Exploring 3-Move – A LambdaMOO inspired environment | Hacker News Reader

Exploring 3-Move – A LambdaMOO inspired environment

bluishcoder.co.nz

74 pointstonyg15 comments

I could say a lot about this topic, but I'll try to keep it brief.

There were a number of similar "post-LambdaMOO" systems built in the mid to late 90s, and early 2000s. I wrote something of my own during a year long bout of .com crash unemployment 2001ish time frame. But before that there was "coolmud" [written by Stephen White who wrote the original MOO before Pavel Curtis adopted it and created LambdaMOO] and then Greg Hudson's "coldmud", which spawned "Genesis", a few other projects, and the thing I was working on but never finished.

Basically they were attempts to generalize the "extensible object oriented network service" side of MOO beyond the 'game' or 'chat' oriented of LambdaMOO and to fix some technical weaknesses that LambdaMOO had.

IMHO these types of architectures/systems were sort of an alternative path for how the internet could have developed if the web and HTTP based architectures hadn't taken over and defined how we think about what the Internet is. (For people who didn't use the Internet prior to the existence of the web it's hard to imagine that, I know.)

I think the combination of prototype oriented object systems plus multi-users plus networking plus group-authoring plus socializing is something that still hasn't been realized to the depth that these systems had, even if they were hobbled by their lack of multimedia capability.

I believe there were similar efforts on the LPC/LPmud side of things, but there were some differences in philosophy there.

LambdaMOO itself lives on and gets some ongoing development here and there.

Can you expand (or point to a resource that expands) on the "internet as extensible object oriented network service" concept? I'm having difficulty grasping what the key differences between that and the HTTP approach look like.

My understanding of HTTP is essentially "send request with resource locator to server, receive response usually with document" which seems at face value similar to "send message to object, receive message back".

Well, before the development of fat Javascript heavy AJAXy type apps, with websockets, webrtc, etc. the difference was more marked.

A huge difference in granularity, at least. But also a conceptual one. In MOO type worlds the 'physical' objects one 'sees' in the [textual] 'world' are directly associated with programmatic objects (w/ prototypical inheritance but nicer IMHO than Javascript's).

And the environment was such that any MOO user could author -- by creating objects [cloning prototypes] and -- if they had programmer permissions -- by adding "verbs" (methods) to those objects.

And code written in the language was well sandboxed with decent permissions systems and a runtime that enforced good behaviour on programs. Tho in the early days of LambdaMOO it was somewhat easy to DOS the system, that got fixed.

Authoring was easy, barrier to entry low, but there was a consistent metaphor: users in adventure-game-like rooms, with objects that could be manipulated through English-like commands, and a descriptive narrative applied throughout.

I can't help but think this would all be much cooler in this day and age with the arrival of robust natural language parsing, 'augmented reality', and so on.

If you don't make it to the end of the article, there's a server running on bluishcoder.co.nz, port 7777:

    nc bluishcoder.co.nz 7777

or with SSL:

    openssl s_client -connect bluishcoder.co.nz:7778

Down at the moment.

It's back now!

Upvoted for LambdaMoo, even though I was more of an LPMUD guy. :) LPMUD was the first environment I programmed in for an extended period outside of a course, and it taught me a lot.

I was an LPMUD guy too. I found once I got used to its verb syntax it was hard for me to switch codebases to something like a MOO.

Meanwhile I was a fool who wrote way too much MUSHcode. At least it helped by making me learn to limit the side effects my code had due to performance issues...

I've been off and on playing a DIKU-based MUD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DikuMUD called MUME (Multi Users in Middle Earth) since the early 90s:

http://mume.org/

telnet mume.org 4242

This is an amazing place; it's sort of like actually playing inside the Lord of the Rings books. The world is enormous and gorgeous. It's designed to be player vs. player (one side are the good races, like Humans, Elves and Hobbits, the other side are the evil races, such as Orcs and Trolls.)

However, evil players rarely make it west of Bree. The Shire is a big and safe Player vs. Environment area.

Here's the current global map of zones:

https://www.realms.org/mume_map.txt

The B is Bree, R is Rivendell and the Ms are Moria.

I clicked through to your map link, expecting something massive, sprawling, and Tolkeinesque. In retrospect, what I got was what I should have expected. Also, makes me grin: so perfectly typically MUD. :-)

Hah! Well said.

You need to create a character and login to the world and start walking around to enjoy the 'goodness' I described.

It's not conducive to a rapid 'check this thing out' kind of look.

Yeah, I used to mud/moo back in the day (1994-1998 probably, since that's when I was at school), but apart from infrequent ifcomp-inspired excursions, I haven't tried any lately.

Damn, just spent 20 minutes trying to figure out how to reset my password. I think this would be one of my oldest accounts.

FYI: Connect info:

telnet lambda.moo.mud.org 8888

Most of the old MOO/MUDs didn't have password reset functionality, IIRC. The best you could do is try and convince an admin to do it. I know my MUD of choice didn't require an email address.

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