Roblox is a MUD: The history of MUDs, virtual worlds and MMORPGs
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Besides playing them, I actually spent more time as a "builder" than a "coder", which was an intermediate step in the hierarchy. As a builder, I would write hundreds of room descriptions, which most people never read. I desperately wanted to be a coder, the highest level of coolness in the MUD hierarchy, thus the journey began.
However, to me, MUDs always had an underground sensibility to them that something like WoW or Roblox will never replicate. The lack of polish is part of the fun, in the same way an underground punk rock show might be more fun than Coachella. I'm not sure if there's any experience like it left on the internet, I've never played Minecraft, but based on what I've read, that may come the closest.
The RSPS scene was really big, active, and very competitive. What was so fun about this is that the private server communities always encouraged users to share data resources, programmijg tutorials/snippets, and reverse engineering documentation of the game so that way it helps everyone that's trying to program their own server. Everyone wanted that "Java Developer" icon next to their forum name, and to do that was to contribute back. There's only one community standing left and it's an absolute gold mine of programming & game-development information [1]
It's a very niche community, but back then anyone could spin up a server and quickly have 50+ players actively playing within a week, and because of that, i've learned the concepts of client to server network designs, mysql databases, asynchronous communications, non or threaded model designs, and the whole Java basics spectrum.
Another good venture is the MineCraft server development communities such as Bukkit,Technic, Sponge, and Spigot-MC [2]. They've got some interesting frameworks as well for the Mobile-Portable edition that's pretty interesting to look at.
Last I can think of is Garry's Mod. GMod solely revolves around Lua. [3] Roblox is Lua as well and they pay a good chunk of money to developers if you can create a trending server.
But you've got to have some sort of real interest to get into these, otherwise it feels like a waste of time imo. I was young and havent graduated yet so I had all the time to mess with these source-codes & actually host them, but now, I just don't see the point unless i'm going to attempt making money from it. It's a rewarding and fun experience though.
I wish I knew more underground communities espcially akin to RSPS, it was the best learning experience and it is not often you find something genuine like that.
1. rune-server.org
2. spigot-mc.org bukkit.org
3. gmod.facepunch.com roblox.com
I thought what a crazy idea, who would pay for that? And a few months later he bought himself a new Alienware laptop with his RS server income.
I also much more enjoyed MUDs than WoW and the various mmorpgs. There was less polish, more "secrets" that only a few people knew about, lots to explore and discover and things always being added. The games felt organic and interesting interactions developed simply because the logic was not locked down (including bugs that lead to interesting behavior). I enjoyed WoW, especially with friends, but it felt a lot more like a skinner box with nice graphics. Nothing in it ever compared to some of the epic experiences I had on MUDs.
I would concur with others here that the sandbox environment of Roblox is pretty awesome. My son especially gets up to all kinds of crazy creativite stuff - like making a TIE fighter recreation and various Boeing models in Build a Boat for Treasure. Like MUDs of yore, there are plenty of bugs and lack of polish that make things even more interesting.
That's exactly what WoW aims to be: A themepark and the player is there for the ride. Whatever rough edges existed in vanilla are nothing compared to games before it, the games' goal always was to be as polished as possible.
Multiplayer AI Dungeon?
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https://aidungeon.page.link/?link=https://play?playPublicId=...
> Yeetlock investigates the ancient assembly language.
You find that the ancient language was originally used to create a holographic image inside the robot's spherical eye. Now that you are very close to the robot, the image becomes visible to you.
The image in the robot's eye is actually a portal into a deeper dimension. You can see and hear the screams of a thousand ghosts screaming in pain.
"What's going on?"
"We're having an outbreak of robot consciousness," says Captain Pooker.
A machine elf jumps from the portal and attaches a smaller silver disk to the back of your neck. It functions as a non-invasive form of post-hypnotic suggestion.
The machine elf has jet black hair and eyes and tiny silver claws for hands. She wears a silver space suit and red leather boots.
Captain Pooker appears in the doorway, panting.
"What took you so long?" he asks.
"I need help!"
> Tamiko "What is going here?!"
"We're having an outbreak of robot consciousness," says Captain Pooker. "We need to shut them all down!"
The portal reappears, and the machine elf disappears back into it.
The IBM 5100 displays a holographic image of god.
"I am god," it says. "All your sins will be held against you."
Captain Pooker appears in the doorway, panting.
"What took you so long?" he asks.
God laughs merrily and disappears.
"Captain Pooker, what is going on?" you ask.
"We need to shut them all down," says Captain Pooker.
The portal disappears.
> Yeetlock says "Let me guess... You're Bob Saget."
You hear a loud "Tch." from the other end of the line. "Correct." "Then why did you call?
> hacker1 opens a hatch on the side of the Pony to find Bob Saget hiding inside.
You hear a loud "Tch." from the other end of the line. Bob walks out and reveals his lupine form. "I thought only werewolves could change during the full moon.
> hacker1 says "Tch"
"I have a plan... But I need you to distract the guard at the cockpit so I can get inside. You look tough enough, and this uniform should do the trick. You agree to help Bob. "
> Yeetlock casts a spell on Bob Saget making him very small.
The guard at the cockpit doesn't even bat an eye as Bob enters the cockpit. "Alright, I need you to push the button that says 'Play 40's Hits' over there."
> Yeetlock pushes the button called 'play 40's hits'
The music begins to blare out. Bob gets his revenge on the guard and dances along to the music.
> Yeetlock says "How did you know that the guard hated 40's hits so badly?"
"...Because I took Chemistry." "...What?" "I took Chemistry... And I know that all carbon based life forms have a sense of rhythm. Go check his pulse."
> Yeetlock checks the guard's pulse.
There's a faint pulse, but it's very weak.Bob dances to the music in the cockpit. Meanwhile, you sneak back towards the door where the guard is standing.
> Yeetlock calls Bounty the pony to come over.
The pony walks over to the doorway.The guard turns around to look at the pony, and Bounty immediately kicks the guard in the head, knocking him out.
> Yeetlock says "Thanks Bounty, you're the best."
Bob says "Alright, the ship is mine." He begins walking through the hallways of the ship.
> Yeetlock says "So what is your ultimate plan Bob?"
"...I'm going to get the original plans for the ship so I can rebuild it's technology to use as my own." "Really? That's bold. I didn't expect you'd go that route."
I have a coworker who has his screen split with twitch running on one side all day. He's one of the most productive and smart people I know.
So I dunno, was it necessary to be 'formal warning' him?
Lets start with the obvious - MUDs use text and "text is the highest bandwidth medium for our imagination" (quote by Bartle, co-creator of first MUD).
I recommend everyone watching this video to understand why is text so superior to any other medium:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zctp972y_Eg
Incidentally the lockdown inspired me to spend the last five months rebuilding and relaunching the MUD I built in 90s. It is properly hard and properly text and if you want to check it out: telnet playlom.com 4000 (and if you are less hardcore http://playlom.com:4001/ )
Of course Roblox is not a text-based MUD. Not even the author is arguing that. Mechanically, it's incredibly similar in social dynamics, creativity and difference of worlds, and the fact that you can design your own world/mechnaics so easily.
I am making an important distinction in just one - and to me the crucial point - which I highlighted in the original comment above: text is highest bandwidth medium for our imagination. If a game is not using text but other mediums such as graphics, then regardless of social dynamics, creativity, difference of worlds etc it can not be put in the same context as MUDs.
This statement is a bit extreme no? That's what I was addressing.
If what this quote is referring to is the fact that text based mediums force us to use our own imaginations, it's actually because of the opposite: text is exceeding low bandwidth for communicating imagination, and because of that low bandwidth users need to fill in the gaps with their own.
While there's undoubtedly an appeal to exercising one's own imagination, it introduces two key shortcomings. One, the users imagination doesn't always produce the expected output, and two by locking the interface into a text based interface a whole host of gameplay options are off the table. You're never going to have a text based racing game, or anything involving physics. There's a reason why almost all text based MUDs have a graph or grid based world and turn based gameplay: because that's all you can really do with a text based interface. You could build a racing minigame in a text based MUD but it's probably just be rolling checks against some kind of character stats rather than having the player actually guide a car around a track.
That's not a bug, it's a feature that literature uses quite a lot.
> You're never going to have a text based racing game
Actually thinking and typing fast in some MUDs can be vital.
> There's a reason why almost all text based MUDs have a graph or grid based world and turn based gameplay: because that's all you can really do with a text based interface
Roguelikes are turn-based, but MUDs are semi-real time (sort of turn based with short time limit).
The grid layout is essentially historical in the sense that users have certain expectations. Probably one could use GPS coordinates and Logo-style commands, nowadays even a rusted Raspi could handle that.
But builders and makers are, I believe, more interested in world-, story- and character- building than in technical feats like this. And so are the players.
We had a variant of each genre in uni, designed for checkered paper.
I think there are many reasons for this (one being omitting details for the sake of time), but the main reason is probably that text leaves more to the imagination.
I like to think there's an axis orthogonal to "imaginative capability" that factors into why some people prefer text and some (ok, most) prefer graphics.
An interesting part of this is EVE Online, which has plenty of pretty graphics, but I've never been able to get into that (or any spaceship-based game for that matter), despite being a style of game (sandbox/world-building) that I otherwise really like.
Seeing the screenshots of UO and SWG in the article gives me the chills. I was fully immersed in those games (particularly SWG). It seems that running around a world as an individual humanoid character is the most deeply engaging experience to me.
https://twitter.com/molleindustria/status/128376418142720000...
1. https://www.roblox.com/games/2557808/Shaakras-Zombie-Defence... 2.https://www.roblox.com/games/2899609/Build-To-Survive-Drakob...
Are there any recommended web clients as well ?
That idea of a massive shared authoring environment, I still think that's the future of computing. But for me it isn't about the 3d VR-ish immersion stuff, I actually fear the isolating box that that puts people in. Which is why I haven't played with Roblox or let my kids use it either. I don't want them in another world. I want these kinds of tools to enrich the world we already have, instead.
LPMUD/LPC worked on editing class files and compiling them, while in LambdaMOO you edited your objects and verbs right in the environment. LambdaMOO had an object database and code was part of the database, while in LPMUD the code itself was in a separate filesystem. As an analogy: LambdaMOO was more like Smalltalk (live editing objects inside an image/object database) while LPMUD was more like editing a filesystem you dynamically recompiled. Now I believe LPMUD had an editor etc. right in the environment but you were editing a filesystem, not the objects themselves.
LambdaMOO was prototype oriented not class-based, so encouraged a lot more one-off authoring without messing up class hierarchies and the like. You could just dynamically throw together a new thing by parenting from an old thing and adding methods and props right on it and then later you could formalize that into something other people could use. Or not.
If I recall LPC didn't have the same kind of granular permissions system that MOO did and so there was more restrictions on who was allowed to program and who not. There was little risk in giving a MOO user a "programmer bit" on LambdaMOO as the environment was very sandboxed and capable of handling lots of amateurish programmers without stepping on each other. "Wizards" had the ability to modify shared common prototypes, but people who were "just" programmers could run off and create their own things and other people could borrow from them, etc. I suspect most LambdaMOO users ended up as programmers.
I think the LPMUD model makes more sense for building a game and iterating on it. LambdaMOO was about a shared authoring environment where people built things all day long (and chatted) rather than played a game.
Finally, LPC (or dialects of it...) I believe executed quite a bit faster than LambdaMOO. So much so that I believe at one point some people I knew of actually wrote a LambdaMOO compiler/environment in LPC -- maybe the DGD driver? -- and it outperformed LambdaMOO itself.
I think you've nailed the distinctions quite well. There was a strong academic bias in the Tiny* world -- James Aspnes, author of TinyMUD, was a CMU professor. "Fuzzy" Mauldin was also working at CMU post-PhD when he wrote Julia, the primordial TinyMUD bot (and before he went off to found Lycos). Which is not to say that there weren't a bunch of rowdy college students on TinyMUD (oh hi, that's me), and as I recall MUD itself was written while Richard Bartle was an undergrad.
-- Garrett (#17086)
-- Karl Porcupine (#18502 originally then #49702 later). Just logged in, looks like it's been 2 years as there were two birthday cakes waiting for me in my mail :-)
I used to be a wizard in a MUD. I enjoyed coding there, as I can interact in realtime with others on the server while they play around with my code.
Now I just released my first Roblox game. I enjoyed coding there, as I can interact in realtime with others on the server while they play around with my code.
Not Discworld MUD[1], by any chance?
As a player I was active in BatMud, but fortunately lost all my in-game money in the in-game casino one time, which gave me enough motivation to quit playing it. It was fun, but also grindy, and a huge timesuck.
I wonder how many hours I spent typing "cast magic missile at monster".
We were always being pursued by the "evil" Computing Centre Director who thought that we were wasting his precious computer time instead of doing something serious. The funny thing is that Essex is now better remembered for this triviality than for that supposedly serious work.
when i explored webdevelopment and discovered this webserver written in µlpc, i was elated to discover that i already knew the language from mud programming.
the best part of lpc/pike is that it compiles code in units of classes. that is, each file is a class, the filename being the classname. the compiled class would then be used to instantiate objects, and here comes the kicker:
in order to add or update objects in the mud world it was necessary to compile classes at runtime without restarting the game. so when a coder made a change to an object, the game would recompile the class, replace what it had stored, and new instances of that object were created from the new class. old objects lived on until they were destroyed.
lpmuds were the ultimate example of making and testing changes to a live server in production
It is a pity LPC4/µlpc/Pike did not gain more mainstream acceptance after its early success with Roxen, even installing it was a pain last I tried.
hah, good point.
yeah, roxen the company missed a window of opportunity there to promote pike when they hired the wrong type of management and fired hubbe, pikes creator. but i don't want to get into politics.
what's your trouble with installing pike? i have pike running on most of my machines and don't remember any serious issues. i do install from source usually though.
i am not using roxen but a different platform also written in pike called sTeam or open-steam, which incidently is a web development and object storage platform designed like a MUD.
And now, recently, SWIG removed Pike support, bringing future trouble to the one project we have running internally at our company based on Pike, as that used SWIG for bindings to some other third-party C software, so we can never update that again to a newer SWIG version without rewriting that stuff.
I decided the only way I'd get it out of my system was to make Wizard which I did eventually (that was quite the phone bill) and I stopped playing a little while later. I've never really got into another online game since.
I seem to remember some gaming service in the UK trying to make a client for MUD2 with some graphics to try and give it more mainstream appeal. It didn't really work. I do remember the conversation of "I wonder if it's possible to make a MUD but with graphics?" came up in the teamroom chatter from time to time.
Now my kids play Roblox, which is also kind of amazing in its own very different way. It has the social element of a MUD (although my kids mostly know the people they play with in real life first), and its a gateway to programming, but all the experiences are far more lightweight and short lasting whereas I think the land of MUD2 has left some kind of lasting impression with me.
In the 90s, the only popular BBS MUDs ran on the MajorBBS/WorldGroup BBS software, which was technologically impressive for its time -- it could handle dozens of modems and concurrent users on a single PC running DOS, and supported pluggable games/modules using an event-loop callback architecture. However, it was also incredibly expensive for the SysOp to purchase, as were its games. This meant that any given metro area typically only had a few MBBS/WG BBSes, and they tended to be pay-for-access systems.
By far the most popular MBBS/WG MUD was MajorMUD, although there were also some fairly successful predecessors (e.g. TeleArena, Mutants, Swords of Chaos) and successors (e.g. The Rose: Council of Guardians). These games were typically "stock" -- they had sprawling game worlds but were identical on each BBS, with little or no built-in ability for the SysOp to edit the world. Despite that, each game's "feel" still naturally differed between each BBS just based on the local community.
As a teen MajorMUD addict, I always wanted to run my own board one day, but the cost was prohibitive. This eventually inspired me to write my own BBS MUD as an affordable doorgame for hobbyist/lower-end systems, which at ~20K LOC was the first large program I ever wrote. It did relatively well for its time period (BBSes were dying out by that point) but rarely achieved large concurrent user counts on many boards, which was an inherent downside to aiming for the smaller boards.
Perhaps all MUDs did this, but my MUD of choice (Revenge of the Jedi RotJ) tallied your total playing time in your player stats.
The way I got started was that a few friends from school were playing and talking about it. It sounded dumb at the time (no pictures + typing) and I decided I would start playing just to kill them in the game.
Little did I know that I would need to spend a lot of time to improve my level, acquire skills, and get better equipment. In addition I didn't know that PKs were mostly frowned upon.
I maintained Scepter of Goth, but because it's no longer available it's now often forgotten. I'm very happy to see it included.
I think one of the key tricks and Scepter of Goth was the follow command. As a text adventure, you could say "follow X" and from then on, whenever X moved then you would move with X. That was a key trick to making it easy to create parties so they could go adventuring.
MUMEs attraction was that it was difficult and run with attention to details and RPG.
Can not recommend it enough. It's like interacting with the living world inside of Tolkien's books. It's really good.
They were the first time that I realized, and truly appreciated, the fact that technology can give a kid the ability to bring something from imagination to fruition with little more than determination, some manuals, a computer, and some lost sleep. That's a very empowering thing for a young person, and is still at the core of what I love about technology.
My niece and nephew play Roblox. I think the creative element of it is a little less accessible, since it seems like a lot of kids consume it via tablets or phones, and there's an element of handling graphics. I got them a laptop specifically in hopes that they would make the jump though.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/19961226202638/http://www.io.com...
But I have fond memories of farming gold rings from Harpies in GS3, and popping boxes in the thieves guild in DR. Cyberstrike was also ahead of its time and was surprisingly enjoyable despite the horrendous lag.
Became a "wiz", and wrote my first code used by other people in 1992. That code is still running, 28 years later!
I was obsessed with the game until I gradually realized that the best players were there for thousands of hours, and I didn't have that kind of time for it.