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Comment by erreon | Hacker News Reader

I was raised on the internet and spent so much time playing MUDs which then got me to want to create my own and learn to code. I played Abandoned Reality http://abandoned.org/ and it was such an amazing experience learning to write and play pretend. My wife and I met playing Abandoned Reality and turned out only lived 45 minutes away from each other.

I hope a few people try it out and get hooked because of your post.

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Meeting the misses on a MUD is a true OG internet love story. That's awesome.

I met my wife on IRC in the late 90s, but meeting on a MUD is a level above that and I bow to grandparent.

I got my hands on the source code of a MUD. It was incredibly flat. Most of the code was if/else and output text. The data was in flat text files as well (1 line = one unit of data, an integer, range or an element of a list, similar to a .env file). The game dumps all the data at every save. It surprised me because I tried to be clever while making my own MUD engine but the result was exactly that, an engine, not a MUD.

Reading the various comments in the CircleMUD source is a bit of a treat: https://github.com/Yuffster/CircleMUD

Very interesting. Do you remember which source you got your hands on? I dabbled in CircleMud as someone else posted, but mostly Envy 2.0 or 2.2. I can't find those codebases quickly these days, but this is a link to a mud based on Envy 2.2 https://github.com/DikuMUDOmnibus/Ultra-Envy

It's from 10 years ago, a French MUD called Multimud. It's closed source because the code contains too much information about the game. It's surprisingly simple, a Perl socket-select single-thread process with no dependencies.

Some indie games that got open sourced after sales dropped off are the same way. Everyone who looked at Terraria's or VVVVVV's code knows it's terrible, and yet, those games exist and are fun, while clearly coded games are less common.

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