[Varelion]

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.

[iepathos]

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.

[outofpaper]

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?

[iepathos]

Haha, ty for this. That's just a personal habit. I tend to call Discord disco for short amongst my friends.

[Varelion]

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.

[Davisb135]

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?

[munk-a]

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.

[kingbirdy]

> 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.

[munk-a]

play.shadowsofisildur.com:4500 - if you'd like (it isn't on the old domain anymore) there's also a discord that I'm a bit hesitant to link to where all the discussion is taking place that has a lot of the old folks hanging around and nostalgifying.

[kingbirdy]

So the website doesn't work and the discord is private for no reason? Unfortunately this is reminding me why I stopped playing MUDs :( For a genre that's entirely dependent on keeping up an established and invested user base, the average MUD sure seems to dislike its players, especially new ones.

[munk-a]

The website is down right now and the discord isn't private but I'm hesitant to personally publish it in such a public place.

[tracker1]

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.

[marknutter]

I'm building this exact thing, actually. Intelligence determines which model powers a mob/npc. Getting neat results so far!

[munk-a]

A MUD exists as a platform for creative writing - introducing LLMs into one would deprive it of its primary function.

[phantom784]

That sounds very different than my memory of MUDs. The ones I remember were much more a text-based version of "World of Warcraft" or other similar MMOs where you navigate through a world, complete quests, etc. You could chat with other players but it was more about teaming up for quests than a creative writing/roleplaying exercise.

Not to say that what you're describing didn't exist, but I don't think it was defining feature of all MUDs.

[egypturnash]

There was a distinct split between people there for the grind and people there for the RP. I was there for the RP and I was mostly on MUCKs, MUSHes, and the occasional MOOs (multi-user chat kingdoms, multi-user shared hallucinations, and mud (object-oriented) ). They all had a combat system lurking somewhere in their code but those routines rarely got used.

[ButlerianJihad]

Firstly, "multi-user chat kingdom" is a backronym that was not envisioned by the original authors of TinyMUCK, but perhaps by the users or developers of some future fork. TinyMUCK is notable for having a "Fuzzball" edition or fork, that powered FurryMUCK itself, as well as related worlds which hosted and catered to people in furry fandom.

Secondly, exactly none of these had a "combat system" of any kind. These were all derived from TinyMUD, written by Jim Aspnes at CMU. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Aspnes

TinyMUD was a "social MUD" and its explicit goals were to be a glorified chat room, and a sort of "blank slate" for people interested in building their own extensible worlds, based on a pure textual interface. There was absolutely no "combat system" at all--in stark contrast to the other "MUDs" on the scene in those days, such as AberMUD, DikuMUD, and LPmud, which were arguably way more popular, way more violent, and way more into the "combat" or "PvP" or also PvE type play styles.

There was, of course, a "kill" command to allow one player to kill another. But the results of the kill were quite nerfed: the player was sent to their $HOME, and collected an "insurance policy" of pennies, which was partly based on the killer-determined "cost" to kill them in the first place. This wasn't combat by any means--basically, a way to sort of put an exclamation mark on a conversation.

MOO, though it was not derived from any Tiny* codebase, was also one of those "talkie" muds at its heart: it was an object-oriented, fully-programmable, extensible world-building server, where indeed, any combat system could've been implemented, if the players/programmers of a certain world agreed to include combat. But MOO was unique in giving a "barebones" server to program from first principles. So, no, none of these had combat systems, and that's their chief appeal.

[pigpop]

In some cases but coming from someone who played MUDs back in the day on a monochrome display and dial-up I know I would have been very interested in playing one with NPCs powered by an LLM had they been available back then. The NPCs as they existed were generally just furniture and the interesting part was playing with and talking to other people.

[Kiro]

Most people played MUDs for the grind. Levels and loot. They care about the story as much as you care about it in Path of Exile.

[munk-a]

The people who played MUDs for the grind will, genuinely, have a lot more fun playing PoE or some other modern adventure game. MUDs were the only option for that sort of adventure experience for a while but there are other options now that simply have more tools at their disposal than text based communication offers.

If a MUD is going to survive today it's going to be driven by those RP focused players where the freedom to describe actions in text allows a flexibility that's unrealistic in graphical games.

[stavros]

Even though I didn't play a MUD for the text, it's entirely false to say that the text didn't add a lot. The writing made or broke the game, since it was all text-based.

[Varelion]

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.

[CTDOCodebases]

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.

[Varelion]

Jesus H. Christ, never thought about that.

[Davisb135]

Sadly, you're not wrong... It might not get off the ground, but if we're able to, we'll give it a shot.

[Varelion]

I really, really hope you lot manage to!

[nerevarthelame]

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.

[rashkov]

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.

[ticulatedspline]

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.

[Davisb135]

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.

[StanislavPetrov]

>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/

[munk-a]

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.

[ErroneousBosh]

> 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.

[geuis]

They aren't all gone. E.g. this is a mud I've played on occasionally for the last 30 years: https://theforestsedge.com/

[eel]

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.

[strbean]

> 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").

[Davisb135]

That's a good idea, thanks! We'd only considered the web app + using a client.

[ethin]

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

[zahlman]

> 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.

[bcrosby95]

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.

[cmrdporcupine]

You would probably like my project https://github.com/timbran-project/moor

[klibertp]

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?

[cmrdporcupine]

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...

[klibertp]

> building alternatives and nobody used them

Right. I kind of forgot that MUDs are supposed to be social. Seeing as the popularity of MUDs plummeted, I also changed my goals over time: I want to build a persistent, text-based (but with rich formatting support, including eventually GUI widgets) live programmable environment with network transparency and multiple concurrent sessions allowed. Since it's personal/local space first, and only allows others to "visit" (and even that is mostly for my own remote sessions), I don't need many users initially. If I was trying to build something that emphasizes the multi-user aspect, the choice of continuing one of the historical lineages would be much harder to avoid.

> Secondly, existing "mainstream" languages are not appropriate, mostly. None of them or their runtimes are really based on a properly sandboxed persistent model.

You're right. And even if you broaden the search so much that "mainstream" is barely visible from the cut-off point, you're left with basically just Smalltalk. My current attempt is based on GToolkit distribution of Pharo Smalltalk - it does check some boxes, but it's class-based (not a big problem given the dynamism) and VERY single-user by design (quite a big problem, and thinking about eventual security/permissions/capabilities handling gives me a headache). Still, from all the prototypes I made over the years, this attempt went the farthest; I think I'll stick with it for a while longer.

> Finally, I have all sorts of ideas on what I think is "better" than MOO

Thank you, I will definitely check it out :)

> 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.

Thanks. That's exactly how a Smalltalk image is built, too, at least with the tooling I'm using (GT). You start an image, point it to a set of Git repos with Smalltalk code, which is then loaded into the image, classes are created, and methods get compiled. You then dump the new image. When you start it the next time, it already contains all the code, and you can change it inside the image at runtime, as much as you want. At some point, you export the changed code back to Git repos, and regenerate the image. Since the image contains all the live objects as well, you can close it, and all the state is restored when you reopen it.

Thanks for the Discord invite, I just joined. I'll go over the book and try to run mooR and mica first, and will reach out for help if needed.

For mica specifically: I'm not 100% sure, but I seem to remember you describing the idea behind it much earlier (here on HN) than this spring. I think it was in comments under a Python-Prolog bridge or something like that. Good to see you had the time and motivation to implement it :) I'll definitely give it a read!

[Davisb135]

That's a cool project, thanks for sharing!

[freediver]

Mine is still running

> telnet playlom.com 4000

Owe my programming skills to it, and also dropping college, only to start a company later.

[yehoshuapw]

discworld mud (any many others) ase still totally worth playing

[fragmede]

ssh to late.sh

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49001127

[newobj]

They're still a thing