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Comment by Jemaclus | Hacker News Reader

I'm building a MUD in Go right now, so this is pretty timely. Really creative take on the genre!

I was literally JUST thinking about doing this today! Although I was thinking I would only do the actual core (connection handling, database, etc) in Go, and do much of the actual game programming in Lua so that players could extend the game.

That's a good idea! I'm not even remotely sure how to do that. I tackled this project as a way to really dig in and learn Go, and I'm still working my way through it. I'm slowly learning more idiomatic ways of writing Go, but I'm not even sure how I'd go about extending the game with Lua or anything else. Got any resources on that kind of thing, or could you give a high-level description of how that might work, so I can explore the possibility?

I definitely need some scripting ability. For example, it would be nice if I could script mobs to perform certain actions during quests, something that I'd have to hard-code in Go right now.

I think gopher-lua on github could be useful to you

I'll check it out, thanks!

Cool! What kind of MUD, if you don't me asking?

It's a Merc/Diku inspired version. The codebase is written in Go, and the data is stored in JSON files. I'll open source it, eventually. It's feature-complete, I just need to get some bare-bones data in there (like starting areas, items, mobs, etc). Maybe in another month or two. :)

You could allow (trusted) players to customize rooms and objects with an in-world accessible Lua layer similar to how LPMUDs used LPC. That would be pretty cool. MUDs taught me how to write creatively, but not how to code; in the future they could do both.

Sounds awesome! I do have some built in methods to instantiate mobs, objects, and rooms, then save them to disk, but they're pretty basic and don't allow more advanced things like scripting events or locking doors and things like that.

I was already a fairly creative writer when I got into MUDs, but my coding skills were weak and pretty disorganized. Programming a DIKU MUD back in the early 90s that people actually used and enjoyed required me to step up my focus and skills, which got me ready to enter the tech industry proper in the mid 90s.

In-world Lua is a great idea. All of the core MUD programming back then was, of course, written in C, but player (and admin) scripting was done with an embedded Perl interpreter.

Same! A MUD is one of the first things I learned to code with C when I was in college.

Well, I'm pretty stoked to hear that! What does 'feature complete' mean? Like, 'MVP' sort of thing? MUDs and friends tend to have a never-end, never 'complete' feature set. (:

Well, I mean that you can technically play the game. You can register, log in, walk around, pick up items, drop items, wear items, wield items, practice, train, fight, die, cast spells, use skills, do socials, check your stats, check your score, check your inventory, open/close/lock/pick doors, join groups, chat, send notes, etc, etc.

You're right that it's never really done, but my theoretical goal is basically a bare-bones MUD written in Go that anyone else could pick up and turn into a fully featured one. More practically, I'll probably just make a couple dozen areas and stick it on a server and see if anyone wants to play before I spend too much more time on it.

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