It was marvelous, and I have my many magical multiplayer moments with MUD which I wasn’t able to experience with MMORPGs or other modern multiplayer games. They are a lot of fun too, but MUD was something else.
I got banned from Aardwolf in early 2000’s because my friend and I couldn’t prove that we were separate individuals connecting from the same modem. They had asked us to count simultaneously in different orders and we had failed the test. We went back to Counter-Strike.
I also had some scumbag moments. Namely, I helped someone else on the MUD code on his other MUD, and I saw that he never installed libcrypt or whatever, so I could view players' passwords in plaintext. Since I new him from the main MUD we played, there were a bunch of people I knew playing in both, at least to check out this guy's project. So I'd use the same IP trick to log in as them and kill their friends, as them. Fun stuff.
The mods teleported my chars into a dungeon and virtually tortured them while trying to get me to admit one person was behind the lot.
I hope a few people try it out and get hooked because of your post.
A few years went by and suddenly playing MUD / MOOs was free. I honestly miss those days, text-based has a vibe that no graphical game can ever replicate.
There was a small regular community which got wiped out when WorldPlay started charging for it. The studio got more free accounts and gave them to regular players so that the game didn't just evaporate immediately, which meant everyone suddenly had a minor name change. After that, the game evaporated.
Aardwolf was fun, though I remember my big gripe was that it had a bunch of weird little themed zones like the Star Trek and Wizard of Oz ones that felt a little hokey to have in there. These days it wins solely by virtue of being one of the few that's still populated and free.
When I tried to go back to the Simultronics ones (Gemstone IV and Dragon Realms), not only was it a ghost town, which made random interactions almost stressful because you feel like two people walking past each other in a ghost town, but they have double, triple, and quadrupled down on squeezing their whales for every cent. A lot of people playing that game are paying $50-100 a month or more, and even normal players have to cough up more than the base $15 a month subscription if they want more than 1 character (!!!). Looks like their website has been stripped of all its cool character too. Shame.
These games in their heyday were truly a one of a kind experience. All of the weird online socializing you see people getting on platforms like Discord, but all wrapped up around a fun RPG game that felt so much more flexible and imaginative than other online games at the time.
https://discord.gg/H8Xr3UF - is a discord server people migrated to.
LLMs could really make this genre incredible. Too bad they probably don't have the funding to do something with it.
The important thing is to relate to other humans and to be sure of what kind of human you're interacting with: the creators of the game or other players.
The staleness that actually "shipping once"[0] gives is precisely the space where human player creativity grows and thrives in.
---- [0] I understand you can get the similar results and better base games if you patch things occasionally, but constant patches[1] hides the jank and repetitiveness with novelty.
[1] And dynamically creating "content" with LLMs is like a constant stream of patches.
A new MUD needs a way to build several thousand rooms, mobs, items, etc. LLMs can help with that process, though I wouldn’t trust them alone with things like balance.
Similarly, existing MUDs adding new areas need hundreds of rooms, mobs, items, etc. In my experience MUDs tend to stagnate when there’s no new content for long time players.
There were far more genres of MUDs than just the Diku-style ("EverQuest-like", to use as analogy the graphic MMO that took a lot from the Diku-style of MUD) that needed to be "endless" content farms of mobs and items and new areas full of more mobs and items.
But also many of the fan favorite Diku-style MUDs were procedurally generated and no one was actually building all those thousands of rooms/mobs/items by hand even then. In theory you could use an LLM as a part of procedural generation process, but that's not the kind of content I would have wanted from a good MUD at the time I was heaviest playing MUDs. (But then I also didn't play many Diku-style/Diku-inspired MUDs, either. I was more on the Socializer side of things at the time.)
If you want an LLM-created text adventure, by all means, go and enjoy that yourself. I want no part of it.
Here's a (dramatized) YouTube video of a few epic battles:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-Ax1MZlDoE
And here's a stream of us fighting one of the bigger bosses in the game (a huge spider in Mirkwood):
warning, this ranking will put the horny muds up top: https://mudstats.com/Browse
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my MUD history goes: in '98 i got into realms of despair, played for years. another mud phase is awarded to trenton for his dbzfe/ff1 muds, both having tilesets if you preferred the pueblo mud client. dbzfe was unique in its real time combat, dodging left a right punch, or parrying it high, or ducking. all timing-based, high adrenaline moments for me
but, the past ~7 years or so, i just log into discworld. i made a very ugly site for it, not mobile friendly. https://badteeth.neocities.org/ not even eyeball friendly
seems i like throwing up pages for _things_. i briefly played a finnish mud: https://icesus.neocities.org/
MUDs are truly wonderful, and I hope they have a resurgence in some form soon.
There was some random phoenix which used to spawn somewhere. You couldn't teleport to it, but you could teleport near it, and I somehow scripted up a seek and destroy phoenix button. Can't recall why, it dropped something useful but not that useful, so mostly it was just the fun of watching the rooms zoom by (textually) and the joy of seeing a code creation work, insignificant as it was.
Thanks, Lasher, for keeping it alive all these years. I still remember Aardwolf fondly. And I still love regex.
> Can't recall why, it dropped something useful but not that useful
The flaming sun gem got a new use pretty recently, sometime in 2020 +/- 2 years.
https://github.com/agentultra/bakamud
And I often stream working on it at https://twitch.tv/agentultra
MUDs are great! Achea is another great one.
Happy gaming folks.
Perhaps they are useful to you. If you need dependency bounds relaxed or revised to work on modern GHCs, let me know and I'll take a look.
I am very much the target person for this but also am oddly sad that this isn't like ... a MOO? Or something!
I ran into a fair amount of deadlock situations during development of different features, and in retrospect I think I would have benefited a lot from the architectural/paradigm shift to an ECS or an actor model like https://github.com/anthdm/hollywood
As for the wins, Go always makes it very easy dealing with concurrency primitives, I really loved using channels, and pretty much everything I needed was in the standard library.
warning to those just trying them out now though : a lot of MUDs have gone the unfortunate route of having premium shops and other MMO pitfalls.
I don't think Aardwolf does -- not positive. I think Achaea and some of the other big ones do though.
I recommend Discworld. https://discworld.starturtle.net/lpc/
Achaea's had a premium shop for a long, long time, yes. It seems they've recently added ways for players to accumulate "credits" (the premium currency) just by playing the game normally -- it's called the "renown" system. (And there have always been other programs that involve volunteering behind the scenes -- the most obvious and in-the-open one is being an official newbie guide.)
I haven't felt any strong desire to put money into Achaea, personally. There are a lot of nice-to-haves, and yes, a good number of premium artefacts that give real advantages in gameplay; but the selling point for me has always been the RP-focused world and community, and mechanically speaking you don't need artefacts for PvE. Probably the most common premium items I've seen are non-decaying vials (which are, IIRC, extremely cheap and very accessible via accumulated renown) and the Atavian wings that let you travel to a lot of different locations very quickly.
I did make a small cash purchase once, to ensure that my character would never get deleted from inactivity, but these days it seems a sufficient amount of total game time is enough to avoid that fate.
I'd definitely recommend Achaea if you're interested in a heavily character-driven world with a community that's passionate about roleplay. The cash shop is by no means a necessity (unless you're getting very deep into PvP, where my expertise runs out, so it could go either way). The volunteer staff (the "Garden of the Gods", as it were) are super active with both large and small RP events, so there's a lot of both official and "unofficial" goings-on in the world. It's really fantastic.
(If anybody here remembers Soludra, hi, that was me!)
it was quite a bit of fun, and the 3rd or 4th MUD I worked on.
I’d love to find it again and reread it.
I thought it was called Legends but that hasn’t turned up the same thing.
Could that be it? I’ll dig it up if so..
My first MUD was Phoenix. At some point they did a big update that forced all players to restart from level 1, and subsequently lost their player base and died. I'm sure I learned something from that debacle.
Nonetheless I encourage people to keep the genre alive. MUDs probably peaked in the 1990s.
these days it's more in the 40-70 people range.
Just a month ago, I remembered one MUD I've been trying out since 2003. And found that it is still online, and my password still works. Very weird feeling to log in to something 22 years later. It was pretty advanced at the time, with 256 color support, IPv6, advanced encoding support, etc. https://cryosphere.org/
EDIT: Thanks, I see the Web Client link now (derp).
I earned my first money in-world by writing poetry. At first I hand-wrote it and sold it on the street to other players (probably because they had compassion on a poor first-level wizard who didn't know anything about the game). Later on I had a book of my poems printed and sold in the local bookshops, and went on to write for one of the player-run newspapers. Good fun :-)
[1] ~50 lvls on my paladin char.
Was this an Aardwolf thing, or am I thinking of something else?
I remember Fufa though.
I have been (extremely slowly) migrating the Diku codebase to Swift, I hope to complete that and ship it this way someday (I've been too scared to ship these changes, though they work locally just fine). Maybe when I retire!
10 minutes sounds excessive though. Was the prompt not informing you that the name xyz can not be used and you'd have to pick another one? It also depends on the MUD of course - how many names did you try?
I never had a problem picking a proper name for one of my characters, but indeed I hated it when MUDs would want to make me wait for name-approval manually. Most MUDs allowed instant-creation and resume gameplay on the spot though. Weird that the name-choice barrier took you 10 minutes. What was the MUD?
So, as far as I could tell, the game was utterly pointless. The developer replied to me apologetically on Twitter but I never went back to give it another shot.
There was a "hacking" minigame, and it was mandatory to solve it as part of the introductory tutorial levels. I think the original console version used left+right thumbsticks, and on PC that meant a half-keyboard half-mouse setup. There were some serious sensitivity/dead-zone issues, but that wasn't the main blocker.
IIRC the problem was that if you had remapped any keys in the options (as I had before starting) the new choices didn't apply during the minigame... except they still influenced the on-screen instructions! So I was stuck constantly failing this minigame because it was waiting for me to press some arbitrary (stock) key to progress, while telling me I needed to press a different (remapped) key that kept having no effect.
Anywho, I think I realized it some other week/month after wiping/reinstalling in frustration. Thereafter I prioritized tools/upgrades that let me skip the badly ported minigame.