5 ms·

a question on maintenance and all that. what kind of machines are required to maintain these? the client talks about flash and or websockets, so some sort of se

a question on maintenance and all that. what kind of machines are required to maintain these? the client talks about flash and or websockets, so some sort of servers have to be maintained... I know servers are fairly cheap now.. that would be a cool story too.. If its been running for 30 years, how much memory/storage does the world take? I had a Java programming examples book and it had a simple MUD implemented in a RMI, it was kinda neat and i always wanted to build a game out of it...

claudius 9y ago
I’m now hosting one of the older ldmud-style MUDs (Nightfall) and the additional load and memory consumption on my server is absolutely negligible. There’s some continuous CPU usage now, but in the low % (on an ancient AMD Opteron). Unfortunately we do have only a few players nowadays, though.
rsync 9y ago
"the client talks about flash and or websockets" Can you just telnet in and avoid the web based interface completely ? I would assume so ... then you could start your game in a screen session and just re-attach anytime you like. Can you, indeed, telnet (or ssh) to discworld ?
- jwfxpr 9y ago
  You can directly telnet in, yeah, but it's not a great way to play. There are plenty of MUD clients (for Discworld in particular you want one compatible with MCCP compression) that are designed for playing in a terminal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD_client https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD_client I played on Discworld MUD for many years, quite some time ago. It's probably been 15 years since I last logged in. Very tempting to stick my head back in there!
  - shabble 9y ago
    Make sure you login every couple of years or so. I just had a quick look and two of my three accounts have expired and been purged.
exikyut 9y ago
You can literally run a MUD server on a toaster. More specifically, a 486 or Pentium would not be a good fit, but literally anything else would work. :D The only thing you need is good internet. If your internet connection doesn't tend to completely fail (a small bit of latency and the rare crash shouldn't be the end of the world) then you're honestly good to go. If you want to run this on a server, you're looking at around $10/mo for something decent, and if you scout around hard you may be able to get something for less. Google Compute Engine quietly let you have 600MB of RAM and 1GB of bandwidth per month for free, for example. :P -- Your profile mentions PHP and Node.JS. Of the two, Node.JS is probably the better choice to build something like this with - PHP's network/socket handling has a few sharp edges that make it occasionally fall over, and for a social project like a MUD, you'll get death-by-a-thousand-papercuts in the form of "...PHP?!" all the time, so there's that as well. Obviously Java would work fine too; Node's advantages over Java in a context like this are lower grammatical verbosity and zero compile time. -- The first thing I'd recommend is poking around to understand how to do both telnet and websocket based networking. Websockets will handle modern browser clients and cover 99% of a fledgling MUD's connections. Telnet will handle the die-hards who, if they come back, might stay for a while :P Start with telnet first: you need to decide how you want the text UI to work. You can leave telnet out until you have everything else doing interesting things, but I strongly advise having at least a basic understanding of how VT100 emulation works from the start (while you're still in the design stage), or whatever you build may be extremely difficult to get working inside telnet. Some web MUD clients just wrap a VT100 session hosted on the server with some websocket trickery and do things that way. That's a good way to do things, because it means people who want to stick with telnet don't really lose anything. Websockets is just a networking system and is mostly fun to work with; to get started just find a library you like and tinker with it. -- As for gamedev, I recommend studying existing MUD systems, not with the intention of drowning yourself in how they all work (which will be disasterous), but to get an idea of how they structure their world info - what's where, how navigation works, etc etc. Ultimately there are (AFAIK) few gotchas and MUD development is quite simple - rooms are connected to other rooms, and things happen - but it's a good idea to think through how you want to architect how rooms connect together so you can eg easily get at the bigger picture, and think about how you want interactions and cause/effect state to be maintained and associated with players. --
stormcode 9y ago
LambdaMOO server can be run on a $5 EC2 instance without much problems. The database resides in memory though, so if you have a giant game (like HellMOO database from what I've heard) it can take like a gig of ram. However, with careful management you can run a game with 100 people online, in a massive world, with tons of code and rooms and such, with 250megs of ram.
hazeii 9y ago
Shades (a commercial successful MUD that ran on British Telecom from the mid 80's) happy ran with 64 users on a Z80 with 256K RAM, 2Mb RAM disk and 10Mb HDD. It's actually still running (telnet://games.world.co.uk) though these days it's running on a Z80 emulator. Makes it a bit over 30 years old, and some of the old players still log in (just to see who's still around). Disclaimer: I'm the author.

claudius 9y ago

I’m now hosting one of the older ldmud-style MUDs (Nightfall) and the additional load and memory consumption on my server is absolutely negligible. There’s some continuous CPU usage now, but in the low % (on an ancient AMD Opteron). Unfortunately we do have only a few players nowadays, though.

rsync 9y ago

"the client talks about flash and or websockets" Can you just telnet in and avoid the web based interface completely ? I would assume so ... then you could start your game in a screen session and just re-attach anytime you like. Can you, indeed, telnet (or ssh) to discworld ?

jwfxpr 9y ago
You can directly telnet in, yeah, but it's not a great way to play. There are plenty of MUD clients (for Discworld in particular you want one compatible with MCCP compression) that are designed for playing in a terminal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD_client https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD_client I played on Discworld MUD for many years, quite some time ago. It's probably been 15 years since I last logged in. Very tempting to stick my head back in there!
- shabble 9y ago
  Make sure you login every couple of years or so. I just had a quick look and two of my three accounts have expired and been purged.

exikyut 9y ago

You can literally run a MUD server on a toaster. More specifically, a 486 or Pentium would not be a good fit, but literally anything else would work. :D The only thing you need is good internet. If your internet connection doesn't tend to completely fail (a small bit of latency and the rare crash shouldn't be the end of the world) then you're honestly good to go. If you want to run this on a server, you're looking at around $10/mo for something decent, and if you scout around hard you may be able to get something for less. Google Compute Engine quietly let you have 600MB of RAM and 1GB of bandwidth per month for free, for example. :P -- Your profile mentions PHP and Node.JS. Of the two, Node.JS is probably the better choice to build something like this with - PHP's network/socket handling has a few sharp edges that make it occasionally fall over, and for a social project like a MUD, you'll get death-by-a-thousand-papercuts in the form of "...PHP?!" all the time, so there's that as well. Obviously Java would work fine too; Node's advantages over Java in a context like this are lower grammatical verbosity and zero compile time. -- The first thing I'd recommend is poking around to understand how to do both telnet and websocket based networking. Websockets will handle modern browser clients and cover 99% of a fledgling MUD's connections. Telnet will handle the die-hards who, if they come back, might stay for a while :P Start with telnet first: you need to decide how you want the text UI to work. You can leave telnet out until you have everything else doing interesting things, but I strongly advise having at least a basic understanding of how VT100 emulation works from the start (while you're still in the design stage), or whatever you build may be extremely difficult to get working inside telnet. Some web MUD clients just wrap a VT100 session hosted on the server with some websocket trickery and do things that way. That's a good way to do things, because it means people who want to stick with telnet don't really lose anything. Websockets is just a networking system and is mostly fun to work with; to get started just find a library you like and tinker with it. -- As for gamedev, I recommend studying existing MUD systems, not with the intention of drowning yourself in how they all work (which will be disasterous), but to get an idea of how they structure their world info - what's where, how navigation works, etc etc. Ultimately there are (AFAIK) few gotchas and MUD development is quite simple - rooms are connected to other rooms, and things happen - but it's a good idea to think through how you want to architect how rooms connect together so you can eg easily get at the bigger picture, and think about how you want interactions and cause/effect state to be maintained and associated with players. --

stormcode 9y ago

LambdaMOO server can be run on a $5 EC2 instance without much problems. The database resides in memory though, so if you have a giant game (like HellMOO database from what I've heard) it can take like a gig of ram. However, with careful management you can run a game with 100 people online, in a massive world, with tons of code and rooms and such, with 250megs of ram.

hazeii 9y ago

Shades (a commercial successful MUD that ran on British Telecom from the mid 80's) happy ran with 64 users on a Z80 with 256K RAM, 2Mb RAM disk and 10Mb HDD. It's actually still running (telnet://games.world.co.uk) though these days it's running on a Z80 emulator. Makes it a bit over 30 years old, and some of the old players still log in (just to see who's still around). Disclaimer: I'm the author.