Do you like MUDs? Play regularly?
Morbus Iff — Thu, 2005-01-27 15:20
So, for various secret and treasonous reasons, I've been investigating MUDs lately, and the process of setting one up. Since I know nothing about them, I've been asking around and trusting people at their word, based on a shared knowledge on what we're trying to build. This resulted in a suggestion of an LPMud using Skylib/MudOS (am I even saying that right? I have no idea). Is this a good choice?
Or do any Gamegrene readers even play MUDs? Or would want to? This should probably be a poll.
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No responses? Mudding must be a dying art.....
Morbus, seriously, why? Ive helped with a couple of mud start ups and worked as admin on a couple of pay to play muds and the sum total of my knowledge is this - Its Hell!
I wrote areas for a mud called Calmar, slaved away adding 50 0dd locations a day, setting up quests and encounter details for them. Then upon opening them up to players watched as a string of players told me the ccc's (computer controlled characters) were easy to kill and had spelling mistakes in their attack strings. When asked about the descriptions or the locations, they all had Brief set so didnt read them and didnt really care either.
When working just as admin, half the time your listening to complaints about people cheating and the other half your explaining that 'No we arnt recruiting builders/immortals/coders at the moment thank you'.
Using an existing mud engine rather than having someone code from scratch means your kinda locked into someone elses idea of what a mud should be and using a home baked system means you spen most of your time chasing down bugs and explaining to players why you havent as yet got a system to do xy or z.
And then theres the sinking knowledge that text muds are a dying breed as mmorpg's eat away at your player base slowly but surely.
I guess i sound jaded huh....
But on the plus side it can be a giggle, its hideously adictive. And its still more of a roleplaying enviroment than an mmorpg.
So if your determined to do it, good luck. My best advice tho would be to find someone who can build you an engine from the ground up. You can start with an existing engine, but youll begin to chaff under its restrictions fairly early on. With a home baked engine, it takes longer, but its a lot more satisfying.
K.
Ultimately, I was planning on building a PARANOIA MUD, until I was informed that Skotos has the rights for it. I've since decided that something more integrated into the Gamegrene site/backend would be more interesting, and that idea has been percolating in my head (codename: Wuddershins).
Neat.
Your a glutton for punishment mate (g).
If you can find yourself a php coder they could knock you up something that looks like a chat room and you could VERY SLOWLY expand from there.
Historically a young student with too much time on his/her hands will do.
And tbh your better off just getting stuck into it rather than planning too much. Believe me, 90% of everything your considering will change compleatly the second it comes to implementation. Your better off finding out what you can and cant do before you decide what youd like to do and get frustrated trying to crowbar it in. I cant stress this one enough, the amount of wonderfull ideas that got watered down and ruined by the constraints of the code are without number.
K.
What makes you think I'm not a coder? I've written software that has been downloaded more than a 100,000 times, have written books for O'Reilly (the number one computer book publisher), wrote a tech column for a year, and have also done a few things for Apple. I know exactly what I'm getting into, mate ;)
Hah! They all say that, and a few nervous breakdowns and no hair later they cave and return to the nice safe world of.... whatever it was they did before they started.
Seriously tho, Ive been an admin and builder on muds for the best part of twelve years, i know what your getting into too. So if you can code, i stick to my origonal piece of advice. Write it from the ground up.
K.
Welp, "write it from the ground up" is definitely the way it's gonna be. I'm talking "when you come to Gamegrene, you're already playing" sorta integration, not a "click here to play" thing (per Ghyll, a Lexicon based game hosted by Gamegrene).
Interesting... So each area of the web page as is becomes a location that can be manipulated.... Deeper interaction with the other denizens of Gamegrene.... Hmmm...
K.
oh...i see there ARE people with too much free time on their hands :)
People with too much free time on their hands make the world go round.
How is this going? Did it die a slow and miserable death, or has it been quietly hatching in a cold, dark, wet place where nobody is likely to notice until it is too late?
I play MUDs, or at least I used to play the Discworld MUD.
Dfaran, the MUD idea has pretty much died, as I'm more interested in integrating something with Gamegrene, as opposed to a separate entity. I've had the same ideas in my head for roughly six years now - one of the first articles published for Gamegrene include ruminations about the same sorta design (as per the comments re: Wuddershins, not the MUD). But, as things always do, things have gotten in the way. I've since been doing a ton of stuff with Fudge, also Ghyll (naturally), and blah blah blah. Too many ideas, too little time (the latest has been a Ghyll/Fudge conversion). For the past few months, I've been spending a lot of time mentally designing an XML based format for a collectible card game based on Fudge. I may write about it on Gamegrene eventually once I codify it some more.
I have tried out various MUDs and even helped work on two so far and have found them to be often more enjoyable to play than graphical MMORPGs. If only because you dont need the latest cutting edge computer to play one nore a net connection that would suck the brains out of a KRAY... heh.
The best MUD I've come across so far is unfortunately also the worst one. This being CthulhuMUD. As you might guess its bades on the H.P. Lovecraft mythos stories and in this case it pulls heavily from Chaosium's RPG. (Without permission.) Unlike other "theme" MUDs, CthulhuMUD is not just a renaming of some monsters and professions. This is a heavy reworkig of the system and a remarkable setting of of the world circa 1920-30. Complete with sanity loss and the Dreamlands.
The MUD looks good too and plays well though the EXP vs Level balance is as off kilter as any other MUD I have seen.
Where things broke down was with the moderators and owners. Half of which were a shady lot up to no good. Over powered alts of the moderators went on periodic killing and just plain harassment sprees against the MUD simply to make life miserable for everyone. Eventually the MUD succomb to its own bile and a likely impending lawsuit from Chaosium.
CthulhuMUD is back now with new owners and they seem to so far be a much more agreeable lot than the previous. There are still some problems old and new. But only a fraction of the troubles of the old.
Waiting to see what develops with BattleMUD, a Battletech based system in the works.
Currently waiting to restart work on an awesome space-based MUD with starships and vehicles, (and maybee even mecha.)
Omega
I just wanted to throw a few things out there.
1. Adminning, and even building or "creating" on a mud is a thankless job. It takes a special type of person with the right motivations to excell at it. Getting players that give you feedback, even as annoying as "your mobs are easy to kill" is an amazing feat, and one that any creator should be grateful for.
2. Building a "game engine" for a mud from the ground up is NOT a trival task. It is generally the work of, not months, but years. For those with a creative vision who want to create a world based on that vision but who do not have an ungodly amount of time and expertise, the accepted and typical way to get started is to use a publicly distributed codebase. Notice , code..BASE. For those just getting into the mudding world or at least the immortal side of things, who do not have a strong strong grok of C programming, lpc libs are a good way to start. There are a large number of lpc codebases out there with a few different drivers. These range from "lil" lib, which is a lib that provides an environment to log into, and code with file setup, all the way to something like Dead Souls. Dead souls is a lib that provides everything from combat to a starting area to quests. With Dead Souls, an included QCS or quick creation system makes adding an area with 50 rooms with varied descriptions with 15 different types of NPC's each wielding a different weapon, with a shop to buy and sell items and a pub to stop for refreshments, all of this, a few hours ...5 or 6 hard coding. There is NOTHING about the standard Dead -souls setup that can not be changed...completely , to suit your vision, however it would seem simple to spend hours, if not days, coding a projectile weapon system from scratch when There are libs like Dead Souls that have done this for you. Reinventing the wheel so to speak. Don't like the fact that the included projectile system takes 3 rounds of combat to complete, dig into the lib and change it. Don't like your players logging into a "standard cookie cutter" area? Mudconfig startroom "/domains/your new domain/room/glorious_new_areas_startroom.c New players never have to see a single room of the areas that are included with Dead Souls. They are included as examples of how to do various things.
You are not locked into ANYTHING with a lib like dead souls. but you are provided a great starting point.
I am new here and don't know the status quo for etiquette yet, so i am hesitant to post any links or whatnot. If anyone would like more information on LPMuds, Dead Souls in particular, or the price of tea in china, let me know and I can point you in the right direction.
Wow, some old faces on here I haven't seen in YEARS.
Firstly, Kestanan, hows it going! (Kano here)
Secondly, Omega, i'm fairly sure I helped you build a Star Wars MUD years back.
Thirdly, playing Calmar was the best experience of my life, despite playing countless other MUDs with a larger content I consider everything Calmar had to offer to be first rate, Kestanan added so much to the MUD and it's true he never recieved praise for any of it, and on top of this, Calmar had some heavily exploitable bugs and it's a shame the playerbase chose not to report those bugs, I myself was a rather immature MUD player at that time and was notorious for exploiting bugs and generally cheating my way to power, if an imm told me not to do something, I generally did it.
I'm trying to find a decent MUD to play, i've tried large rep ones such as Imperian but none of them have the that.....certain thing that keeps me coming back, I heard Ris was starting Calmar again a while back and even Calmar-Mud.com has obviously been bought for it but still no word, I also want to casually build again as creating areas and such was a lot of fun, I even became skilled at MOBPROGs etc.
If anyone has a heads up on another MUD or needs another builder i'm game.
Kano