Comment by crtlaltdel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crtlaltdel | Hacker News Reader

love it! i spent YEARS playing and coding for MUDs and ran a few games as a solo admin/coder. imo it is so very satisfying to watch the global chat channels after a new feature/area/weapon/mob gets rolled out...and what the community thinks of it. i can recall more than one occasion where a well planned quest resulted in interesting dynamics after players started interacting with it. an example; one quest would add an "invisible" token object to a player's inventory. quest stages would check for and modify the state of the token when it was "present". in this particular MUD there was PK...and eventually someone decided to carry the corpse of someone on the quest into an area where you must have the token to enter...and they "walked" right in. none of us had thought of that potential "use-case"...and it exposed a really interesting game play mechanic that we never knew existed...the equivalent of cutting off the guards finger to pass biometric locks in a spy story...

...damn...its hard not to want to start another MUD...

EDIT: i know this post is NOT a MUD project...but the solo-MMO dev story just struck a nostalgia chord in me

On the topic of MUDs.

There's a 1 man developer who wrote not only his own MUD but tools to create and find MUDs to play[0].

It's all written in Elixir and open source[1]. He's given a couple of talks[2] about it and does some living code on Twitch.

I have no affiliation with the author but I did watch some of his talks just for fun.

[0]: https://grapevine.haus [1]: https://exventure.org/ [2]: https://youtu.be/Ef_fG5pd5TY?t=36

There's also some good interviews with him on the various Elixir podcasts. I'm blanking on the one he was recently on, but I suppose listennotes.com(?) might help out.

Another one person MUD project is Bo Zimmerman's CoffeeMUD. It's been around for some time. See http://www.coffeemud.org/

I always felt that a MUD would be a fantastic design approach for a graphical MMO. Specifically, start by creating a text (MUD) version of your world and the basic interactions, and only when you've created a compelling story and experience with words do you translate that into visuals.

It also would be pretty intriguing to create a MUD that could work in multiple media: text, 2d graphics (think point and click adventure), and perhaps 3d graphics. Theoretically it would be doable. A pretty interesting advantage would be that an MMO with a text option would really open it up from the perspective of accessibility.

Any suggestions on protecting credential transfer in a MUD? I have been wanting to build one but honestly I'm used to the convenience of HTTPS and the passing of credentials over a socket is preventing me from starting.

mbedtls is a bit annoying at first but the windows build process is less painful than openssl.

```powershell New-Item "temp" -ItemType "directory" -Force $client = New-Object System.Net.WebClient $client.DownloadFile("https://github.com/ARMmbed/mbedtls/archive/mbedtls-master.zi..., "temp\C:\temp\mbedtls-master.zip") Expand-Archive -Path C:\temp\mbedtls-master.zip -DestinationPath C:\temp\; Move-Item C:\temp\mbedtls-mbedtls-master\ C:\mbedtls\ MSBuild.exe C:\mbedtls\visualc\VS2010\mbedTLS.sln /p:Configuration=Release /p:Platform=x64 MSBuild.exe C:\mbedtls\visualc\VS2010\mbedTLS.sln /p:Configuration=Release /p:Platform=Win32 ```

lets try that again https://git.thejoyo.com/JoYo/snippets/src/branch/master/mbed...

Mudlet and a number of other maintained clients now support TLS!

if you ran it over a websocket it seems like that could help the situation you mention. back in the day, honestly, as mostly 14-16yo kids....we really didn't think about that!

Make a small api in whatever language for the login in https and return a token or something.

SSH? Server-side implementations exist in Python, Go, Java, and other languages. You can have a plain-text, telnet-style listener that informs people that they should use SSH instead.

https://github.com/dworkin/dgd and https://github.com/dworkin/lpcssh

You can wrap a telnet session in TLS pretty easily which then protects the plain text password floating by.

I've also been playing around with OAuth inside of a telnet session, but it's a little wonky as you might guess. If you're signed into Grapevine (mentioned above as well) this link will have you auto signed into a telnet session: https://grapevine.haus/games/Spigot/play

This is my draft spec (it's not completely filled in but the idea is there) https://gist.github.com/oestrich/1fc022a448c36ac2aa5a099f4ca...

Spigot and Grapevine are also open source if you wanted to poke around.

> ...damn...its hard not to want to start another MUD...

docker run -it --rm -p 4000:4000 -p 4001:4001 -p 4002:4002 --rm -v $PWD:/usr/src/game evennia/evennia evennia start -l

docker run --name dreamland -p 8001:9001 -it dreamland/local

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ClockworkSoul/dead-souls-d... > docker-compose.yaml

docker-compose up -d

"...damn...its hard not to want to start another MUD..."

Or you could just play the best MUD there ever was, and still is.

http://www.realmsofdespair.com/

rod??!? wow! yes!

edit: i spent many hours on genesis[0] and did my first lpc scripting (area building) there

0: https://www.genesismud.org/

RoD absorbed an absurd amount of my early teenage life. Wouldn’t trade it for anything.

I can thank RoD/smaug for my coding career. I had some fun on the star wars MUDs too where you got the xyz coords of your ship on the prompt to know where you were.

Awesome...I also spent years playing/coding/admining MUDs, though the one I was writing never got very large.

The mechanics you mentioned are interesting; what kind of MUD was it? I got hooked on DIKU MUDs in 1990 or so, and still play https://mume.org:4143/ from time to time.

i did a good amount of work on merc/rom based games...but it was lpmud that i really got into!

> lpmud

Yes, I remember those, and played with them a bit. They were a far more flexible, dynamic environment, but 'back then' (in the early 90s), as I recall, the performance hit associated with LP MUDs (inherently dynamic) vs. DIKU MUDs (inherently static) was pretty large, and available memory/CPU cycles were at a premium.

Mostly though I think I preferred DIKU MUDs because I happened to start with them, just by chance.

Good times, thanks for sharing!

An LPMud was my jams as well. I actually had reason to go back to DGD and it's technically a really interesting project.

Embedded text editor (a modified version of ed), live code reloading, JIT compilation to a VM byte code, translating data automatically between old objects and their new freshly compiled code...

dgd was a cool project. i remember when dworkin was talking about persisting the world state to disc. i was pretty sure that ldmud also supported `ed`. super fun stuff!

Maybe you should have used monads instead of mutating inventory state

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