Comment by Varelion
6 days ago
A little irrelevant, but I need to vent about something MUD adjacent.
I really wish MUDs were still a thing. The text-based roleplaying communities were largely swallowed by Discord, where as before they existed scattered over proboards, jcink, and a few others.
Discord, being the imperfect text platform, limits the text and leaves most interaction limited by awkward formatting. To boot, even when a better ecosystem is invented, players refuse to give it a shot even if directly invited, because they got comfortable with Discord's terribleness.
It's so frustrating, and I don't know how to voice it, or even what can be done.
MUDs never disappeared. People stopped finding them engaging enough to use. Blaming Discord reverses the causality. MUDs lost engagement long before disco was created. People congregate on disco because it offers a more compelling social interface, even if it lacks the depth of a persistent game world. The opportunity I'd draw from this isn’t to convince people to return to older and less engaging interfaces. It’s to build persistent roleplaying systems around the interaction modes that have proven to be more engaging already. Potentially combine voice, speech recognition, text, tts, and synthesized characters with a proper world simulation underneath. If roleplaying communities already gather in disco, then deliver the experience where they already are. The interface was always irrelevant to what made MUDs fun anyway. Imagination and connecting with other people was always the thing.
Is your autocomplete passing you disco instead of Discord and you're just going with it? Or are you implying that before the creation of disco music people had grown tired of MUDs?
Haha, ty for this. That's just a personal habit. I tend to call Discord disco for short amongst my friends.
I specifically outlined non-MUD role playing environments because I know MUDs lost popularity long before Discord. I am outlining that any form of tech, besides Discord, is sidelines -- MUDs and a hopeful resurgence as well.
I agree with you. You've also got more / easier competition. IIRC, MUDs peaked in the mid-late 90s. MMOs were really the death knell, then the explosion of other types of games, mobile games, then to your point things like Discord.
One adjacent project we're exploring for the future is if you took all of the current understanding of game design and mechanics with modern AI functionality, knowledge bases, etc, and built a MUD, what would it look like and would it be enough to bring back players from other games?
There is an ongoing project doing this (that launches this weekend I believe) to revive a MUD called Shadows of Isildur. I think a lot of effort has been put into the new changes to the codebase to bring QoL features that a modern audience would expect while keeping the bones of the game the same. I'm not certain how it will fare as, to be honest, MUDs take an inordinate amount of time to really groove into and immerse yourself in - but I am excited to see efforts like this invested on as we older MUDers find ourselves finally reaching the point of having free time again.
> There is an ongoing project doing this (that launches this weekend I believe) to revive a MUD called Shadows of Isildur
Interesting, could you share more info? I couldn't find anything on Google. I played a fair amount of SOI back in the day and it'd be fun to start over on a fresh server.
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Would be kind of a cool experiment for a mud-style interface, where each npc/avatar was backed by a lower-cost LLM... similar rules for the npcs in the game, but a background feed, and history of interactions with other players as background.
Maybe limiting npc's to only a certain number of moves that aren't a response to other users per day...
It could be a lot of fun.
I'm building this exact thing, actually. Intelligence determines which model powers a mob/npc. Getting neat results so far!
A MUD exists as a platform for creative writing - introducing LLMs into one would deprive it of its primary function.
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I honestly worry that the relevance of text-based systems is largely tied with literacy and how it interacts with the player's imagination -- something largely in decline, at least in the US.
It's not just imagination the relevance is also tied to focus and attention. I have multiple friends who claim that the reason they don't read is because are "visual learners" .
The real truth is they have a 30 second attention span and can't finish a page without daydreaming so in order to stay focussed they need a YouTube video than contains the same information but with constant visual changes.
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Sadly, you're not wrong... It might not get off the ground, but if we're able to, we'll give it a shot.
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Simutronics is has been running and developing Gemstone and DragonRealms for 30+ years and counting. The communities are about 400-1000 players each. They've embraced microtransactions (in the form of quarterly events), but both games are entirely playable without participating in that aspect.
With modern technology, training in both games is very automatable. But developing and optimizing your training routines is (in my opinion) incredibly fun. Actual roleplaying is less common it was in the 90s, but there are still nightly events where dozens of players will get together to socialize and explore the worlds in-character.
I highly recommend it, and for those who don't have the time to grind, you can join the shattered server where 24/7 scripting is allowed and encouraged. F2P subscriptions don't work on that server, unfortunately, but it has been a great hobby for someone like me who used to play back in the day but could never play it without scripting due to time constraints.
Technically MUDs still are a thing, there's a good number still running. Though sounds like you don't really just want a MUD where you want to go out mobbing but a more social thing (but not IRC?).
I suspect MUDs may have a bit of a resurgence soon, I've seen more and more interest in them as of late simply because they seem like an excellent pairing with LLMs which easily consume text. Though I think for your needs someone would need to work on the barrier to entry to getting on a MUD as well as the modern UI/UX expected today.
Having stepped away from MUDs ourselves for years, it's been interesting to see what the community has been cooking up in terms of UI/UX, Evennia, MUDlet, TUIs, etc.
>I really wish MUDs were still a thing.
They aren't as popular as they once were, but they are still out there. One of the hardest-core OG muds, Armageddon Mud (which was based on the Dark Sun world) recently went down, but the founders have been working on a new reboot with a totally new code base. Looks interesting (I played the original but have no connection with the MUD itself). They are aiming to launch BETA in the relatively near future if anyone wants to check it out.
https://www.zalanthas.org/
There are also some OG muds still chugging along after 30+ years, like the hardcore PVP mud Duris:Land of Bloodlust. The player base has dwindled mightily over the years but people still play and it is a load of fun to explore, if MUDs are your thing, as it incredibly expansive having been in active development for decades.
https://www.durismud.com/
MUDs are still kicking around and if you'd like to play in one you'll find a few solid communities with good engagement that would love to include you. They're in an odd spot though since MUDs existed in two sorts of categories 1. I really want to adventure and text is the only way to do that (these sorts died off to MMOs) and 2. I want to roleplay - those survive but the mechanical portions of those games are becoming more and more irrelevant as new games are constantly supplying better systems and mechanisms than MUDs were able to.
This leaves MUDs in a weird place since things like MUSHes generally have most of the roleplaying tools without as much weird code for attacks and PVP interactions being involved so I've seen those thrive more recently.
> I really wish MUDs were still a thing.
About 15 years ago, for a while I ran a MUD over AX.25, because MUDs aren't nerdy enough on their own, and amateur radio - even packet radio - isn't nerdy enough on its own.
All three of us that used it found it pretty entertaining.
They aren't all gone. E.g. this is a mud I've played on occasionally for the last 30 years: https://theforestsedge.com/
The MUD I play (Aardwolf) averages about 200 players online at any time, but it's effectively dead as a MUD. There's very little player interaction, which is what made MUDs special originally. Part of this is that nearly all multiplayer features have been abandoned, and the rest of the features are centered around loot box equivalent features. Despite this, there are a couple hundred people who seem to enjoy the gamification. The MUD is highly optimized for scripting, so it scratches the side project programming itch for me.
> even what can be done.
I think this could be solved with bridge bots to make your MUD multiplatform. You could have a dedicated web app, an IRC bridge, a Discord bridge, etc.
Discord-brained users can still use your MUD and contribute to network effects, and you can provide an off-ramp ("I just want to play VarelionScape, maybe I'll just open the dedicated website on my phone instead of going on Discord and digging through the server list").
That's a good idea, thanks! We'd only considered the web app + using a client.
Fully agree here. I love MUDs. The shear level of creativity that you can have in an MUD is practically infinite, and MUDs are just so fun to play in general. Especially when you start adding in triggers and sound packs and all that
> Discord, being the imperfect text platform, limits the text and leaves most interaction limited by awkward formatting.
I don't think I understand your meaning here. I'd much rather use Markdown than BBCode or related.
I have a pile of ideas and not enough time to get to them all, but one of them is the opposite direction. Embrace Discord, and build a MUD whose social systems are funneled through it.
You would probably like my project https://github.com/timbran-project/moor
Very cool! Why reimplement the "moo code", though? Is it "just" for backward compatibility, or did you determine that none of the existing languages can be easily modified to live in a MOO environment?
I started playing on an LP MUD in the late '90s. Over the past 20 years, I tried a few times to implement a similar environment, only with everyone being a "wizard". LPC was also a prototype-based OO language with multiple inheritance, and it supported live development, with code for objects stored in files and dynamically reloadable. I would always hit some kind of blocker, no matter the language I chose for the implementation. It looks like MOOs did (and do) what I wanted, but I just wasn't aware of their existence. :( Maybe if I used MOOs as a model, I'd get better results... but I'm not sure if I want to go all in on DB. I tried looking up how the code is loaded into the DB in the book (https://timbran.org/book), but couldn't find it. Is there an explanation somewhere of how MOOs are bootstrapped from sources, how you can maintain sources in files on disk, and how new definitions are pulled into the DB at runtime?
There's all sorts of reasons, not sure what level of detail you want me to get into. I've got about 30 years of thoughts on this.
For one, I think MOO is kind of shite in lots of ways. But I and others spent lots of time 20+ years ago building alternatives and nobody used them. There's intrinsic value to just picking up and then improving on something that has established history. It gathers an audience of users, has name recognition, and most importantly keeps you responsible from an engineering dev POV because you are forced to focus on delivering a thing that works and you have a way to prove it. As Linux has shown, incremental improvement on a somewhat flawed but relatively popular and known foundation has value. mooR cakes over a lot of the ugly parts of MOO and honestly, I'm pretty proud of it.
Secondly, existing "mainstream" languages are not appropriate, mostly. None of them or their runtimes are really based on a properly sandboxed persistent model. I poked at WASM, and I could write a screed about that, but wrong system. MOO (and successors to it) were built with the idea of lots of people jamming on one shared world, and it shows.
Finally, I have all sorts of ideas on what I think is "better" than MOO, and did eventually open the floodgate this spring and start building out the "dream system" here: https://github.com/timbran-project/mica -- but as you can see from relative star count of one vs the other.. my first point has relvance.
There should be an explanation in the book on how loading works. If not, I'll need to clarify. Documentation writing sucks. But the TLDR is that one of the arguments you pass to the system at start is basically a source directory of ("objdef") human readable / editable source files, and that gets compiled into a persistent binary database. Once that's done, restarts load directly from that DB/image, not source. (But the system can periodically export or "dump" objdef files as well).
Note this is a bit different from classic LambdaMOO, which had no such process. It had a primitive text database that was not human editable really, and you started from what people passed around of those.
Hope that helps. Come by the discord if you have questions: https://discord.com/invite/Ec94y5983z
Also I just finally put up a new blog post on dev status https://timbran.org/catching-up-with-moor.html
EDIT: I've done some book edits and added a chapter here which I hope helps: https://timbran.org/book/2.0-dev/html/the-system/bootstrappi...
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That's a cool project, thanks for sharing!
Mine is still running
> telnet playlom.com 4000
Owe my programming skills to it, and also dropping college, only to start a company later.
discworld mud (any many others) ase still totally worth playing
ssh to late.sh
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49001127
They're still a thing