Building a MUD engine is quite an endeavour in itself. Let alone the game! A good way to test your skills in networking, parsing, databases, and data structures.
I’ve been chipping away at one on my stream using Haskell. Experimenting with Lua integration, parsing, networking, STM and concurrency… currently hacking on Entity Component Systems and unboxed vectors and all kinds of stuff.
Thing is you can start small. Start with a chat server. Add character registration. Add a mob. Add some commands to interact with the mob. Just keep adding things on.
There’s a community for mud coders too. There are dozens of us.
"Show me your [code] and conceal your [data structures], and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your [data structures], and I won’t usually need your [code]; it’ll be obvious."
If you would share your data structures for your MUD?
Every time another nostalgia post comes along for MUDs people start replying with the name of a small MUD they enjoyed but I’m surprised how rare it is to see Iron Realms MUDs mentioned.
I’m almost certain they are the largest MUD development company to exist.
I played two of their MUDs — Achaea and Lusternia. The sheer imaginative scale of these worlds and engines are unmatched by even today’s standards. (And they still exist!)
PVP is a battle of engineering. The best PvPers build elaborate trigger systems that watch the terminal for specific maladies and conditions and counter them with herbs, potions, and skills.
The RP is similar to D&D but so much deeper. Where D&D is mostly storytelling by a DM, RP in huge commercial MUDs involve gods, physics, deeply entrenched politics, money, fame, and power spanning thousands of players.
Entirely player-driven economy. If you wanted a sword you could buy one from a player run market or commission a unique piece from a blacksmith. And boy it was truly unique. A blacksmith in Lusternia is really a wordsmith. A steel sword can be described as “honed to an obsidian finish”.
Peak human imagination, but sadly in a medium too many people can’t get into.
You just reminded me of Star Wars Roleplaying on Habbo Hotel when I was a preteen circa 2006. Habbo Hotel was basically an IRC and MUD with user-created hotel rooms. The Sith and Jedi orders were popular "rooms" in Habbo, and would often rise to the top and bring an influx of users– mostly teenagers.
But they were clearly gated, like a nightclub. There were those who were "in" the Jedi Temple or Sith academy, and those who were out. This creates a sort of exclusivity, and people would naturally want to join the Jedi Temple or Sith Academy. They'd have to agree to a set of rules written on a sticky note on the room's wall, and dress the part.
Sometimes all hell would break loose when a Sith Warrior or Inquisitor would come and attack the Jedi Temple. They were legally allowed to do this, as long as people were online to witness it.
It was really interesting how they battled each other with just text chat. They had specified rules where you'd have to type out five action lines (minimum of 5 words) after an attack in order to maime or kill someone. At any point in those five lines, the defender could use 2 lines to repel the attack. To add a complication, the actions had to be coherent with each other.
So it ended up being a lot of;
Sith: Jedi filth! Hiding in your temple, while the universe suffers. I will free them of you!
Jedi: Your oppression ends here, Sith!
Sith: swings lightsaber towards your body
Sith: it connects with your neck
Sith: it cuts through the muscle
Jedi: swings lightsaber at lightsaber (illegal: 4 words)
Jedi: it parries your lightsaber away
Sith: it connects through the bone (illegal: parried)
Of course, these would often devolve into long OOC (out of character) arguments, and this drama would bring in even more of a crowd. It was chaotic, and a whole bunch of fun.
It wasn't just RP fighting though. They would have all the Jedi initiates wear "robes" and hang out in rooms decorated like a Jedi temple. Then the Jedi Masters would conduct lessons and we'd have to memorise the Jedi code.
I still remember the Sith code. I had to memorise it and recite it at random times to the Sith Lords. When I graduated from that, I ended up teaching it myself to several acolytes.
"Peace is a lie, there is only passion. Through passion, I gain strength. Through strength, I gain power. Through power, I gain victory. Through victory, my chains are broken. The Force shall free me."
I also always look for the IRE MUDs :) I played Achaea about 15 years ago; the community of players really makes the game what it is. (If anybody remembers Soludra, that's me!)
Between this and the previous MUD post about LLM MUDs I'd love to see a comeback.
A few months ago I tried out my old (1999-2004) hang, wocmud.org
Some of the quests were still sometimes broken. auto attacking mobs were still unfairly strong. But, there were a couple people more than willing to help me get my gear back from my corpse. They helped me remember the areas, quests, syntax, etc that I had BURNED into my memory when I was 14. We chatted and got caught up in the 20 years of updates. Oh, and I didn't get banned for being out-of-character. overall a 10/10 nostalgic experience
I started working on my own with Evennia and claude. I was hoping to hook up an LLM for MOBs but had to put it down when life got busy again.
I'm sure you mean wotmud.org, and I always look for someone to mention this one in MUD threads, but rarely see it.
Man I was hooked on that game in high school. Joined the Lion Wardens, multiple high level characters, knew the zones. Nothing has come close since then.
That feeling of leveling in a safe zone when your screen fills with red names of opposing faction characters and you just get deleted and lose all your gear and a level... so good.
Ah! Well, enjoying a MUD is still a great shared experience haha. Nothing like them since. I still gravitate to punishing games with obscure mechanics and steep learning curves, and I imagine I'm still chasing that MUD high.
I think what made them special was that they were populated by others that put in that effort, and so the community felt invested. And you'd see the same names every time you logged on cause there was a single server, and reputation mattered. Ah man, what a time of life haha.
I'm glad it sparked something. Really cool to see not just the nostalgia, but the active projects/games, and the feature requests. Original Post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49008538
I learned to touch-type by accident as a kid playing MUDs—no time to look at your hands while you’re under attack! I made friends, discovered things about myself, and even got brought on to start writing room descriptions. Totally formative for me in so many ways.
I logged back on a year or two ago, now in my late thirties, and the sense of community and a critical mass of others who were invested in the game and eager to have me join just wasn’t there. It’s a shame because I agree MUDs have so much unique value to offer. Maybe it’s too much to hope for their return to former glory but I hope at least some flavor of them can rise again as a new form of mostly text oriented multiplayer game.
I learned to code on an LP MUD back in the late 90s. It was a fun experience.
I did all my work in the MUD interface using ED. I didn't realize other people wrote their code offline and sh'd in to upload it. I got very good at writing and editing code on the command line.
i remember using ED in LPmuds. fun times. i had learned coding already so i can't claim that much, but when it came to web development i discovered the spinner webserver, written in uLPC, a GPL licensed rewrite of LPC (later renamed to roxen and pike). i could not believe my luck to discover a webserver written in a language that i was already familiar with from MUD coding.
nowadays i am using a web-platform for my websites that is not only written in pike but also implements a MUD like architecture.
I miss MUDs. My old MUD went through a rename, a fork, and what have you --- but it's limping on, though with few playing it. The cost of hosting these things are so cheap today that you can just let it sit and mind its own business.
Back in the 90s you needed a permanent internet connection (rare!) and fast enough to handle all the usually uncompressed text, so it had to be a - shocker - T1 or better. Then you needed a server.
My old MUD has a discord; turns out a lot of the people I knew 25 years ago were there and remembered the my nick if not a little about myself back then. That was a fun nostalgia trip.
MUDs will eventually see a resurgence, I think. Mobiles with little language models to give flavour text and quests, plus a little tool calling language behind it to make it happen? I can see it working; in fact, I might just myself...
Yeah but my idea was more about mobiles handing out quests or answering simple questions maybe about what they do. the dungeon gpt thing was a bit more organic.
I had been working on it for a couple years, using it myself. I finally released it recently. A number of users are contributing feature requests, testing, etc on the discord as well.
We had a MUD at our university and many of us contributed to it as well as playing/hanging out there. The university was quite strict in terms of the use of central resources (mostly VAX VMS 6000 and 8000 series, already pretty long in tooth). I later learned that the faculty decided to permit the MUDs consumption of scarce resource because they considered the development work a valuable lesson in itself on maintenance of a large code base and division of labour.
MUDs are really cool, but for anyone looking for a narrative fantasy experience, my first recommendation is going to be The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, but more specifically the mod scene around that game as well as the OpenMW replacement game engine.
Bethesda’s game was a gem that was full of rich lore, plenty of readying, and very flexible RPG systems (although being a magical glass cannon does tend to be the best build). However, it was also a relatively flawed game (which Bethesda game isn’t?) that the community has expanded and fixed into a juggernaut.
I recommend picking up a mod pack from modding-openmw.com and checking it out. Tamriel Rebuilt is particularly impressive: fans have added a massive bank of new maps, quests, etc.
Something cool about the OpenMW engine is that it supports scripting that exceeds the original engine so that new quests are more rich and dynamic than original ones in the game. They are even starting to expand into custom spell effects (as the original game had a rigid list of spell effects that wasn’t malleable).
My favourite game, and I agree that the new content added by the Tamriel Rebuilt is incredible. It is lacking in multiplayer which I expect is a large part of what makes MUDs special. TES3MP is an attempt at multiplayer Morrowind, and claims to be playable, though I haven't tried it so not sure how smooth it is or what the community is like. https://tes3mp.com/
I spent so many hours playing MUDs. I haven't found a type of game that comes close to the immersion and community of MUDs. I checked in on my old MUD a few years ago. Still there like an old friend. But, it was a ghost town. Maybe 10 active players at peak hours. It was maybe 100 in the day.
One of my early programming forays was being a wizard for a MUD I enjoyed. A code base that allows small communities to pop up around building and playing a world together is something I have not seen since my MUD days. It is my hope that Hytale, with its integrated modding tools and server, will fill the niche of community developed game worlds.
I do think MUD's really have a lot of opportunity to be interesting/fun buildable worlds. That they can be delightful and instructive. Especially with LLMs, the sitting there hand crafting zone after zone after zone forever and ever: that part can take more of a backseat (even though it's also some of the best part).
Man, I hadn't made the connection between my historical MUD experience (shout out Dark and Shattered Lands!) and my relative comfort in TUIs despite my somewhat non-technical background. My son is turning 7 this year and I'd love to get him into something like DSL....it was such a valuable experience for me across a variety of aspects -- obviously reading/typing certainly, but also strategy & problem solving, math, imagination, empathy/social interaction....What an incredible gift it was to have grown up in a time when graphics were worse and our brains weren't completely hacked yet.
DSL was my jam back in the day. Even though it was quite large and popular, I almost never see it brought up in these discussions which has always made me think I was dreaming up those years of playing it stealthily at school
I once made a web-based MUD game. The response in Korea was surprisingly low. I concluded that MUD games weren't popular in my country, and the people who actually played them were mostly in their 40s and 50s, while general consumers preferred GUI.
These days, I sometimes think about whether I could make a MUD game that interacts with AI, but I wonder if it would appeal to a generation that has no memory of MUD games
Problem I have found is the barrier to get past that actually gets younger people to read something. I regularly have grad students at a top tier university just straight up not read my emails... Then expect me to explain it all again in person.
I think a killer feature for any modern MUD would be to incorporate an optional text to speech narrator for the large walls of text that are inherent in the area descriptions.
Question to you all, muds tends to have a unix style interface, has anyone done a replacement for this uiux that fits … the class of 2019 first year computer science student that doesn’t understand files and needs a different uiux.
I am not sure I understand your question- MUDs have a text interface, somewhat similar to a command line. It wouldn't be a proper MUD if it had a graphical interface- there are plenty of games out there that do this like Baldurs Gate. The files part of your comment I don't understand either.
If a computer science student doesn’t understand files, that should be one of the things they are taught. What’s the point of being a student if it isn’t to learn?
My college roommate was really big into MUDs, one particular one anyway. He wasn’t a super techy person, it was pretty much the only thing he did on his computer.
I'm not sure I understand correctly, muds are text based but not file based. But there are several mud clients available with different features. Most include an auto mapper for example, you can connect through different specialized protocols to your favorite mud server.
I mean, that’s a MUD for you. It’s inherently text based. It’s of the golden age of the internet where passing the UX bar meant you earned your place in the community.
The genre opened doors for MMORPGs like EverQuest. If you want something modern and polished there are no shortages of other games.
I think part of the nostalgia for MUDs is a nostalgia for the era of the internet where communities were small and special. Everyone has a discord now. It’s all so samey. Bring back the quirky hobby communities run by the users.
I played around a bunch on the discworld MUD around thirty years back, for a few years. I’m not sure I even remember my username I had. I know I don’t remember the password. I should pop in sometime.
But now comes the real question - will the MUDs be programmed in something sane? The last MUD/MUCK I was on was done in RPN-style code. That was a headache to code various plugins and options.
LPC is a language that looks like C (the C in LPC) and there is even a general purpose language called pike that is a rewrite of LPC.
in an LPmud, the engine and the world itself including user contributed part are all written in LPC. unlike other MUDs that have a core written in C and an obscure custom language to define the world inside. this made LPmuds very approachable, and i believe the language and architecture is what enabled LPmuds to have built-in ftp and later webservers too, all written in LPC.
One thing I obliquely enjoyed about cutting my teeth on LPC was occasionally having to write things from scratch where we'd just be reusing well-trod FOSS in other languages. Growth opportunities :)
The worst part of that is, at least the only MUD/MUCK engine I ever glanced at the source code for; those primitives were actually still script calls to blocks of C functions.
Modern MUDs and similar will just include a mature script language, like LUA and let that directly access the background resources from within some sandbox. No point in re-inventing the wheel with a custom scripting language. For any legacy data (E.G. running some old world on a new system) it'd probably make more sense to write a transpiler / converter anyway.
> Modern MUDs and similar will just include a mature script language, like LUA
Not necessarily. The persistent, live nature of some types of MUD programming (LPMUDs, MOOs) is unique enough that many typical scripting languages are not a good fit. The only general-purpose languages that come close to the required execution model are Common Lisp and Smalltalk (and Prolog, if you squint hard enough), which are so unpopular that you don't really get much out of choosing them over a custom language. That's one of the reasons so many MUDs developed their own execution models and language dialects.
Writing a transpiler for a large MOO code or LPC codebase would require generating tons of boilerplate to emulate the unique semantics of the languages, as well as providing a runtime with support for those features. It's not that easy.
For some MUDs, scripting with Lua is more than enough. There's a book on writing MUD engines[1], and the second half shows exactly this setup (I think C++ for the engine and Lua for scripting). It will work in many cases, but it'll break down if you try to make the MUD easily programmable by users. It can still be done, but at some point, it might be easier to start from scratch rather than trying to make a stock Lua or Python interpreter work in that environment.
> It will work in many cases, but it'll break down if you try to make the MUD easily programmable by users. It can still be done, but at some point, it might be easier to start from scratch rather than trying to make a stock Lua or Python interpreter work in that environment.
I am curious as to why not Lua or JavaScript? Lua is what Roblox uses and JS needs no introducton.
Almost no languages are built for the environment where all code and values must be live and persistent and accessible to many people at once. Sandboxing and permissions need to be much more granular than what you get in most implementations, and persisting complex state (nothing in-world can disappear or break just because a server is restarted) is hard if that state is not first-class in a language (imagine a half-consumed generator in JS). There's more, but in short: the requirements this environment enforces on the "mudlib" language are unique enough that no mainstream language is a good fit out of the box.
I might be wrong - I investigated Pike just once, a long time ago - but I think Pike dropped a lot of the "liveness" that LPC provided (ie. reloading objects from a (changed) source at runtime while keeping their identity and updating clones). It's still probably a good fit for a lot of more advanced MUDs, but it's even more niche than CL and Smalltalk, so again, not much of an advantage over a home-grown solution. Plus, I've been recently looking more closely at MOOs, and for that, even LPC would not be enough (too much of a separation between code and data) - LPC/LPMUDs weren't really built for persistence as much as MOOs were.
Still, I can't disagree that, out of the box, LPC and Pike are probably a (much) better fit for a mudlib language compared to Lua, Python, or JavaScript :)
reloading objects from a (changed) source at runtime while keeping their identity and updating clones)
the functionality is still there, but hidden. roxen can reload modules but the reload creates a new object instance which new http requests will get, whereas old requests keep the old instance until the request completes.
however open-sTeam, a collaboration platform developed by a university in germany built a system of proxy objects such that your code always only interacts with the proxy allowing the actual object in the background to be replaced by new instances. in your own code you don't realize you are dealing with a proxy. it's completely transparent. it also stores the object state in a database creating full object persistence. the architecture is very similar to a MUD. they even wrote an object protocol allowing you to access the object from remote, so you can write remote clients that interact with objects with implementations in pike, php and java.
the university is no longer working on that platform, but since they released it as GPL i am able to continue using it as a base for all my websites and web-apps.
persistence and runtime reloading of objects are my favorite features in any language. i just love to be able to change code at runtime without having to restart the server. it works just like i am used to from my LPmud time.
One part of MUD history that rarely gets told in English: the Chinese game industry basically started there. In the mid 90s Chinese students overseas ran wuxia MUDs like Xiakexing (侠客行, 1995), all text, built on the LPMud family.
Wuxia fit text games perfectly because every player already had the whole world in their head from Jin Yong novels, so zero graphics needed. A lot of the people who built the first Chinese online games came out of those communities.
King of Kings (万王之王, 1999), usually counted as the first Chinese graphical MMORPG, was a Taiwanese MUD team putting a graphical client on their existing game.
It's hard to find good info on Chinese netizen culture in English in general. I loved chinaSMACK back in the day, but haven't found a good replacement. Do you know of any blogs or anything about this?
WoW and Runescape exist. But MUDs exist too, and text and graphics have different possibilities. So it makes sense to have some of both in this rich world.
Indeed, text and graphics are different styles and there are pro's and con's to either one. Similar to how some people enjoy ps1 style games over "modern graphics". One of the major pro's for text based games is accessibility.
It's in a way comparable to the difference between a novel and a movie or a novel and a comic/manga.
Really before the term MMO was coined these type of games where called "graphical MUDs"
Also Runescape started as "DeviousMUD".
Neverwinter, Runescape, Tibia, Ultima online, Everquest and more all formed from MUD lineage.
Roguelikes have had 2D UIs since the start (just rendered with characters), while a MUD with a 2D interface is not a MUD but an MMORPG. There's a bit of a middle ground in rich MUD clients that can reorganize the 1D stream of words visually into a dashboard, but that's as far as you can go while still calling it a MUD.
MUDs (and closely related single-user text adventure games) are a well-defined genre; you can improve various aspects of the presentation, add rich formatting, images, background music even, but the moment you stop using text as a main medium for gameplay, you're simply not doing a MUD anymore.
I definitely saw MU* games with graphics schemes in the 90s, although most of the moment to moment activity happened in standard trulytext base "rooms". For instance there were a series of Battletech MU* games that would replicate cockpit HUDs, the hex maps, and related via ASCII art for you while piloting a mech.
Building a MUD engine is quite an endeavour in itself. Let alone the game! A good way to test your skills in networking, parsing, databases, and data structures.
I’ve been chipping away at one on my stream using Haskell. Experimenting with Lua integration, parsing, networking, STM and concurrency… currently hacking on Entity Component Systems and unboxed vectors and all kinds of stuff.
Thing is you can start small. Start with a chat server. Add character registration. Add a mob. Add some commands to interact with the mob. Just keep adding things on.
There’s a community for mud coders too. There are dozens of us.
https://mudcoders.com/
I’m a huge fan of UO which MUDs inspired.
Curious if in the spirit of
"Show me your [code] and conceal your [data structures], and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your [data structures], and I won’t usually need your [code]; it’ll be obvious."
If you would share your data structures for your MUD?
In particular, Raph Koster (aka Designer Dragon) was heavily involved with LegendMud [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LegendMUD
Thank you for posting this! I just finished a MUD engine and I was looking for a way to expose it to a small community of technically minded folks.
Every time another nostalgia post comes along for MUDs people start replying with the name of a small MUD they enjoyed but I’m surprised how rare it is to see Iron Realms MUDs mentioned.
I’m almost certain they are the largest MUD development company to exist.
I played two of their MUDs — Achaea and Lusternia. The sheer imaginative scale of these worlds and engines are unmatched by even today’s standards. (And they still exist!)
PVP is a battle of engineering. The best PvPers build elaborate trigger systems that watch the terminal for specific maladies and conditions and counter them with herbs, potions, and skills.
The RP is similar to D&D but so much deeper. Where D&D is mostly storytelling by a DM, RP in huge commercial MUDs involve gods, physics, deeply entrenched politics, money, fame, and power spanning thousands of players.
Entirely player-driven economy. If you wanted a sword you could buy one from a player run market or commission a unique piece from a blacksmith. And boy it was truly unique. A blacksmith in Lusternia is really a wordsmith. A steel sword can be described as “honed to an obsidian finish”.
Peak human imagination, but sadly in a medium too many people can’t get into.
You just reminded me of Star Wars Roleplaying on Habbo Hotel when I was a preteen circa 2006. Habbo Hotel was basically an IRC and MUD with user-created hotel rooms. The Sith and Jedi orders were popular "rooms" in Habbo, and would often rise to the top and bring an influx of users– mostly teenagers.
But they were clearly gated, like a nightclub. There were those who were "in" the Jedi Temple or Sith academy, and those who were out. This creates a sort of exclusivity, and people would naturally want to join the Jedi Temple or Sith Academy. They'd have to agree to a set of rules written on a sticky note on the room's wall, and dress the part.
Sometimes all hell would break loose when a Sith Warrior or Inquisitor would come and attack the Jedi Temple. They were legally allowed to do this, as long as people were online to witness it.
It was really interesting how they battled each other with just text chat. They had specified rules where you'd have to type out five action lines (minimum of 5 words) after an attack in order to maime or kill someone. At any point in those five lines, the defender could use 2 lines to repel the attack. To add a complication, the actions had to be coherent with each other.
So it ended up being a lot of;
Sith: Jedi filth! Hiding in your temple, while the universe suffers. I will free them of you!
Jedi: Your oppression ends here, Sith!
Sith: swings lightsaber towards your body
Sith: it connects with your neck
Sith: it cuts through the muscle
Jedi: swings lightsaber at lightsaber (illegal: 4 words)
Jedi: it parries your lightsaber away
Sith: it connects through the bone (illegal: parried)
Of course, these would often devolve into long OOC (out of character) arguments, and this drama would bring in even more of a crowd. It was chaotic, and a whole bunch of fun.
It wasn't just RP fighting though. They would have all the Jedi initiates wear "robes" and hang out in rooms decorated like a Jedi temple. Then the Jedi Masters would conduct lessons and we'd have to memorise the Jedi code.
I still remember the Sith code. I had to memorise it and recite it at random times to the Sith Lords. When I graduated from that, I ended up teaching it myself to several acolytes.
"Peace is a lie, there is only passion. Through passion, I gain strength. Through strength, I gain power. Through power, I gain victory. Through victory, my chains are broken. The Force shall free me."
Pretty fun times.
I also always look for the IRE MUDs :) I played Achaea about 15 years ago; the community of players really makes the game what it is. (If anybody remembers Soludra, that's me!)
Between this and the previous MUD post about LLM MUDs I'd love to see a comeback.
A few months ago I tried out my old (1999-2004) hang, wocmud.org
Some of the quests were still sometimes broken. auto attacking mobs were still unfairly strong. But, there were a couple people more than willing to help me get my gear back from my corpse. They helped me remember the areas, quests, syntax, etc that I had BURNED into my memory when I was 14. We chatted and got caught up in the 20 years of updates. Oh, and I didn't get banned for being out-of-character. overall a 10/10 nostalgic experience
I started working on my own with Evennia and claude. I was hoping to hook up an LLM for MOBs but had to put it down when life got busy again.
I'm sure you mean wotmud.org, and I always look for someone to mention this one in MUD threads, but rarely see it.
Man I was hooked on that game in high school. Joined the Lion Wardens, multiple high level characters, knew the zones. Nothing has come close since then.
That feeling of leveling in a safe zone when your screen fills with red names of opposing faction characters and you just get deleted and lose all your gear and a level... so good.
My first character was a Lion Warden too. :)
I always get a kick out of running into another wotmud alumni in the wild.
Wotmud taught me to type fast.
nope! wocmud, worlds of carnage. `telnet wocmud.org 4000` or https://www.wocmud.org/welcome.php
I think wocmud is one of the smaller muds out there but for whatever reason my brother and I were obsessed!
I learned about Wheel of Time much later in life so I missed out on WoTMUD
Ah! Well, enjoying a MUD is still a great shared experience haha. Nothing like them since. I still gravitate to punishing games with obscure mechanics and steep learning curves, and I imagine I'm still chasing that MUD high.
I think what made them special was that they were populated by others that put in that effort, and so the community felt invested. And you'd see the same names every time you logged on cause there was a single server, and reputation mattered. Ah man, what a time of life haha.
Wotmud is still going strong. Come join the discord!
I'm glad it sparked something. Really cool to see not just the nostalgia, but the active projects/games, and the feature requests. Original Post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49008538
I learned to touch-type by accident as a kid playing MUDs—no time to look at your hands while you’re under attack! I made friends, discovered things about myself, and even got brought on to start writing room descriptions. Totally formative for me in so many ways.
I logged back on a year or two ago, now in my late thirties, and the sense of community and a critical mass of others who were invested in the game and eager to have me join just wasn’t there. It’s a shame because I agree MUDs have so much unique value to offer. Maybe it’s too much to hope for their return to former glory but I hope at least some flavor of them can rise again as a new form of mostly text oriented multiplayer game.
I learned to code on an LP MUD back in the late 90s. It was a fun experience.
I did all my work in the MUD interface using ED. I didn't realize other people wrote their code offline and sh'd in to upload it. I got very good at writing and editing code on the command line.
i remember using ED in LPmuds. fun times. i had learned coding already so i can't claim that much, but when it came to web development i discovered the spinner webserver, written in uLPC, a GPL licensed rewrite of LPC (later renamed to roxen and pike). i could not believe my luck to discover a webserver written in a language that i was already familiar with from MUD coding.
nowadays i am using a web-platform for my websites that is not only written in pike but also implements a MUD like architecture.
I miss MUDs. My old MUD went through a rename, a fork, and what have you --- but it's limping on, though with few playing it. The cost of hosting these things are so cheap today that you can just let it sit and mind its own business.
Back in the 90s you needed a permanent internet connection (rare!) and fast enough to handle all the usually uncompressed text, so it had to be a - shocker - T1 or better. Then you needed a server.
My old MUD has a discord; turns out a lot of the people I knew 25 years ago were there and remembered the my nick if not a little about myself back then. That was a fun nostalgia trip.
MUDs will eventually see a resurgence, I think. Mobiles with little language models to give flavour text and quests, plus a little tool calling language behind it to make it happen? I can see it working; in fact, I might just myself...
I think one of the very first public demos for GPT was a text adventure game?
AI Dungeon played like a text adventure game and ran off GPT-2, later GPT-3 fine-tunes. That might be what you're thinking of.
Yeah but my idea was more about mobiles handing out quests or answering simple questions maybe about what they do. the dungeon gpt thing was a bit more organic.
If anyone is interested, I launched a new mud client in 2026:
https://runemud.com
I had been working on it for a couple years, using it myself. I finally released it recently. A number of users are contributing feature requests, testing, etc on the discord as well.
We had a MUD at our university and many of us contributed to it as well as playing/hanging out there. The university was quite strict in terms of the use of central resources (mostly VAX VMS 6000 and 8000 series, already pretty long in tooth). I later learned that the faculty decided to permit the MUDs consumption of scarce resource because they considered the development work a valuable lesson in itself on maintenance of a large code base and division of labour.
I thought it would be fun to do a modern reimplementation of LambdaMoo, but someone already did it in Rust! https://github.com/timbran-project/moor
Yep, that's me.
Join in the fun.
MUDs are really cool, but for anyone looking for a narrative fantasy experience, my first recommendation is going to be The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, but more specifically the mod scene around that game as well as the OpenMW replacement game engine.
Bethesda’s game was a gem that was full of rich lore, plenty of readying, and very flexible RPG systems (although being a magical glass cannon does tend to be the best build). However, it was also a relatively flawed game (which Bethesda game isn’t?) that the community has expanded and fixed into a juggernaut.
I recommend picking up a mod pack from modding-openmw.com and checking it out. Tamriel Rebuilt is particularly impressive: fans have added a massive bank of new maps, quests, etc.
Something cool about the OpenMW engine is that it supports scripting that exceeds the original engine so that new quests are more rich and dynamic than original ones in the game. They are even starting to expand into custom spell effects (as the original game had a rigid list of spell effects that wasn’t malleable).
My favourite game, and I agree that the new content added by the Tamriel Rebuilt is incredible. It is lacking in multiplayer which I expect is a large part of what makes MUDs special. TES3MP is an attempt at multiplayer Morrowind, and claims to be playable, though I haven't tried it so not sure how smooth it is or what the community is like. https://tes3mp.com/
People start talking to llms all day, suddenly text based games are interesting again...
I don't like to steal jokes, and a good one I heard somewhere is that Star Trek is a utopia because they don't have social media.
Information was made to be free: Sharing jokes shares the joy!
I spent so many hours playing MUDs. I haven't found a type of game that comes close to the immersion and community of MUDs. I checked in on my old MUD a few years ago. Still there like an old friend. But, it was a ghost town. Maybe 10 active players at peak hours. It was maybe 100 in the day.
One of my early programming forays was being a wizard for a MUD I enjoyed. A code base that allows small communities to pop up around building and playing a world together is something I have not seen since my MUD days. It is my hope that Hytale, with its integrated modding tools and server, will fill the niche of community developed game worlds.
I do think MUD's really have a lot of opportunity to be interesting/fun buildable worlds. That they can be delightful and instructive. Especially with LLMs, the sitting there hand crafting zone after zone after zone forever and ever: that part can take more of a backseat (even though it's also some of the best part).
There's a MUD inside it, but the late.sh ssh-able bbs with it's door games that got submitted 2 days ago is incredible. It's such a wonderful little text world there. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49001127 https://late.sh/
Man, I hadn't made the connection between my historical MUD experience (shout out Dark and Shattered Lands!) and my relative comfort in TUIs despite my somewhat non-technical background. My son is turning 7 this year and I'd love to get him into something like DSL....it was such a valuable experience for me across a variety of aspects -- obviously reading/typing certainly, but also strategy & problem solving, math, imagination, empathy/social interaction....What an incredible gift it was to have grown up in a time when graphics were worse and our brains weren't completely hacked yet.
DSL was my jam back in the day. Even though it was quite large and popular, I almost never see it brought up in these discussions which has always made me think I was dreaming up those years of playing it stealthily at school
I once made a web-based MUD game. The response in Korea was surprisingly low. I concluded that MUD games weren't popular in my country, and the people who actually played them were mostly in their 40s and 50s, while general consumers preferred GUI.
These days, I sometimes think about whether I could make a MUD game that interacts with AI, but I wonder if it would appeal to a generation that has no memory of MUD games
Problem I have found is the barrier to get past that actually gets younger people to read something. I regularly have grad students at a top tier university just straight up not read my emails... Then expect me to explain it all again in person.
I think a killer feature for any modern MUD would be to incorporate an optional text to speech narrator for the large walls of text that are inherent in the area descriptions.
I three MUDs in one as a channel mode for my IRCD the other month: https://github.com/float64co/psyrcd/blob/master/plugins/mud....
Question to you all, muds tends to have a unix style interface, has anyone done a replacement for this uiux that fits … the class of 2019 first year computer science student that doesn’t understand files and needs a different uiux.
I am not sure I understand your question- MUDs have a text interface, somewhat similar to a command line. It wouldn't be a proper MUD if it had a graphical interface- there are plenty of games out there that do this like Baldurs Gate. The files part of your comment I don't understand either.
Simply untrue.
There have been hundreds of MUD clients and many of them were not purely text based at all. Many had images and map screens built in.
MUDs are text based. Some of the clients can have graphical features but the basic way to interface with the MUD itself is with text.
HTTP is a text based protocol, nobody is arguing websites are muds.
Let's skip the strange purity tests and engage in good faith discussion.
Tho it wasn't unheard of for some MU* games to have ascii graphics in the telnet stream
If a computer science student doesn’t understand files, that should be one of the things they are taught. What’s the point of being a student if it isn’t to learn?
My college roommate was really big into MUDs, one particular one anyway. He wasn’t a super techy person, it was pretty much the only thing he did on his computer.
I'm not sure I understand correctly, muds are text based but not file based. But there are several mud clients available with different features. Most include an auto mapper for example, you can connect through different specialized protocols to your favorite mud server.
Example clients: Mudlet, zMUD, kMUD, mushclient
I looked at Mudlet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1Llvwy0Y_Y&list=PLA40A1E6E5...
It's still text based in sense of `look at monolith`.
> Discord slash commands are interactive bot commands activated by typing / in the chat, prompting an inline menu of options and parameters.
Discord uses slash commands to visually autocomplete possible parameters.
> https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
Apple uses contextual actions to limit freeform grammars.
I mean, that’s a MUD for you. It’s inherently text based. It’s of the golden age of the internet where passing the UX bar meant you earned your place in the community.
The genre opened doors for MMORPGs like EverQuest. If you want something modern and polished there are no shortages of other games.
I think part of the nostalgia for MUDs is a nostalgia for the era of the internet where communities were small and special. Everyone has a discord now. It’s all so samey. Bring back the quirky hobby communities run by the users.
I disagree.
I think there's value to making a mud that uses discord-style slash commands outside of Discord without the player memorizing the text grammar.
Welcome to your new side project!
I played around a bunch on the discworld MUD around thirty years back, for a few years. I’m not sure I even remember my username I had. I know I don’t remember the password. I should pop in sometime.
Takes me back to the old days, using telnet to play The Marches on the UCSD computers from my apartment dial-up. Any of the other peerage around here?
Personally I think MUDs are a great platform for the agent/human coordination things that everyone's trying to build.
> You can read more about my new MUD engine project, Pinwheel, here on my blog.
Sadly I can't, both links redirect to the same page :P
FYI the wikipedia link in the footer is broken (points to mod, not mud)
Yes! Check out wafertown.com :)
I'd be keen for a MUD accessed via WhatsApp.
But now comes the real question - will the MUDs be programmed in something sane? The last MUD/MUCK I was on was done in RPN-style code. That was a headache to code various plugins and options.
you are looking for LPmuds.
LPC is a language that looks like C (the C in LPC) and there is even a general purpose language called pike that is a rewrite of LPC.
in an LPmud, the engine and the world itself including user contributed part are all written in LPC. unlike other MUDs that have a core written in C and an obscure custom language to define the world inside. this made LPmuds very approachable, and i believe the language and architecture is what enabled LPmuds to have built-in ftp and later webservers too, all written in LPC.
One thing I obliquely enjoyed about cutting my teeth on LPC was occasionally having to write things from scratch where we'd just be reusing well-trod FOSS in other languages. Growth opportunities :)
The worst part of that is, at least the only MUD/MUCK engine I ever glanced at the source code for; those primitives were actually still script calls to blocks of C functions.
Modern MUDs and similar will just include a mature script language, like LUA and let that directly access the background resources from within some sandbox. No point in re-inventing the wheel with a custom scripting language. For any legacy data (E.G. running some old world on a new system) it'd probably make more sense to write a transpiler / converter anyway.
> Modern MUDs and similar will just include a mature script language, like LUA
Not necessarily. The persistent, live nature of some types of MUD programming (LPMUDs, MOOs) is unique enough that many typical scripting languages are not a good fit. The only general-purpose languages that come close to the required execution model are Common Lisp and Smalltalk (and Prolog, if you squint hard enough), which are so unpopular that you don't really get much out of choosing them over a custom language. That's one of the reasons so many MUDs developed their own execution models and language dialects.
Writing a transpiler for a large MOO code or LPC codebase would require generating tons of boilerplate to emulate the unique semantics of the languages, as well as providing a runtime with support for those features. It's not that easy.
For some MUDs, scripting with Lua is more than enough. There's a book on writing MUD engines[1], and the second half shows exactly this setup (I think C++ for the engine and Lua for scripting). It will work in many cases, but it'll break down if you try to make the MUD easily programmable by users. It can still be done, but at some point, it might be easier to start from scratch rather than trying to make a stock Lua or Python interpreter work in that environment.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/MUD-Game-Programming-Development/dp/1...
> It will work in many cases, but it'll break down if you try to make the MUD easily programmable by users. It can still be done, but at some point, it might be easier to start from scratch rather than trying to make a stock Lua or Python interpreter work in that environment.
I am curious as to why not Lua or JavaScript? Lua is what Roblox uses and JS needs no introducton.
Almost no languages are built for the environment where all code and values must be live and persistent and accessible to many people at once. Sandboxing and permissions need to be much more granular than what you get in most implementations, and persisting complex state (nothing in-world can disappear or break just because a server is restarted) is hard if that state is not first-class in a language (imagine a half-consumed generator in JS). There's more, but in short: the requirements this environment enforces on the "mudlib" language are unique enough that no mainstream language is a good fit out of the box.
The only general-purpose languages that come close to the required execution model are Common Lisp and Smalltalk
well, and pike, which itself is based on LPC so it has the required execution model by design.
the point is that LPC and pike are the kind of sane language being asked for.
I might be wrong - I investigated Pike just once, a long time ago - but I think Pike dropped a lot of the "liveness" that LPC provided (ie. reloading objects from a (changed) source at runtime while keeping their identity and updating clones). It's still probably a good fit for a lot of more advanced MUDs, but it's even more niche than CL and Smalltalk, so again, not much of an advantage over a home-grown solution. Plus, I've been recently looking more closely at MOOs, and for that, even LPC would not be enough (too much of a separation between code and data) - LPC/LPMUDs weren't really built for persistence as much as MOOs were.
Still, I can't disagree that, out of the box, LPC and Pike are probably a (much) better fit for a mudlib language compared to Lua, Python, or JavaScript :)
reloading objects from a (changed) source at runtime while keeping their identity and updating clones)
the functionality is still there, but hidden. roxen can reload modules but the reload creates a new object instance which new http requests will get, whereas old requests keep the old instance until the request completes.
however open-sTeam, a collaboration platform developed by a university in germany built a system of proxy objects such that your code always only interacts with the proxy allowing the actual object in the background to be replaced by new instances. in your own code you don't realize you are dealing with a proxy. it's completely transparent. it also stores the object state in a database creating full object persistence. the architecture is very similar to a MUD. they even wrote an object protocol allowing you to access the object from remote, so you can write remote clients that interact with objects with implementations in pike, php and java.
the university is no longer working on that platform, but since they released it as GPL i am able to continue using it as a base for all my websites and web-apps.
persistence and runtime reloading of objects are my favorite features in any language. i just love to be able to change code at runtime without having to restart the server. it works just like i am used to from my LPmud time.
One part of MUD history that rarely gets told in English: the Chinese game industry basically started there. In the mid 90s Chinese students overseas ran wuxia MUDs like Xiakexing (侠客行, 1995), all text, built on the LPMud family.
Wuxia fit text games perfectly because every player already had the whole world in their head from Jin Yong novels, so zero graphics needed. A lot of the people who built the first Chinese online games came out of those communities.
King of Kings (万王之王, 1999), usually counted as the first Chinese graphical MMORPG, was a Taiwanese MUD team putting a graphical client on their existing game.
It's hard to find good info on Chinese netizen culture in English in general. I loved chinaSMACK back in the day, but haven't found a good replacement. Do you know of any blogs or anything about this?
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Can't you have multiple users in a dungeon in non text based games? See WoW and RuneScape.
Roguelikes have evolved from being text based long ago, so I don't see why MUDs have to be.
So you say, but I notice you made a text post and not a reaction vlog.
The greatest tragedy is I can only upvote this once.
Because then it would be a different thing?
WoW and Runescape exist. But MUDs exist too, and text and graphics have different possibilities. So it makes sense to have some of both in this rich world.
Indeed, text and graphics are different styles and there are pro's and con's to either one. Similar to how some people enjoy ps1 style games over "modern graphics". One of the major pro's for text based games is accessibility.
It's in a way comparable to the difference between a novel and a movie or a novel and a comic/manga.
Really before the term MMO was coined these type of games where called "graphical MUDs"
Also Runescape started as "DeviousMUD".
Neverwinter, Runescape, Tibia, Ultima online, Everquest and more all formed from MUD lineage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Graphical_MUDs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_massively_multiplay...
You seem to be suffering from the misconception that text-only is a _bad_ thing.
There is a difference between thinking a game being text-only is bad and thinking that a genre being text-only is bad.
Roguelikes use text as symbols, rather than being primarily literary. This comparison doesn’t make sense
Roguelikes have had 2D UIs since the start (just rendered with characters), while a MUD with a 2D interface is not a MUD but an MMORPG. There's a bit of a middle ground in rich MUD clients that can reorganize the 1D stream of words visually into a dashboard, but that's as far as you can go while still calling it a MUD.
MUDs (and closely related single-user text adventure games) are a well-defined genre; you can improve various aspects of the presentation, add rich formatting, images, background music even, but the moment you stop using text as a main medium for gameplay, you're simply not doing a MUD anymore.
I definitely saw MU* games with graphics schemes in the 90s, although most of the moment to moment activity happened in standard trulytext base "rooms". For instance there were a series of Battletech MU* games that would replicate cockpit HUDs, the hex maps, and related via ASCII art for you while piloting a mech.
What’s the point of books? Can’t you just watch a movie?