A simple MUD server in Python which can be run on a Raspberry Pi | Hacker News Reader

A simple MUD server in Python which can be run on a Raspberry Pi

github.com

126 pointsraytopia65 comments

I do love muds.

I sorta maintain: https://github.com/shmup/miniboa

There's a lot of rabbit holes if you ever want to explore the social/textual landscape of the 80s and 90s, especially the 90s and into the early 2000s. A LOT of stuff was written. Recently I've been absorbing more of it

Like this: http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/Virtual.Community.html

And also a book you may like to look up, "My Tiny Life": https://archive.org/details/mytinylifecrimep0000dibb_c6m4

Or read some papers indexed here:

- https://hayseed.net/MOO/

- https://lisdude.com/moo/

Bare with me, the topic of MUDs isn't mentioned here often and I've been wanting to link dump a little

Super cool. MUDs were cool because they were open, free. I'm kind of repelled by the modern derivative, the Corporate Games like World of Warcraft.

Would a modern MUD be web based? What is the modern web version of a MUD?

I don't think immersive 3D like the aforementioned WoW is really a MUD but I am not sure pure text is to my liking. I think Rogue-likes might have hit the sweet spot — allowing you to explore somewhat graphically but there was still a degree of imagination required. The cost to create a Rogue-like world too would not be prohibitive (and I mean cost in terms of time and effort — like the time and effort that would be required to create a 3D immersive universe like WoW, etc.).

And, sure, I know Dwarf Fortress is a thing but the other aspect of MUDs that was cool was that so many existed with their own unique feel and character.

I guess I am looking for a web ring of Rogue-likes.

Even cooler if, while on different servers, they had a mechanism for linking or tunneling to other sites. I'm imagining two sysops cooperating and adding tunnels between their two worlds so that a player could wander into a completely new world — unknowingly moving from one site to another. You get enough sysops to join up and you kind of no longer need a web ring.

There's a lot of muds with web clients now a days. Telnet still seems to be the most popular though because most of the popular clients support it.

If you're looking for something that isn't just text based Graphical Muds wmay be what you're looking for. For context they are the often times over looked link between muds and mmos.

I swear I remember reading something about connected mud servers but I can't remember it off of the top of my head unfortunately.

Telnet's a shit option these days. No encryption.

Webclients can be protected by HTTPS, and Evennia (for one) offers SSH.

Genuine question, but why would a MUD require encryption? Seems like a strange feature.

Character login requires password, which is sent plaintext over telnet.

Even if you get around that somehow, there are still concerns about session hijacking to steal someone’s in-game items and currency.

I suppose the threat vector seems incredibly low to me. Seems like a strange use of a capable hacker's time, in today's world of bitcoin and ransomware, to be preying on people's in-game currency / pets from ancient MUDs. Their saleability would seem to approach zero.

Password reuse might be an issue, but in my experience people had their environments pre-configured to log in automatically, so a unique complex password would eliminate that risk.

Personally, I think the complexity of implementing encryption for these services would outweigh the benefits. A big part of their appeal is the ease of setup and shell access.

I think you way, way underestimate MUD players :-)

I view it as an issue of best-practice password hygiene. Just because the stakes are low, and it's a hassle, doesn't mean you should skip it.

The more you get used to implementing it, the easier it gets.

ssh is just as easy to use on the client side

SASL can secure the login without encrypting the whole session. And most other things benefit more from signing than from encryption, though I'm not sure how much support for this there is.

That said, server software supporting SSH is getting common these days, so it might be a matter of just updating and/or reconfiguring the server. (It's difficult to make too general a statement about all servers though)

Who’s looking though?

In my opinion, its a critical feature.

Consider that in 2024 even this public forum is accessed in an encrypted form by even non-logged in users. Here's an unstructured list of some of the reasons:

Man in the middle attacks achieving remote code execution on client or server

Surveillance and/or stalking

Presence monitoring

Psychological analysis (Maybe a user is drunk, maybe they're in a good or bad mood today.)

Command injection or deletion

Most people use services with no regard to any of these things and most will never be subject to them. If a precocious hacker teen, controlling spouse or parent, spyware/adware company, censorship application, oppressive state regime, rogue sysadmin, rival player or any such of the endless possible yet rare actors decide that your service is best suited to these ends, it is now more or less trivial to develop a plugin for their evil device.

TERMINAL EMULATOR SECURITY ISSUES 2003 https://marc.info/?l=bugtraq&m=104612710031920&q=p3

Most people assume the threat is the FBI or the Chinese or something; it's not that MUDs are some high-value intelligence asset, but consider what anyone could glean by deploying a packet sniffer on your LAN and reading your traffic to/from it. That it's MUD traffic is immaterial.

Same goes for local LLMs. Most UIs don't offer HTTPS enabled by default, so you're broadcasting your most intimate thoughts on the same network segment your malevolent stepchild uses. Apps make amateur spycraft for BPD-types easy.

> Would a modern MUD be web based? What is the modern web version of a MUD?

A month ago people posted Improbable Island here. It's not "modern" but it's a mud-like website

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39135779

I inquired about the relationship with muds. It's.. like a mud, but without a map (so rooms form an arbitrary graph, and edges don't have a cardinal direction like "north")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39141173

Have you tried Neverwinter nights' persistent worlds? Not the NWN online game but the original 2001 game.

Back in the day I thought it is the best thing: players can create their own worlds and invite others. Of course builders cannot connect two worlds so that was a pity. Still, I believe it was a lot better than games such as WoW.

Nevertheless the game never achieved the popularity it deserves, and nowadays the persistent worlds are not played by many.

Web MUD clients exist.

I'm really not sure if modernizing MUDs is worth the effort. Actual MUD gamers will look at it with either contempt or distrust, especially blind players. And regular gamers are unlikely to play a text game. I could make a game with a MUD sensibility or even use a MUD engine, but I would never call it a MUD. MUD players want more of the past and I'm not really interested in that.

> especially blind players

Isn't accessibility for a web-based MUD just a matter of adding `aria-live="polite"` as an attribute to the incoming text? Five years ago I did this on https://evolvingstory.juliablewis.com/ and it seemed to work with OSX screen reading.

This is more of a social problem than a technical problem. MUD blind players are extremely distrustful of innovation because, more often than not, innovation means graphics or custom clients they cannot freely alter and manipulate.

And they don't wanna be left behind. They wanna use their own client on a telnet connection because that is already suited for them. Many QOL features for the sighted can have a negative impact on the blind. Any attempt at engaging that audience must first convince them that you won't leave them behind.

One simple way to benefit the blind is by making sounds integral to a game, with clear cues for everything.

the modern equivalent of a MUD as a user-designed social experience is definitely VRChat

Roblox and Minecraft are what the kids who can't afford a VR setup are using.

I too love MUDs / MOOs.

I still miss some of the features that Discworld Mud had, and mainstream gaming hasn't warmed to. Strange currencies, complex banking, different in-game languages, convenience features gated in RP ways (the Taxi guild of portal wizards!), etc. The conventional wisdom holds that that'd be far too much friction for modern games, but it contributed so much to making the world feel more than an inch deep, which is something modern gaming needs all the help with it can get.

I also think scripting in LambdaMOO may have been my gateway drug to coding. Once I learnt I was able to expand the world myself, I was intoxicated. Yib's Guide to MOOing [0] is a great read for anyone interested in how that all used to work.

And the social scene of these services in the 90s and early 00s is hard to describe. Honestly, @go #17 in LambdaMOO at its height felt more like the Metaverse to me than anything Facebook has made to date.

[0] https://www.lisdude.com/moo/ygm.pdf

Discworld Mud is still around, active, and getting updates fyi! I'm sure it's not the same as it's heyday but . I love the language feature in particular, I also want it to be used in other games. Having to change currency I could do without though :P How many Ankh-Morpork dollars to an Agatean rhinu? Can I convert Djelian talona to Lancre pounds in this town? Writing that out though, it is great for the roleplaying experience.

Earlier tonight I converted some Ankh-Morpork dollars into Lancre bucks so I could buy a tent. They recently added tents so now I can afford a "house" :P

Here's a page I threw up with a buncha Discworld MUD links, for the curious: https://badteeth.dungeon.red/

I've been messing around with miniboa. Pretty fun to use!

Those links on Moos look interesting thanks for sharing!

I wonder what the reason for calling out the fact that it could be run on a Pi is. MUDs are not new, of course, so I guess they’ve been run on some very weak machines.

But, the license file seems to be 11 years old… I guess those older Pi’s are pretty weak.

Still slightly confused but less so.

Even the oldest rPIs are more than tenthousand times more powerful than what you'd need to run a MUD. Pretty much anything that can run a telnet server users could do useful stuff with could also run a MUD. This is written in python, so it probably needs slightly more power than that though.

Most likely this is just a case of awkward English - the intended use of the project is to be run on a rPI. It's not a minimum requirement.

Color me suspicious. I ran a MUD back in 2005 that we opted not to add features to because of how CPU intensive they were.

Obviously if you took gamma diku and tossed it on an rpi, yeah, because that was built in the '80s with that hardware in mind. But muds evolve and get features and people come up with stuff that can't be ran on ancient hardware.

For example, most MUDs turn(ed) off mobile AI when players weren't in the zone. It wasn't strictly necessary to have it on, but it would be nice to have NPCs that did stuff when PCs weren't around so when they revisit something happened.

I'd be suspicious too if I said any mud rather than a mud. That MUDs have been run on much weaker hardware is a fact.

Also I didn't write that in a vacuum, I wrote that as a response to a comment which establishes the context you are to understand my statements in.

Still seems confusing to me. MUDs were run on much weaker hardware than that even.

Definitely. I ran a MUD on a Sun Sparcstation with 32 megs of RAM back in the mid 90's. (The MUD only used a fraction of that, of course.)

That's similar to what Discworld MUD ran on back then, although that needed frequent MUD reboots to keep the MUD and server somewhat useable (every 45 minutes or so). Today it is on a 8GB VM and only reboots for bigger game updates. We're looking at moving it onto a PI5. The added bloat can no longer keep up with hardware getting better :)

Perhaps it's just meant to signal: Anyone can run this, hackers welcome!

Most people don't run servers. RPi is seen as the way to run servers at home for most people.

This just sparked me to look up my old favorite. Just a 20 year old thread with posts over the years: https://alt.mud.narkive.com/No6CZyd7/questwars-quest-for-fae...

What's a good MUD to play now?

The Wheel of Time MUD has been around since the '90s and I've been playing it on and off for the last couple decades.

https://wotmud.info/

https://www.mudlet.org/ is a client with a lot of muds to choose from. You can also connect to others of course.

I still play https://mume.org/ from time to time. It's been running (almost) continuously since 1991. I started it in 1992.

My favorite MUD is definitely Midnight Sun II. It's one of the MUDs in the selection you get when you start Mudlet from mudlet.org, which is an excellent/modern client.

http://www.eotl.org/ was great in the 80s and was still great when I played a few years ago.

https://www.legendsofthejedi.com/

thanks for the suggestions everyone. just played the LoTR through MUDlet for a bit.

For anyone else wondering what a MUD is, down in the README:

> MUD is short for Multi-User Dungeon. A MUD is a text-based online role-playing game. MUDs were popular in the early 80s and were the precursor to the graphical Massively-Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games we have today, like World of Warcraft. http://www.mudconnect.com is a great site for learning more about MUDs.

MUDs can be wonderful. They can be even better with a proper MUD client. A couple of the popular ones are TinTin++ (text) or Mudlet (gui).

https://tintin.mudhalla.net/

https://www.mudlet.org/

I spent quite a bit of time at the end of high school into early college playing on a Forgotten Realms themed MUD. It accomplished two valuable things: it durably increased my typing speed by 20-30 wpm, and it also inoculated me against the MMOs which would have been way more destructive for me.

Humm, you can run anything on a Raspberry Pi as long as it has an arm linux version? Or it's interpreted and the interpreter runs on said arm linux, as in this case.

It would have been interesting enough without the Raspberry Pi part.

Another good mud server and open source in python is https://www.evennia.com/

I've wondered about SMS for a MUD. I'm guessing it would be crazy expensive...

I used to play a MUD that has a sizeable player population that used Mxit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mxit

It was... strange. I still don't understand how it could have possibly worked.

MUDs were a lot of fun back in the day when I had fewer demands on my time, and had friends that played and competed with me. Unfortunately they can be very time consuming, similar to an mmorpg, and hardly anyone plays them anymore.

I did my first mud on a 386. It was dos or Linux I can’t remember. I was learning C at the same time so you can imagine it was the software equivalent of pruno.

MUDs would work great inside WhatsApp.

The complete opposite of Raspberry Pi, but I predict that one result of generative AI models is we will end up with over 1 million concurrent players on MUDs.

#1 Dramatic simplification of navigation and actions, making them accessible for new users

#2 Significantly better role-playing enabled through NPC characters

#3 Access & visualization medium by choice: text, narration/voice, image, video, 3D

If I had the free time this is what I would work on now. I've messed around with LLM RPGs, but the big piece is there needs to be a stored structure to get around the context model issues, or at minimum reduce costs and speed up use since we now have huge context models.

I have half a MUD that uses TTS and speech-to-text as the interface with LLMs generating the content and a database keeping the context. It works surprisingly well.

Slight tangent, but The Whale's Keeper (https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=5k15omg0bdbddxfr) was an IFComp entry last year, built on a game engine for chat apps (https://plotopolis.com/). I'm not sure how much the format contributed, but did enjoy the game.

MUDs would work great with CarPlay and ChatGPT to convert input to structured text. Ouput would just be ai audio. It would be like an interactive podcast

Just be careful when approaching actual current MUD gamers with that idea. They're largely cynical towards AI. I don't really blame them, a lot of people coming at /r/mud with new ideas are either lazy, misinformed, or crypto bros.

LLMs leave a lot to be desired when it comes to boundary enforcement. Your entire party of little African boys could fall into a mile-deep hole and nothing stops all of them from escaping using the power of their flighty farts.

Then we get to the arcane textbook-sized rulesets people write to enforce basic things like "chests are closed by default and can only be opened with the appropriate key and must be opened before contents can be seen or retrieved and items can only be retrieved one at a time but only within the constraints of the encumbrance system" at which point you might as well just use the LLM to generate Inform 7 code.

I'm not a programmer, just a humanities nerd on Hacker News. AI would be indeed bad for that at the moment. It could be an endless source of fluff, amusement, and roleplay hooks. In many MUDs, you are required to stay in character. But AI is no good for anything of mechanical consequence.

But it doesn't matter, the MUD community seems already annoyed by bad AI proposals. It would take a good and consistent communication effort to overcome that.

I think AI could be useful in MUD clients, to show a picture of where the player is, and in the future that might even be a moving picture showing the combat moves.

That is already possible with ASCII graphics or graphically at the client level.

> not a programmer, just a humanities nerd

Inform 7 was written for people like yourself. Check it out. The syntax is prosaic enough for a humanities nerd to write and structured enough for ChatGPT4 to generate.

Contrived example:

> The Exhibition Room is a room. It contains a closed locked lockable transparent openable container called the display case. The display case contains a priceless pearl. The display case is scenery. The description of the Exhibition Room is "By far the finest thing in the room is a priceless pearl in a glass display case. It should of course be yours[if key is not visible], if only you can remember where you hid the key[end if]."

> The silver key unlocks the display case.

> A jade vase, a teak chest, a bronze teakettle, and a child's burial casket are openable closed containers in the Exhibition Room.

> After taking the pearl: say "The pearl rolls into your hand, gleaming in the oblique light; your fortune is made."

> end the story finally.

https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/book/WI_1_1.html

That's awesome, thanks!

I am aware of Inform 7, I think it is awesome. A few months ago I made a quick demo using Inklescript[1], which I found simpler and more suitable to my project (a Star Trek adventure). Inform 7 remains something I wish to explore in the future when I need something more complex.

Thanks! ;)

---

[1] https://www.inklestudios.com/ink/

Depends on the MUD type. I used to play, admin, and sysadmin on AVATAR MUD, and the sheer text scroll of a large group in combat just wouldn't translate to WhatsApp. A lot of the players used TinyFugue with complexish state management in the scripting to highlight things going on in the combat output.

Now, Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy as a text adventure game over WA could be interesting for some people.

This is some really nice to read code

Reply on news.ycombinator.com