game terms than monsters of comparable difficulty. However, there is also the fact that players will be more challenging and exciting to fight than monsters no matter what you do.

    Never trust the client: Never put anything on the client. The client is in the hands of the enemy. Never ever forget this.

    "Do it Everywhere" law: If you do it one place, you have to do it everywhere. Players like clever things and will search them out. Once they find a clever thing they will search for other similar or related clever things that seem to be implied by what they found and will get pissed off if they don't find them.

    "Do it Everywhere" Corollary: The more detailed you make the world, the more players will want to break away from the classical molds.

    Stamp Collecting Dilemma: Lots of people might like stamp collecting in your virtual world. But those who do will never play with those who like other features. Should you have stamp collecting in your world?"
    We know that there are a wide range of features that people find enjoyable in online worlds. We also know that some of these features are in conflict with one another. Given the above, we don't yet know if it is possible to have a successful world that incorporates all the features, or whether the design must choose to exclude some of them in order to keep the players happy.

    The quality of roleplaying is inversely proportional to the number of people playing. The higher the fee, the better the role-players. (And of course, the smaller the playerbase.)

    Enforcing roleplaying: A role-play-mandated world is essentially going to have to be a fascist state. Whether or not this accords with your goals in making such a world is a decision you yourself will have to make.

    Storytelling versus simulation: If you write a static story (or indeed include any static element) in your game, everyone in the world will know how it ends in a matter of days. Mathematically, it is not possible for a design team to create stories fast enough to supply everyone playing. This is the traditional approach to this sort of game nonetheless. You can try a sim-style game which doesn't supply stories but instead supplies freedom to make them. This is a lot harder and arguably has never been done successfully.

    Players have higher expectations of the virtual world: The expectations are higher than of similar actions in the real world. For example: players will expect all labor to result in profit; they will expect life to be fair; they will expect to be protected from aggression before the fact, and not just to seek redress after the fact; they will expect problems to be resolved quickly; they will expect that their integrity will be assumed to be beyond reproach; in other words, they will expect too much, and you will not be able to supply it all. The trick is to manage the expectations.

    Online game economies are hard: A faucet/drain economy is one where you spawn new stuff, let it pool in the "sink" that is the game, and then have a concomitant drain. Players will hate having this drain, but if you do not enforce ongoing expenditures, you will have Monty Haul syndrome, infinite accumulation of wealth, overall rise in the "standard of living" and capabilities of the average player, and thus unbalance in the game design and poor game longevity.

    Ownership is key: You have to give players a sense of ownership in the game. This is what will make them stay--it is a "barrier to departure." Social bonds are not enough, because good social bonds extend outside the game. Instead, it is context. If they can build their own buildings, build a character, own possessions, hold down a job, feel a sense of responsibility to something that cannot be removed from the game--then you have ownership. If your game is narrow, it will fail. Your game design must be expansive. Even the coolest game mechanic becomes tiresome after a time. You have to supply alternate ways of playing, or alternate ways of experiencing the world. Otherwise, the players will go to another world where they can have new experiences. This means new additions, or better yet, completely different subgames embedded in the actual game.

    As a virtual world's "realism" increases, the pool of possible character actions increase. The opportunities for exploitation and subversion are directly proportional to the pool size of possible character actions.
    A bored player is a potential and willing subversive.

    Players will eventually find the shortest path to the cheese.

    Featuritis: No matter how many new features you have or add, the players will always want more. Pleasing your Players: Despite your best intentions, any change will be looked upon as a bad change to a large percentage of your players. Even those who forgot they asked for it to begin with.

    Loophole Law: If something can be abused, it will be.

    Murphy's Law: Servers only crash and don't restart when you go out of town.

    Attention is the currency of the future. The basic medium of multiplayer games is communication.

    Virtual social bonds evolve from the fictional towards real social bonds. If you have good community ties, they will be out-of-character ties, not in-character ties. In other words, friendships will migrate right out of your world into email, real-life gatherings, etc.

    "The more persistence a game tries to have; the longer it is set up to last; the greater number (and broader variety) of people it tries to attract; and in general the more immersive a game/world it set out to be--then the more breadth and depth of human experience it needs to support to be successful for more than say, 12-24 months. If you try to create a deeply immersive, broadly appealing, long-lasting world that does not adequately provide for human tendencies such as violence, acquisition, justice, family, community, exploration, etc (and I would contend we are nowhere close to doing this), you will see two results: first, individuals in the population will begin to display a wide range of fairly predictable socially pathological behaviors (including general malaise, complaining, excessive bullying or killing, harassment, territoriality, inappropriate aggression, and open rebellion against those who run the game); and second, people will eventually vote with their feet--but only after having passionately cast 'a pox on both your houses.' In essence, if you set people up for an experience they deeply crave (and mostly cannot find in real life) and then don't deliver, they will become like spurned lovers-some become sullen and aggressive or neurotic, and eventually almost all leave." Violence is inevitable: You're going to have violence done to people no matter what the facilities for it in the game are. It may be combat system, stealing, blocking entrances, trapping monsters, stealing kills to get experience, pestering, harassment, verbal violence, or just rudeness.

    Is it a game? It's a SERVICE. Not a game. It's a WORLD. Not a game. It's a COMMUNITY. Not a game. Anyone who says, "it's just a game" is missing the point.

    Identity: You will NEVER have a solid unique identity for your problematic players. They essentially have complete anonymity because of the Internet. Even addresses, credit cards, and so on can be faked--and will be.

    Jeff Kesselman's Theorem: An online universe is all about psychology. After all, there IS no physicality. It's all psych and group dynamics. Psychological disinhibition: People act like jerks more easily online, because anonymity is intoxicating. It is easier to objectify other people and therefore to treat them badly. The only way to combat this is to get them to empathize more with other players.

    Mass market facts: Disturbing for those used to smaller environments, but administrative problems increase EXPONENTIALLY instead of linearly, as your playerbase digs deeper into the mass market. Traditional approaches tend to start to fail. Your playerbase probably isn't ready or willing to police itself.

    Anonymity and in-game staff: The in-game staff member faces a bizarre problem. He is exercising power that the ordinary virtual citizen cannot. And he is looked to in many ways to provide a certain atmosphere and level of civility in the environment. Yet the fact remains that no matter how scrupulously honest he is, no matter how just he shows himself to be, no matter how committed to the welfare of the virtual space he may prove himself, people will hate his guts. They will mistrust him precisely because he has power, and they can never know him. There will be false accusations galore, many insinuations of nefarious motives, and former friends will turn against him. It may be that the old saying about power and absolute power is just too ingrained in the psyche of most people; whatever the reasons, there has never been an online game whose admins could say with a straight face that all their players really trusted them (and by the way, it gets worse once you take money!).

    Community size: Ideal community size is no larger than 250. Past that, you really get subcommunities.

    Law of Player/Admin Relations: The amount of whining players do is positively proportional to how much you pamper them. Many players whine if they see any kind of bonus in it for them. It will simply be another way for them to achieve their goals. As an admin you hold the key to many of the goals that they have concerning the virtual environment you control. If you do not pamper the players and let them know that whining will not help them, the whining will subside. In every aggregation of people online, there is an irreducible proportion of jerks.

    Rewarding players: It is not possible to run a scenario or award player actions without other players crying favoritism.

    Rewards: The longer your game runs, the less often you get kudos for your efforts.

    Utopias: Don't strive for perfection, strive for expressive fertility. You can't create utopia, and if you did nobody would want to live there. That's it.

  • Theres a new MMORPG coming out and it's looking VERY promising. It's called Dawn. Last I heard they were still looking for beta testers for their spring beta. www.glitchless.com [glitchless.com]. I'm hoping this isn't going to turn into vapourware because from the looks of what they're trying to implement, they've got a real job in front of them; it's going to be incredible if they pull it off.

    "// this is the most hacked, evil, bastardized thing I've ever seen. kjb"

  • I think the masses beleive that they prefer graphics over anything else. Most people I know only mention graphics when they talk about new games, for playability has always been the most important thing. BTW thank god for MUDs, if it were not fore tsunami.thebigwave.net I would have amjored in Chemistry intsead of CS :)

  • First Perl Program (Score:3)

    by cluge ( 114877 ) on Monday January 01, 2001 @09:27AM (#538311) Homepage
    I was introduced to PERL when a friend of mine decided to write his own MUD, in PERL. That was almost 10 years ago. I still play it. They are addicting, perhaps we need a Senate comittee to look into the dangers of MUD addiction?

    Still fun, glad to see somone's writing a history

  • Some big ones are still around... (Score:4)

    by Magus311X ( 5823 ) on Monday January 01, 2001 @09:40AM (#538312)
    Some of the largest MUDs are still around. Simutronic's GemStone III [gemstone.net] and DragonRealms [dragonrealms.net] are still among the most popular online games. Both are text based, but have a world no other game can compare with.

    Thousands of people active in the game world at any given time. A realistic working economy. A tight-knit community on thousands which frowns upon PvP combat. Houses, organizations and guilds which help, not war with each other. Hundreds of spells. Balanced items. A logical EXP system which focuses on skills, not level, which provides unrivaled game balance. Dozens and dozens of special events and quests monthly. A rich history and storyline which involves all who play. A courteous and helpful staff. Dozens of unique and complex skills. A marvelous combat system. And well... lots more!

    Both of these games are FAR different from your typical MUD, and are definitely worth a try.
    -----
  • Gawd. I remember when some idiot friend of mine introduced me to Genesis and to a couple of other LP MUDS. My GPA went from 3.9, honor roll, etc. to failing about 1 year of classes. Whenever I see some guys come into my lab to play, I tell em "say no to crack" .... At least I learned mucho Unix in that year.

    MUST LEVEL, MUST GET DARK BASTARD SWORD!

    ---no sig, no ip, no clue---

  • Text based Internet MUD's (Score:4)

    by DaneelGiskard ( 222145 ) on Monday January 01, 2001 @09:45AM (#538314) Homepage
    ...these are still the best, if you got the necessary fantasy.
    I remember playing "3 Kingdoms" during a whole summer...anyone else?

    And to make this a bit more informative, here is one of the largest MUD Link collections:
    www.mudconnector.com [mudconnector.com]

    cheers
    mike
  • I know some of what I am going to say will seem a bit extreme but it is all true. I started my IT career as a debugger on a LAB at the University of West Florida when I was a student their. Mud was with a sub set of the students the CRACK of computer games. I have seen students spend 48 hours-striate playing MUD. one student became a very good hacker only so he could relay over to MUD sights that was block off on the Router. My Favorite was when he email SUN telling them he was a professor at UWF experimenting on Multi User Networks It worked and he got a SUN Account that he used to relay. I seen several students Get striate F's in class because they where never in class. One student became legion. He was MUDing when His girl friend comes over and picks a fight with him. One of the things she yelled out was "you rather do this shit than to FUCK ME? Its over!" Well he ended up being the guy who gave up food, money, shelter even SEX for MUD. He claimed that cyber sex or MUD sex was better any way! He seemed happy to be rid of her. Mud showed me how powerful having a different world to escape to can be and how hard it can drive people. The hacker guy finally got a job with the navy. Running a LAB and Yes it was a MUD sight. Every thing I said here is true MUD IS the Crack of computer games.

  • In defense of MUDs (Score:5)

    by Shoeboy ( 16224 ) on Monday January 01, 2001 @09:47AM (#538316) Homepage
    I'm sick of hearing how MUDs are simply a way for maladjusted losers to escape reality. MUDs are much more than that. MUDs are theraputic.
    You see, the average MUD (or everquest, ultima online etc...) user would be considered a deranged loser by most standards and it's not fair to expect them to "get a life".
    The average online game user needs to learn basic social interaction skills before he/she can be expected to confidently address another human being. That's where these online worlds come in - they're like training wheels for the outside world. By questing for the +4 mantool of loving with Ulgac the barbarian, little Larry/Laura Loser is excersising his/her severely underdeveloped social skills in a manner that will eventually help them deal with not just barbarians and ogres, but also investment bankers and vice presidents of sales and marketing.
    So three cheers for MUDs. Virtual interaction is still interaction - and that's more than these people would get otherwise.

    --Shoeboy
  • Anyone remember MUME? Is it still around?
  • I like the SneakEmail thing....
  • AMP actually had Colossal cave as part of the MUD
    itself. Its a reasonably well suited map to get the game theory and competition/co-operation right
  • Oh he's out there somewhere, as are the people who did things like Shades. I've not seen any of the VaxMUD hackers around for a long time though. I guess being VMS fortran people they now dwell in a different universe
  • I've been playing/running a mud for nearly ten years now (Shameless plug: The Dragon's Den [http]), and I remember back in the days of LPMud 2.4.5 being impressed with the fact that anyone with some server space and an Internet connection could download the source, make some tweaks, and have a functional multiplayer game. The proliferation of MUD servers (LPMud, MudOS, DGD, Diku and its descendants, etc.) is a testimony to the early open nature of the MUD world.

    Those of who have burned countless hours looking for that one stupid artifact necessary to complete the next quest realize that the addictiveness of a game isn't always related to its triangle fill rate and texture mapping capabilities.

  • MUD-Dev (Score:3)

    by Claw ( 7749 ) on Monday January 01, 2001 @10:34AM (#538322) Homepage

    If you're interested in the design, development, and implementation of MUDs, and that enclude Everquest, WorldForge, UltimaOnline, TheRealm, Skotos, BatMUD, LambdaMOO, etc, have a look into the MUD-Dev mailing list. It is a high signal list (typically 10 posts a day) which features many of the architects, designers, implementors, and inspirations of the above games and many others

    MUD-Dev has been active since the late 1980s, but unfortunately the archives only extend back to 1996 due to the earlier traffic being lost:


    --
  • Question. Is GemStone related to Gemstone Warrior (anyone remember that game?)?

  • MUDs are for people with fantasy left in their mind.
    A MUD is a game that YOU live, that you make it for what it is and that happens mostly in your head. MUDs are more interactive, they build a community that is, IMHO, stronger than the ones build these days through EverQuest and alike. I play MUDs now for more than 8 years and, yes, I still like them.
    And all Internet games have one thing in common: if you play them carefully you can even make some friends there. You meet people that you, most likeley, would never meet in the real life. People that you would pass on the streets, in the bar or club because of the way they look. The MUDs lower this boundary a lot (even more than the EverQuest(s) where you "see" the other one, too) giving you a chance to learn more about the other people before you meet them (if ever) on a MUD party.
    Dangerous? I agree, MUDs are dangerous in a way that you might loose a sense of reality if you play somebody in the game that is definitely not you. If you create an alter ego that acts, looks, ... in a way that you are not. And if you finally believe that this is you. I have seen this happen some times but not too often.
    Anyway, I think everybody should try and play a MUD and see if (s)he likes it. A nice list of (english and german) MUDs can be found on www.mud.de [www.mud.de]. Have fun!

  • Dawn = Vaporware -- no doubt about it (Score:5)

    by Chester K ( 145560 ) on Monday January 01, 2001 @12:02PM (#538325) Homepage
    Theres a new MMORPG coming out and it's looking VERY promising. It's called Dawn.

    I hate to shatter hopes, but it's been determined that Dawn is vaporware and will never exist.

    They claim their team of one programmer and five artists can out-do the likes of UO, EQ, and AC, with an engine written in six months. The lead programmer doesn't know any of the industry terms, has never answered any questions about what technologies he's using to develop the project, one of their main screenshots has been shown to have been stolen from an online art gallery, a major scene from their demo movie was shown to simply be a rendering of an example scene that comes with 3D Studio Max. The main programmer's much-touted "military experience" has been discovered to only be a brief stint in ROTC in High School. Their corporate website was registered by yourbigdaddy@hotmail.com, the address is in a residental area. When a phone number was dug up and called, the programmer's mother answered the phone and said she didn't know anything about any game, and that Jeff (the programmer) was in school.

    Those, combined with the fact that every time he opens his mouth and talks about the game, he pours out descriptions of new, minute features. The whole thing reeks of a situation where some kid, fresh out of high school, came up with a grand idea, actually thought he could do it, and spouted his mouth off and made promises about it.

    Don't hold your breath over it.
  • Unfortunately both GS3 and DR are pay-to-play. I used to play them ALL THE TIME, till it wasn't free. I personally have kinda wanned(sp?) on MUDding, mostly because a lot of MUDs are a little too heavy on the player killing and lacking on the actual enjoyable rp. Then there's a few MUDs where the implementors like to cheat (Anyone play Waterdeep? Cyric and Talos both cheat, that's the reason why Deneir(sp?) left and there's no waterdeep2). Unfortunately I also went over the a few exetremely elitest MUXes, I found my character sitting in bars for exetremely long periods of time being told to go away. So basically GS3 and DR are about the best M*'s you're going to find in existance, but you have to have cash.

    It sucks not having a job =P

  • I am a wizard on Furrymuck. [furry.org]

    Are MU*s dead? I don't think so.

    Graphics are beautiful but limited. They may allow you to choose your character's general body type, hair color, clothing, and the like, but until computers are fast enough to render any number cf objects doing anything in real time, text will remain superior for some things.

    Furrymuck -- like all social MU*s -- requires more creativity from its participants than any graphical system now existing. (I challenge those who disagree with me to show me a graphical system with player characters as diverse as a fox-centaur hybrid, a blue monocerous [not a unicorn], and a completely created race [Khromat]. Those examples were just chosen from some other wizards.)

    Actions are far more broad in a text- based Mu* than in a graphical one. Your character may have twenty pre-programmed ways to swing his sword in something graphical, but I've never seen a graphical MU* where you can laugh while you tumble down a hill into a bank of flowers, or gently stir a placid lake while dragonflies skitter across the surface.

    In short, for most graphical MU*s, you are exploring what others have created. In a text-based one... you are the creator.

  • Re:Some big ones are still around... (Score:3)

    by Kingfox ( 149377 ) on Monday January 01, 2001 @03:40PM (#538328) Homepage Journal
    Actually, it was that reason that kept me on M*'s instead of giving them up. My excuse was: I was going to waste my time playing games instead of studying. Whether it be Dungeon Keeper, Total A., Starcraft, etc. If I'm wasting my time on a M*, at least the effort isn't gone. When I beat the level on Dungeon Keeper, the cool nifty dungeon I dug is gone. When I vanquish my foes on the RTS game, the army is gone. With a M*, my creation stays.

    Yeah, I know I could have played a MMORPG like UO, but that wouldn't have let me create things and code like the MOO I got involved with did. That way I could keep on telling myself that I was keeping my coding skills fresh by wasting my time on a MOO instead of playing another game.

    Ultimately, it was the fact that others could enjoy my creative efforts on CyberSphere [vv.com], while the dungeon in Dungeon Keeper was only seen by me and an opponent or two. I've built many things, and coded many cool objects, which hundreds of people have enjoyed playing with. That wouldn't have been possible with any other homework avoider that I know of.
  • It's interesting to note that Lycos's search engine was a re-application of "Fuzzy's" work on a robot that traveled mud rooms and constructed maps and graphs of the information in the mud database. "Julia" was the mother of the web search engine. And "Fuzzy" is now quite well off. --Kynn
  • Oooh Thanks for the vote of confidence AC...

    Glad to see someone doesn't like me. :)

  • Genesis BBS in birmingham, Alabama?

  • Memories (Score:1)

    by Synn ( 6288 )
    Man, now this brings back some memories. Hoppermud, Ancient Anguish, Age of Insanity, Midevia... used to have a Battletech nut friend pretty much live at my old apartment to play the Battletech Muses and Mushes. The sad thing is that those old muds were much less of a timewaster than the new graphical ones like Everquest.

  • Everquest = MUD Engine (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What nobody seems to realize is that Evercrack is just some graphics slapped over the top of a MUD engine. The combat messages even contain many of the same spelling and grammatical errors present in DIKU and Circle MUD strings.
  • Depends on which code you're talking about. I'm sure there's maybe one or two people in Minnesota that still have copies of the original Milieu listings (as in either lineprinter or laser output). This is of course Pascal for the CDC Cyber series, and if I remember the source code that got out wasn't all that was needed, as Jeff Dean put considerable work into making it go as did John Ryan when he ported it to the Vax.

    Now, John Ryan's dead (suicide a few years back), so anything he might have had (like MS-DOS floppies with the source on them) are gone. Jeff Dean is from what I can tell working at Google, I haven't seen him since about '87, but I kind of doubt he has either the original source listings or the Sage versions anymore, either. He was like 16 or so when he ported them from the Cyber listings to the Sage, and this was in maybe '84. 16 years is a long time..

    According to some MUD history, Interplay bought the system that AEK commercialized, they went out of business and the rights to the code went with the creditors. But that's another Slashdot article about Copyright expiration..

    Your best bet is to post over in mn.general and see what you can turn up. There's still a few people from the old days who might have this stuff lying around or know who does.
  • Coding for that long is just silly. The longer your session, the poorer the quality. The next day you look through all the new nifty ideas you implemented, and surprise, surprise, there's an even better way to implement it.

    Of course you can spend the time more wisely, designing and stuff, but who wants to do that on a free basis? ;-) I guess I learned my lesson and tired, now I'm not going to code "seriously" on my free time until I got the perfect language to express my ideas.

    - Steeltoe
  • I invite everyone to check out Iconoclast, which just relaunched on 01/01/01. In its 5 year history, it's been named MUD of the Month at MudConnector and has been consistently ranked the number 1 science-fiction themed RP MUD on Google, Yahoo, Dmoz, and other search engines. It's not your typical fantasy-themed hack-n-slash MUD, but rather incorporates Role-Playing Game rules and a detailed cyberpunk background into a clever blend.
    Iconoclast Website [iconoclast.org]
    _______________________________
  • Sweetness. Yeah, Simutronics [play.net] rocks. I still play DragonRealms & a little HX from time to time.

    As a matter of full disclosure, I was formerly a GM on HX. Nevertheless, I was a player before and after I worked for Simu, and I loved and continue to love the games. A longtime MUDder, I found that Simu's games had the best from MUSHes and MUDs without the worst.

    But the reason I played and continue to play, is that the roleplay is terrific. Graphic-based RPGs can't compete, and both player and GM run events are immersive. There's a war going on now, you ought to log in and check it out.

    ---

  • Muds--Dying, or not? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I brought this issue ("MUDs are going the way of the Macintosh--we're a niche play venue with some super-dedicated players, but we're not mainstream.") up in the mud I used to run: Dartmud [dartmud.com] (Website here [dartmud.com]). Dartmud has never been the most popular MUD, or even really high up there in the rankings, but I've been involved with it for seven years now, during which time it's been online all but about three months, AFAIK.

    Reactions from the mud players were somewhat opposed. Perhaps it's just denial, perhaps it's reality, but they didn't want to accept that MUDs are/were/will be dying.

    Now, no one can say that text based MUDs are really the latest and greatest--they're not. But despite the technological handicap MUDs have, they still retain a good sized, dedicated following.

    MUDs really are part of the Open Source revolution. Not that they're all open source, but they belong to the revolution because of the computing model involved. Have you ever tried to coordinate a cohesive world, coded entirely by volunteers, many of whom are self-taught, and none of whom are "normal" adults? Not to knock my coders, but everytime someone graduated, got married, had kids, and settled down, they'd retire from coding. The all-volunteer workforce was the greatest and oddest thing about running a mud.

    What will be the next collaboratively coded gaming world? MUDs, in my prediction, won't die until there's a new way for people to create their own game worlds with little barrier to entry. As long as the coders are sustaining and improving muds, they will survive. Maybe "the next thing" will be XML-based. Maybe it'll be something that neither I nor any of the other old MUD warhorses would ever predict.

  • Having been on mucks, including Furrymuck, for some time, I just enjoy the creativity of things. I've tried some of the graphical systems to bide the time. They don't do it for me. IRC is ok for good ole chatting; but I do like the feeps of a muck. Where else can you order a 30" Pizza with roast rabbit and rat toppings and eat it in three bites. ;)

    Oh and congrats to the FM wizzes and Revar, its nice to have a system that can have over 500 players and minimal lag.

    Give me a telnet terminal and a keyboard to steer it by and my mind can go anywhere.

  • I remember some guy, called himself Anarchy, did something called AberMud. Wonder where he is now? :)

    Pax,

    White Rabbit +++ Divide by Cucumber Error ++

  • http://camelot.cyburbia.net.au:80/~martin/cgi-bin/ mud_tree.cgi [cyburbia.net.au]

    a little out of date, but displays a lot of the relationships between early text-based MUDs

  • When I started my studies in 1993 I met a lot
    of nice and intelligent people (some of whom I formed studygroups with)

    ... problem was that they got hooked up on MUDS while I was lucky enough to escape the plague ;^)

    MUDS didn't catch me (lack of imagination?), but for those of my friends it did catch, I ended up
    seeing them again years later! Ofcourse they were all supergods of somekinds (having played litteraly 1000s of hours).

    The sad part is that some of my friends actually saw their game being erased because the MUD Masters found that there were to many gods on their mud. 5 years of playing flushed down the toilet in a sec. Tough luck!
  • Help me out here, what were the MUDs on the 400-port MTS in 1979? MORDOR, SCEPTER? It's been a while...and I remember less of those on Plato.
  • Dawn is almost certainly vapourware. If you follow the decent MMORPG sites (e.g. Lum's [lumthemad.net]) you'll have seen them take quite a pasting from most neutral observers and even some of their own fansites.
  • My favorite of all time is Arctic [arctic.org]. A close second is AnotherMUD [anothermud.org], which lacks the quality and consistency of Arctic but makes up for it in pure fun.

    And, of course, I must take this opportunity to pitch my own creation: Blood Dusk [dusk.org]. It's offline for major upgrades right now, but check out the pages to get a feel for it...
  • They are all still around. Sure they don't have the giga followings of the big graphical games. But for the most part I find the players to be a little more intelligent. I started my mudding career back in College, on Dragon Realms, then I migrated to the first World Of Darkness MUSH called The Masquerade. I still have an account on FurryMuck telnet://furry.org 8888, I think... Yep just logged on there.

    Now I'm mostly into the Role Playing style of MUSHing. I play on a super hero based mush called Marvel X-treme: telnet://minerva.erisian.net 2008. I'm also the caretaker of another fantasy based game called Star Wars a New Threat: telnet://starwas.pennmush.org 9999. Both of these games are great for the serious minded Roleplayer, not people who are drawn to hack and slashing. There's a new site out there dedicated to all things text based mu* ing. It can be found at Electric Soup [electricsoup.net] this is the site of a friend of mine and a great place to talk about MU*ing. Some may say that its a dead art, but as long as people can read and people can type, I think these games will go on strong. No matter how customizable you can make your Avatar on the graphical games, they can never come as close to the power of the written word. Mushes and MUDs are not dead, not by a long shot. Drop by sometime.

    Regards,

    Frank/Runestar/Zeus@Starwars A New Threat/Pluto@Marvel Xtreme.
  • Geez, I remember when Martin came out with that on rec.games.mud.admin and MUD-Dev.

    AeMUD seems to have vanished, MUD++ is off the map... and those of us who were there at the begining, well...

    If you want a look at the state-of-the-art in muddom, read the FAQs on the MUD-Dev site at www.kanga.nu. There are a few good men (and women) still pressing the bleeding edge. For those of us who have gone off in pursuit of other things (like a living wage), there are still dreams of starting our own great enterprise in the online games industry. Someday.

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