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Comment by VadimPR | Hacker News Reader

If you'd like to dig further, online text games (MUDs) are still around. https://mudlet.org is a nice modern client for playing them!

(bias: I'm the project lead)

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And don't forget that MUDs led to the wider field of "interactive fiction," which covers MUDs but also a bunch of other really fascinating ways of telling stories with interactive text. There are oodles of them at https://ifcomp.org/ and https://ifdb.tads.org/

Hi Vadi! Sarapis here. ;)

He's right, Mudlet is the best desktop client out there for Mudding with. This is the part where I mention that I run a company with five MUDs ranging from almost 24 years live to just a couple years live. https://ironrealms.com

I used to be a cat-like dual wielding rapier knight with totem-skills, had a lot of fun with my old guild until the RP requirements were dropped. Still z thank you and the rest of the gang fort giving me so much fun and be able to meet so many nice people. I'm sure my character (Shearr) is still gathering dust somewhere :-)

Five! To think I've been goofing off with MUDs for personal projects the last 20 years and have only written maybe .05 of a MUD.

I have not played MUDs in a long time, but, when I did, I always just got by with Tintin++. I never went all the way and wrote an actual bot that could run unattended, because there were so many different things that could really mess up your bot, or, at least cause it to act impolite, that it looked like more trouble than it was worth. Also, I wasn't that great at scripting with tt++. :P I was, however, (literally) a wizard with LPC.

Yeah, I also got heavily invested in tt++ scripts but never fully automated. It was great back in the day but there were definitely some eccentricities that made advanced difficult - lack of proper lists, awkwardness dealing with empty strings, weird scoping and special variables, no dicts.

I recently dusted off my old files and tried to get it running in the latest version but there were so many breaking changes that I just gave up trying to fix it.

It would be fun to try to make a proper fully automated bot, though as you said, there are so many different contexts and possible text prompts itd be difficult to make it truly reliable. I wonder what the best approach would be - some kind of classic AI goal system or newfangled ML?

(If I had the time to start over, I’d probably use Mudlet since it uses a proper scripting (lua) instead of something that got hacked together over time. Though it’s a bit GUI-reliant for my tastes)

Yeah, tt++'s programming model is essentially a finite state machine with a single global scope. If that sounds hard to work with, it is.

I think if I were starting over, I'd go with a client that's extensible in a real language, whether that be Lua, Python, Ruby, Scheme, elisp, etc., simply so I could take advantage of modern programming language features.

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