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Comment by grimgrin | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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 :-)

ssh is just as easy to use on the client side

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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!

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