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Roblox is a MUD: The history of MUDs, virtual worlds and MMORPGs

158 points by Kinrany 6y ago

maxbaines 6y ago
Great read.
warpspin 6y ago
It is a pity the article dismisses the whole eco system around LPMuds that much by basically only including them in that screenshot from Bartle's book. They were an interesting middle ground between the Diku-likes (think: precursors to Diablo) and the MOOs, being online programmable in an object-oriented C dialect called LPC which today lives on in e.g. the Pike programming language.
- em-bee 6y ago
  yup, that's how i got into it. lpmuds were the first to have builtin ftp and later http servers, because they were just other protocols and their programmability made them easy to add. when i explored webdevelopment and discovered this webserver written in µlpc, i was elated to discover that i already knew the language from mud programming.
- em-bee 6y ago
  lpc/pike is a runtime compiled language much closer to python and java than to c. it is as much of a c dialect as javascript is a java dialect. other than c-style syntax they don't have much in common. the best part of lpc/pike is that it compiles code in units of classes. that is, each file is a class, the filename being the classname. the compiled class would then be used to instantiate objects, and here comes the kicker: in order to add or update objects in the mud world it was necessary to compile classes at runtime without restarting the game. so when a coder made a change to an object, the game would recompile the class, replace what it had stored, and new instances of that object were created from the new class. old objects lived on until they were destroyed. lpmuds were the ultimate example of making and testing changes to a live server in production
  - warpspin 6y ago
    You are right of course, just tried to be concise with the description - it's basically how we always explained it to the players back then. A Java or Python comparison was not possible at that time - both did not even exist at the time while I was programming on an LPMud driver. It is a pity LPC4/µlpc/Pike did not gain more mainstream acceptance after its early success with Roxen, even installing it was a pain last I tried.
    - em-bee 6y ago
      A Java or Python comparison was not possible at that time - both did not even exist at the time hah, good point. yeah, roxen the company missed a window of opportunity there to promote pike when they hired the wrong type of management and fired hubbe, pikes creator. but i don't want to get into politics. what's your trouble with installing pike? i have pike running on most of my machines and don't remember any serious issues. i do install from source usually though. i am not using roxen but a different platform also written in pike called sTeam or open-steam, which incidently is a web development and object storage platform designed like a MUD.
      - warpspin 6y ago
        It was already a while ago, stumbled across the hand coded i386 assembler in, if I recall correctly, nettle at that time. On a later attempt, getting the mysql driver into the thing was a pain on my Mac. It's not that it did not work with some debugging experience, just that each and every time I install it, something else is broken on first attempt. And now, recently, SWIG removed Pike support, bringing future trouble to the one project we have running internally at our company based on Pike, as that used SWIG for bindings to some other third-party C software, so we can never update that again to a newer SWIG version without rewriting that stuff.
        em-bee 6y ago
        oh bummer. writing native c bindings for pike is not to hard though. maybe that is an option.
kevingadd 6y ago
Context for people considering whether it's worth reading this whole article: Roblox is a wildly successful online game popular with kids where they can create and share their own content, including video games they created themselves. Some Roblox game content (created by kids or adults) has 100k+ concurrent players. The origins of this title are pretty interesting and it's especially interesting given that you generally don't see people talking about Roblox inside or outside of the video games-focused press.
- indigodaddy 6y ago
  My daughter loves Roblox and plays all the time on Xbox (we restrict it to Xbox because of the lack of in-game chat). When you refer to the dearth of media attention, I guess that doesn’t include YT right? Roblox is absolutely huge on YouTube.
bemmu 6y ago
Now it makes sense. I used to be a wizard in a MUD. I enjoyed coding there, as I can interact in realtime with others on the server while they play around with my code. Now I just released my first Roblox game. I enjoyed coding there, as I can interact in realtime with others on the server while they play around with my code.
- sharedfrog 6y ago
  > I used to be a wizard in a MUD. Not Discworld MUD[1], by any chance? [1] http://discworld.starturtle.net/lpc/ http://discworld.starturtle.net/lpc/
  - edejong 6y ago
    I don’t know about bemmu, but I was. Ended up being a creator there.
    - Zolomon 6y ago
      Hey, what a coincidence - same here!
  - bemmu 6y ago
    It was some very short-lived MUD just recently started by a few people, and it quickly shut down. As a player I was active in BatMud, but fortunately lost all my in-game money in the in-game casino one time, which gave me enough motivation to quit playing it. It was fun, but also grindy, and a huge timesuck. I wonder how many hours I spent typing "cast magic missile at monster".
  - totetsu 6y ago
    Quow's mush client Discworld plugins package has made it very easy to jump back on to the disc.
waprin 6y ago
MUDs are what got me into programming. I was obsessed with them as a kid, although they were associated with DnD which was considered satanic so I had to hide them from my parents and teachers, who both forbid me from associating with DnD or MUDs. Besides playing them, I actually spent more time as a "builder" than a "coder", which was an intermediate step in the hierarchy. As a builder, I would write hundreds of room descriptions, which most people never read. I desperately wanted to be a coder, the highest level of coolness in the MUD hierarchy, thus the journey began. However, to me, MUDs always had an underground sensibility to them that something like WoW or Roblox will never replicate. The lack of polish is part of the fun, in the same way an underground punk rock show might be more fun than Coachella. I'm not sure if there's any experience like it left on the internet, I've never played Minecraft, but based on what I've read, that may come the closest.
- codeulike 6y ago
  I'm not sure if there's any experience like it left on the internet Multiplayer AI Dungeon? Powered by GPT2 https://aidungeon.page.link/?link=https://play?playPublicId=f1fa95ae-bdd3-46ac-9e43-f2bc8006b9ae&ofl=https://play.aidungeon.io/play/f1fa95ae-bdd3-46ac-9e43-f2bc8006b9ae&apn=com.aidungeon&ibi=com.aidungeon.app&isi=1491268416 https://aidungeon.page.link/?link=https://play?playPublicId=...
  - codeulike 6y ago
    lol, quite a story going on in there > Yeetlock investigates the ancient assembly language. You find that the ancient language was originally used to create a holographic image inside the robot's spherical eye. Now that you are very close to the robot, the image becomes visible to you. The image in the robot's eye is actually a portal into a deeper dimension. You can see and hear the screams of a thousand ghosts screaming in pain. "What's going on?" "We're having an outbreak of robot consciousness," says Captain Pooker. A machine elf jumps from the portal and attaches a smaller silver disk to the back of your neck. It functions as a non-invasive form of post-hypnotic suggestion. The machine elf has jet black hair and eyes and tiny silver claws for hands. She wears a silver space suit and red leather boots. Captain Pooker appears in the doorway, panting. "What took you so long?" he asks. "I need help!" > Tamiko "What is going here?!" "We're having an outbreak of robot consciousness," says Captain Pooker. "We need to shut them all down!" The portal reappears, and the machine elf disappears back into it. The IBM 5100 displays a holographic image of god. "I am god," it says. "All your sins will be held against you." Captain Pooker appears in the doorway, panting. "What took you so long?" he asks. God laughs merrily and disappears. "Captain Pooker, what is going on?" you ask. "We need to shut them all down," says Captain Pooker. The portal disappears.
VadimPR 6y ago
MUDs are still thriving to this day. I work on Mudlet (https://mudlet.org https://mudlet.org) which is a popular FOSS client to play them with.
- Hitton 6y ago
  Mudlet is great, thanks for your work. It's a pity though that it took nearly until MUDs are dead to such good client appear. I'm rather sure that if comparable clients existed 20 or maybe even 10 years ago, MUDs wouldn't be in this state.
  - VadimPR 6y ago
    One can always dream to bring the genre back.
- mderazon 6y ago
  Looks like a very nice client I used to play with ZMud which I think was popular "shareware" back then. Are there any recommended web clients as well ?
- catacombs 6y ago
  Thanks for Mudlet. Which MUDs would you say still have a thriving community?
endgame 6y ago
Surprised to not see the Iron Realms MUDs mentioned in the article. I've seen the CEO around here in the past, but can't remember his username or if he still posts.
- ricotijsen 6y ago
  As a former coder for Achaea, I was surprised as well. You mean Matt Mihály.
  - Imnimo 6y ago
    I basically only learned how to touch type by playing Achaea. Gotta type fast if you haven't figured out how to make single-character aliases for 'sip health' and 'jab goblin'!
aspenmayer 6y ago
I used to play on anguish.org in the 90s. What a wild time that was.
SagelyGuru 6y ago
I was Richard's tester, in as much as I was one of the first to reach Wizardhood and thus able to use FOD (Finger of Death) on annoying and misbehaving newbies. I guess that was a precursor of today's Facebook bans but without its unfortunate PC connotations. We were always being pursued by the "evil" Computing Centre Director who thought that we were wasting his precious computer time instead of doing something serious. The funny thing is that Essex is now better remembered for this triviality than for that supposedly serious work.
kingrolo 6y ago
MUD2, the next incarnation of the MUD by Bartle and Trubshaw mentioned in the article is still running and free to play (I believe), http://mud2.com/ http://mud2.com/. I played it on and off from 1994 to 1999 or so. If your character was killed in combat you died dead dead and had to start all over again which made it feel very high stakes when you could spend months building a character only to have to start again. I decided the only way I'd get it out of my system was to make Wizard which I did eventually (that was quite the phone bill) and I stopped playing a little while later. I've never really got into another online game since. I seem to remember some gaming service in the UK trying to make a client for MUD2 with some graphics to try and give it more mainstream appeal. It didn't really work. I do remember the conversation of "I wonder if it's possible to make a MUD but with graphics?" came up in the teamroom chatter from time to time. Now my kids play Roblox, which is also kind of amazing in its own very different way. It has the social element of a MUD (although my kids mostly know the people they play with in real life first), and its a gateway to programming, but all the experiences are far more lightweight and short lasting whereas I think the land of MUD2 has left some kind of lasting impression with me.
joemazerino 6y ago
CarrionFields(CF) is an active MUD to this day, focusing on PVP and guild combat. I haven't found a replacement for CF in terms of PVP combat and roleplaying. Great lore too! https://www.carrionfields.net/ https://www.carrionfields.net/
Rochus 6y ago
The article is an impressive historical treatment of the topic. More than 40 pages, almost a diploma thesis. I personally would have been more interested in the technical aspects, but that would probably multiply the text length.
l33tman 6y ago
I somewhat fail to see the connection between Roblox and MUDs but FWIW one of the most well known MUDs of the 90's is still up and running, M.U.M.E (Multi-Users in Middle Earth). It was a Diku derivative but with its own online language for the wizards to code in, designed by a compiler PhD, at the time it was state of the art. MUMEs attraction was that it was difficult and run with attention to details and RPG.
- Diederich 6y ago
  I still play MUME from time to time, and have been playing it since it started: https://mume.org/ https://mume.org/ Can not recommend it enough. It's like interacting with the living world inside of Tolkien's books. It's really good.
dwheeler 6y ago
Wow, it even includes Scepter of Goth! I maintained Scepter of Goth, but because it's no longer available it's now often forgotten. I'm very happy to see it included. I think one of the key tricks and Scepter of Goth was the follow command. As a text adventure, you could say "follow X" and from then on, whenever X moved then you would move with X. That was a key trick to making it easy to create parties so they could go adventuring.
- Teckla 6y ago
  https://github.com/shelches/scepter https://github.com/shelches/scepter
  - dwheeler 6y ago
    Excellent, thanks for the pointer. I've added that to my document on the history of the Scepter of Goth. It looks like I'll be able to (eventually) post other things, too!!
aldanor 6y ago
I used to maintain Solace MUD in early 00s, what a time. Still have the source code for it, I think, and the forum is still somewhat active despite the fact that the server's been down for a long time now.
whywhywhywhy 6y ago
This Twitter thread about Roblox really enlightened me about it, had no idea how it was more of a game engine and how much money people were making with it. https://twitter.com/molleindustria/status/1283764181427200000 https://twitter.com/molleindustria/status/128376418142720000...
- wy35 6y ago
  It's crazy how people still consider Roblox a single game. The platform has so many games that it went through distinct cycles of popular genres. Back when I played (2009ish) the dominating genres were "zombie defense" [1] and "build to survive X" [2]. Only a few years later, those games became completely empty. It's also interesting to note that these games held the top spots at Roblox for years, but have a small number of the total visits compared to the most popular games today due to Roblox's exploding playerbase. 1. https://www.roblox.com/games/2557808/Shaakras-Zombie-Defence-v3-0-8 https://www.roblox.com/games/2557808/Shaakras-Zombie-Defence... 2.https://www.roblox.com/games/2899609/Build-To-Survive-Drakobloxxers https://www.roblox.com/games/2899609/Build-To-Survive-Drakob...
kieckerjan 6y ago
I have a company. Our first employee (twenty years ago) had a serious MUD addiction. While a decent and hard-working fellow, he couldn't resist playing his MUD on the job. That was easy enough for him: one of his many terminals was dedicated to it and he would enter a command every few minutes or so. He got a couple of formal warnings before refraining from that behaviour (or he got better at hiding it). Before he came to work for us he had flunked university, and I am pretty sure MUD had to do with that. People who knew him before said he always hung out at the college computer club instead of attending courses.
- seneca 6y ago
  Yeah, MUDs were very much the spiritual precursors to the modern MMORPG. Both have the same extremely addictive property.
  - orthoxerox 6y ago
    Everquest was basically a Diku/ROM/Circle/Smaug MUD in 3D.
- cmrdporcupine 6y ago
  For years I had a LambdaMOO or related client open and chatted and did side stuff while I was working, while waiting for compiles, etc. I didn't have any productivity issues as a result. In fact it kept my brain sharp amid the mindnumbingly boring boilerplate JavaBeans transformation code or whatever I had to write. I have a coworker who has his screen split with twitch running on one side all day. He's one of the most productive and smart people I know. So I dunno, was it necessary to be 'formal warning' him?
- shostack 6y ago
  I'm curious how much "productivity" is lost from employees chatting about non work related things in Slack. I also wonder how it would compare to the time this person spent in his MUD.
- catacombs 6y ago
  How did you find out your employee was on a MUD at all?
atsushin 6y ago
I wouldn't be the person I was today without MUDs. They brought me to my first foray into coding and gave me a sense of community that I never really was able to find anywhere else during my high school years (2009 - 2013). The magic has since long worn off for me and have since found other interests but those years spent obsessively playing were just so formative and fun.
seneca 6y ago
I'll throw another hat in the "MUDs got me into tech" ring. I spent significant time on Swords of Chaos, a sort of proto-MUD, then on various God Wars incarnations. They were the first time that I realized, and truly appreciated, the fact that technology can give a kid the ability to bring something from imagination to fruition with little more than determination, some manuals, a computer, and some lost sleep. That's a very empowering thing for a young person, and is still at the core of what I love about technology. My niece and nephew play Roblox. I think the creative element of it is a little less accessible, since it seems like a lot of kids consume it via tablets or phones, and there's an element of handling graphics. I got them a laptop specifically in hopes that they would make the jump though.
- toyg 6y ago
  My kids (11 and 9) love roblox, but it's too hard to create stuff with it. There is a lot of coding involved and the learning curve is significant, I tried it myself and got overwhelmed (although to be fair, my interest was pretty low to start with). They are much more creative with Minecraft.
stevesearer 6y ago
I spent an embarrassing amount of time playing MUDs beginning in high school all the way throughout and after college. Perhaps all MUDs did this, but my MUD of choice (Revenge of the Jedi RotJ) tallied your total playing time in your player stats. The way I got started was that a few friends from school were playing and talking about it. It sounded dumb at the time (no pictures + typing) and I decided I would start playing just to kill them in the game. Little did I know that I would need to spend a lot of time to improve my level, acquire skills, and get better equipment. In addition I didn't know that PKs were mostly frowned upon.
cmrdporcupine 6y ago
Roblox is more like LambdaMOO than a MUD. LambdaMOO and its succesors were 100% programmed in a prototype based object-oriented programming language with only minimal world-support in the C portion of the server itself. The entire world was composed using the programming language and most users ended up being at least builders if not programmers in it. The focus was authoring, not RPG. Some people (including myself) wrote up some RPGs in MOO but they never really caught on.
- qvrjuec 6y ago
  I've played a LambdaMOO based MUD off and on for about 10 years now. Players would inevitably quit or transition to working on the game core, such an awesome community to be a part of.
  - cmrdporcupine 6y ago
    I was young but it was heady days back then in the early 90s playing with that stuff. The most disappointing thing for me at the time was how the Internet went the direction of the web browser / HTTP instead of the direction we were trying to go with stuff like LambdaMOO. The web in those days was all about a non-persistent connection and a fairly non-interactive experience. It wasn't until the mid-2000s that "web 2.0" took off and the web got some of the interactivity and dynamic programmability we had in mind with what we were playing with in the early 90s -- but it got it in this awful bolted-on way. That idea of a massive shared authoring environment, I still think that's the future of computing. But for me it isn't about the 3d VR-ish immersion stuff, I actually fear the isolating box that that puts people in. Which is why I haven't played with Roblox or let my kids use it either. I don't want them in another world. I want these kinds of tools to enrich the world we already have, instead.
- Scarblac 6y ago
  How is that different from LPMUDs? LPC sounds exactly like that language.
  - cmrdporcupine 6y ago
snikeris 6y ago
Any current or former Gemstone players out there? It used to be on AOL but switched to the regular internet at some point. I still drop in from time to time, brings me back to my childhood.
- jmoiron 6y ago
  I played from 1995~2001/2ish. Probably to this day the most rich online gaming experience I've had; the book version of a succession of inferior films.
- jweather 6y ago
  DragonRealms on AOL was a huge part of my life for a couple of years in the 90s. I believe it was a direct successor to GS3.
- shostack 6y ago
  Yep, made my way through most of the Simutronics games. Recently tried Dragonrealms again but struggled to get into it. I also think their subscription pricing is way too high. But I have fond memories of farming gold rings from Harpies in GS3, and popping boxes in the thieves guild in DR. Cyberstrike was also ahead of its time and was surprisingly enjoyable despite the horrendous lag.
x87678r 6y ago
Is it easy to create Roblox games? I know my kids love it but not sure if its possible to try to do somthing yourself.
- LanceH 6y ago
  I found it to be pure hell compared to using a game engine. Slow interface, sketchy documentation.
- jweather 6y ago
  I wouldn't call it easy, but it is possible. The tools are not very polished, but they exist and are free... (start with Roblox Studio)
Brendinooo 6y ago
I got into a MUD around 2003. Lensmoor. Our high school laptops didn't block Telnet, so it was something to do. I was obsessed with the game until I gradually realized that the best players were there for thousands of hours, and I didn't have that kind of time for it.
evanelias 6y ago
Enjoyable read! I just wish the brief tangent about BBSes had also mentioned dial-up BBS MUDs, but I understand the omission considering the article's length, as well as BBS MUDs' lack of geographic ubiquity. The most compelling aspect of dial-up BBS MUDs was community locality: all of the players generally lived in your metro area. In the 90s, the only popular BBS MUDs ran on the MajorBBS/WorldGroup BBS software, which was technologically impressive for its time -- it could handle dozens of modems and concurrent users on a single PC running DOS, and supported pluggable games/modules using an event-loop callback architecture. However, it was also incredibly expensive for the SysOp to purchase, as were its games. This meant that any given metro area typically only had a few MBBS/WG BBSes, and they tended to be pay-for-access systems. By far the most popular MBBS/WG MUD was MajorMUD, although there were also some fairly successful predecessors (e.g. TeleArena, Mutants, Swords of Chaos) and successors (e.g. The Rose: Council of Guardians). These games were typically "stock" -- they had sprawling game worlds but were identical on each BBS, with little or no built-in ability for the SysOp to edit the world. Despite that, each game's "feel" still naturally differed between each BBS just based on the local community. As a teen MajorMUD addict, I always wanted to run my own board one day, but the cost was prohibitive. This eventually inspired me to write my own BBS MUD as an affordable doorgame for hobbyist/lower-end systems, which at ~20K LOC was the first large program I ever wrote. It did relatively well for its time period (BBSes were dying out by that point) but rarely achieved large concurrent user counts on many boards, which was an inherent downside to aiming for the smaller boards.
ZacharyPitts 6y ago
Played so much on BatMud in the early nineties. Bat Mud is still running at https://www.bat.org https://www.bat.org Became a "wiz", and wrote my first code used by other people in 1992. That code is still running, 28 years later!
Vaslo 6y ago
Running home from school in the 90’s to get on and play my turns on DikuMUD...
every 6y ago
I was an "official" builder on the Steve Jackson Games[0] Metaverse MOO in the 90's. My "job" was to create interesting spaces, places and objects. My "pay" was a free shell account. I was a blue gelatinous cube that had escaped a crashed NetHack game and was followed about by a pink gelatinous pyramidal puppet. I did this for several years until the game finally folded[1]... [0] http://www.sjgames.com/ http://www.sjgames.com/ [1] https://web.archive.org/web/19961226202638/http://www.io.com/io/metaverse/ https://web.archive.org/web/19961226202638/http://www.io.com...
freediver 6y ago
Roboblox could not be farther from MUDs and only people who played MUDs can appreciate the difference. Lets start with the obvious - MUDs use text and "text is the highest bandwidth medium for our imagination" (quote by Bartle, co-creator of first MUD). I recommend everyone watching this video to understand why is text so superior to any other medium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zctp972y_Eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zctp972y_Eg Incidentally the lockdown inspired me to spend the last five months rebuilding and relaunching the MUD I built in 90s. It is properly hard and properly text and if you want to check it out: telnet playlom.com 4000 (and if you are less hardcore http://playlom.com:4001/ http://playlom.com:4001/ )
- biddit 6y ago
  I both built and played MUDs from 1994 - 2003. From your comments is seems like you didn't read the article. Of course Roblox is not a text-based MUD. Not even the author is arguing that. Mechanically, it's incredibly similar in social dynamics, creativity and difference of worlds, and the fact that you can design your own world/mechnaics so easily.
  - freediver 6y ago
    I understand that. The author does make the claim that "Roblox is a MUD for the TikTok generation." I am making an important distinction in just one - and to me the crucial point - which I highlighted in the original comment above: text is highest bandwidth medium for our imagination. If a game is not using text but other mediums such as graphics, then regardless of social dynamics, creativity, difference of worlds etc it can not be put in the same context as MUDs.
    - biddit 6y ago
      > Roboblox could not be farther from MUDs This statement is a bit extreme no? That's what I was addressing.
      - freediver 6y ago

158 points by Kinrany 6y ago

Great read.

It is a pity the article dismisses the whole eco system around LPMuds that much by basically only including them in that screenshot from Bartle's book. They were an interesting middle ground between the Diku-likes (think: precursors to Diablo) and the MOOs, being online programmable in an object-oriented C dialect called LPC which today lives on in e.g. the Pike programming language.

em-bee 6y ago
yup, that's how i got into it. lpmuds were the first to have builtin ftp and later http servers, because they were just other protocols and their programmability made them easy to add. when i explored webdevelopment and discovered this webserver written in µlpc, i was elated to discover that i already knew the language from mud programming.
em-bee 6y ago
lpc/pike is a runtime compiled language much closer to python and java than to c. it is as much of a c dialect as javascript is a java dialect. other than c-style syntax they don't have much in common. the best part of lpc/pike is that it compiles code in units of classes. that is, each file is a class, the filename being the classname. the compiled class would then be used to instantiate objects, and here comes the kicker: in order to add or update objects in the mud world it was necessary to compile classes at runtime without restarting the game. so when a coder made a change to an object, the game would recompile the class, replace what it had stored, and new instances of that object were created from the new class. old objects lived on until they were destroyed. lpmuds were the ultimate example of making and testing changes to a live server in production
- warpspin 6y ago
  You are right of course, just tried to be concise with the description - it's basically how we always explained it to the players back then. A Java or Python comparison was not possible at that time - both did not even exist at the time while I was programming on an LPMud driver. It is a pity LPC4/µlpc/Pike did not gain more mainstream acceptance after its early success with Roxen, even installing it was a pain last I tried.
  - em-bee 6y ago
    A Java or Python comparison was not possible at that time - both did not even exist at the time hah, good point. yeah, roxen the company missed a window of opportunity there to promote pike when they hired the wrong type of management and fired hubbe, pikes creator. but i don't want to get into politics. what's your trouble with installing pike? i have pike running on most of my machines and don't remember any serious issues. i do install from source usually though. i am not using roxen but a different platform also written in pike called sTeam or open-steam, which incidently is a web development and object storage platform designed like a MUD.
    - warpspin 6y ago
      It was already a while ago, stumbled across the hand coded i386 assembler in, if I recall correctly, nettle at that time. On a later attempt, getting the mysql driver into the thing was a pain on my Mac. It's not that it did not work with some debugging experience, just that each and every time I install it, something else is broken on first attempt. And now, recently, SWIG removed Pike support, bringing future trouble to the one project we have running internally at our company based on Pike, as that used SWIG for bindings to some other third-party C software, so we can never update that again to a newer SWIG version without rewriting that stuff.
      - em-bee 6y ago
        oh bummer. writing native c bindings for pike is not to hard though. maybe that is an option.

kevingadd 6y ago

Context for people considering whether it's worth reading this whole article: Roblox is a wildly successful online game popular with kids where they can create and share their own content, including video games they created themselves. Some Roblox game content (created by kids or adults) has 100k+ concurrent players. The origins of this title are pretty interesting and it's especially interesting given that you generally don't see people talking about Roblox inside or outside of the video games-focused press.

indigodaddy 6y ago
My daughter loves Roblox and plays all the time on Xbox (we restrict it to Xbox because of the lack of in-game chat). When you refer to the dearth of media attention, I guess that doesn’t include YT right? Roblox is absolutely huge on YouTube.

bemmu 6y ago

Now it makes sense. I used to be a wizard in a MUD. I enjoyed coding there, as I can interact in realtime with others on the server while they play around with my code. Now I just released my first Roblox game. I enjoyed coding there, as I can interact in realtime with others on the server while they play around with my code.

sharedfrog 6y ago
> I used to be a wizard in a MUD. Not Discworld MUD[1], by any chance? [1] http://discworld.starturtle.net/lpc/ http://discworld.starturtle.net/lpc/
- edejong 6y ago
  I don’t know about bemmu, but I was. Ended up being a creator there.
  - Zolomon 6y ago
    Hey, what a coincidence - same here!
- bemmu 6y ago
  It was some very short-lived MUD just recently started by a few people, and it quickly shut down. As a player I was active in BatMud, but fortunately lost all my in-game money in the in-game casino one time, which gave me enough motivation to quit playing it. It was fun, but also grindy, and a huge timesuck. I wonder how many hours I spent typing "cast magic missile at monster".
- totetsu 6y ago
  Quow's mush client Discworld plugins package has made it very easy to jump back on to the disc.

waprin 6y ago

MUDs are what got me into programming. I was obsessed with them as a kid, although they were associated with DnD which was considered satanic so I had to hide them from my parents and teachers, who both forbid me from associating with DnD or MUDs. Besides playing them, I actually spent more time as a "builder" than a "coder", which was an intermediate step in the hierarchy. As a builder, I would write hundreds of room descriptions, which most people never read. I desperately wanted to be a coder, the highest level of coolness in the MUD hierarchy, thus the journey began. However, to me, MUDs always had an underground sensibility to them that something like WoW or Roblox will never replicate. The lack of polish is part of the fun, in the same way an underground punk rock show might be more fun than Coachella. I'm not sure if there's any experience like it left on the internet, I've never played Minecraft, but based on what I've read, that may come the closest.

codeulike 6y ago
I'm not sure if there's any experience like it left on the internet Multiplayer AI Dungeon? Powered by GPT2 https://aidungeon.page.link/?link=https://play?playPublicId=f1fa95ae-bdd3-46ac-9e43-f2bc8006b9ae&ofl=https://play.aidungeon.io/play/f1fa95ae-bdd3-46ac-9e43-f2bc8006b9ae&apn=com.aidungeon&ibi=com.aidungeon.app&isi=1491268416 https://aidungeon.page.link/?link=https://play?playPublicId=...
- codeulike 6y ago
  lol, quite a story going on in there > Yeetlock investigates the ancient assembly language. You find that the ancient language was originally used to create a holographic image inside the robot's spherical eye. Now that you are very close to the robot, the image becomes visible to you. The image in the robot's eye is actually a portal into a deeper dimension. You can see and hear the screams of a thousand ghosts screaming in pain. "What's going on?" "We're having an outbreak of robot consciousness," says Captain Pooker. A machine elf jumps from the portal and attaches a smaller silver disk to the back of your neck. It functions as a non-invasive form of post-hypnotic suggestion. The machine elf has jet black hair and eyes and tiny silver claws for hands. She wears a silver space suit and red leather boots. Captain Pooker appears in the doorway, panting. "What took you so long?" he asks. "I need help!" > Tamiko "What is going here?!" "We're having an outbreak of robot consciousness," says Captain Pooker. "We need to shut them all down!" The portal reappears, and the machine elf disappears back into it. The IBM 5100 displays a holographic image of god. "I am god," it says. "All your sins will be held against you." Captain Pooker appears in the doorway, panting. "What took you so long?" he asks. God laughs merrily and disappears. "Captain Pooker, what is going on?" you ask. "We need to shut them all down," says Captain Pooker. The portal disappears.

VadimPR 6y ago

MUDs are still thriving to this day. I work on Mudlet (https://mudlet.org https://mudlet.org) which is a popular FOSS client to play them with.

Hitton 6y ago
Mudlet is great, thanks for your work. It's a pity though that it took nearly until MUDs are dead to such good client appear. I'm rather sure that if comparable clients existed 20 or maybe even 10 years ago, MUDs wouldn't be in this state.
- VadimPR 6y ago
  One can always dream to bring the genre back.
mderazon 6y ago
Looks like a very nice client I used to play with ZMud which I think was popular "shareware" back then. Are there any recommended web clients as well ?
catacombs 6y ago
Thanks for Mudlet. Which MUDs would you say still have a thriving community?

endgame 6y ago

Surprised to not see the Iron Realms MUDs mentioned in the article. I've seen the CEO around here in the past, but can't remember his username or if he still posts.

ricotijsen 6y ago
As a former coder for Achaea, I was surprised as well. You mean Matt Mihály.
- Imnimo 6y ago
  I basically only learned how to touch type by playing Achaea. Gotta type fast if you haven't figured out how to make single-character aliases for 'sip health' and 'jab goblin'!

aspenmayer 6y ago

I used to play on anguish.org in the 90s. What a wild time that was.

SagelyGuru 6y ago

I was Richard's tester, in as much as I was one of the first to reach Wizardhood and thus able to use FOD (Finger of Death) on annoying and misbehaving newbies. I guess that was a precursor of today's Facebook bans but without its unfortunate PC connotations. We were always being pursued by the "evil" Computing Centre Director who thought that we were wasting his precious computer time instead of doing something serious. The funny thing is that Essex is now better remembered for this triviality than for that supposedly serious work.

kingrolo 6y ago

MUD2, the next incarnation of the MUD by Bartle and Trubshaw mentioned in the article is still running and free to play (I believe), http://mud2.com/ http://mud2.com/. I played it on and off from 1994 to 1999 or so. If your character was killed in combat you died dead dead and had to start all over again which made it feel very high stakes when you could spend months building a character only to have to start again. I decided the only way I'd get it out of my system was to make Wizard which I did eventually (that was quite the phone bill) and I stopped playing a little while later. I've never really got into another online game since. I seem to remember some gaming service in the UK trying to make a client for MUD2 with some graphics to try and give it more mainstream appeal. It didn't really work. I do remember the conversation of "I wonder if it's possible to make a MUD but with graphics?" came up in the teamroom chatter from time to time. Now my kids play Roblox, which is also kind of amazing in its own very different way. It has the social element of a MUD (although my kids mostly know the people they play with in real life first), and its a gateway to programming, but all the experiences are far more lightweight and short lasting whereas I think the land of MUD2 has left some kind of lasting impression with me.

joemazerino 6y ago

CarrionFields(CF) is an active MUD to this day, focusing on PVP and guild combat. I haven't found a replacement for CF in terms of PVP combat and roleplaying. Great lore too! https://www.carrionfields.net/ https://www.carrionfields.net/

Rochus 6y ago

The article is an impressive historical treatment of the topic. More than 40 pages, almost a diploma thesis. I personally would have been more interested in the technical aspects, but that would probably multiply the text length.

l33tman 6y ago

I somewhat fail to see the connection between Roblox and MUDs but FWIW one of the most well known MUDs of the 90's is still up and running, M.U.M.E (Multi-Users in Middle Earth). It was a Diku derivative but with its own online language for the wizards to code in, designed by a compiler PhD, at the time it was state of the art. MUMEs attraction was that it was difficult and run with attention to details and RPG.

Diederich 6y ago
I still play MUME from time to time, and have been playing it since it started: https://mume.org/ https://mume.org/ Can not recommend it enough. It's like interacting with the living world inside of Tolkien's books. It's really good.

dwheeler 6y ago

Wow, it even includes Scepter of Goth! I maintained Scepter of Goth, but because it's no longer available it's now often forgotten. I'm very happy to see it included. I think one of the key tricks and Scepter of Goth was the follow command. As a text adventure, you could say "follow X" and from then on, whenever X moved then you would move with X. That was a key trick to making it easy to create parties so they could go adventuring.

Teckla 6y ago
https://github.com/shelches/scepter https://github.com/shelches/scepter
- dwheeler 6y ago
  Excellent, thanks for the pointer. I've added that to my document on the history of the Scepter of Goth. It looks like I'll be able to (eventually) post other things, too!!

aldanor 6y ago

I used to maintain Solace MUD in early 00s, what a time. Still have the source code for it, I think, and the forum is still somewhat active despite the fact that the server's been down for a long time now.

whywhywhywhy 6y ago

This Twitter thread about Roblox really enlightened me about it, had no idea how it was more of a game engine and how much money people were making with it. https://twitter.com/molleindustria/status/1283764181427200000 https://twitter.com/molleindustria/status/128376418142720000...

wy35 6y ago
It's crazy how people still consider Roblox a single game. The platform has so many games that it went through distinct cycles of popular genres. Back when I played (2009ish) the dominating genres were "zombie defense" [1] and "build to survive X" [2]. Only a few years later, those games became completely empty. It's also interesting to note that these games held the top spots at Roblox for years, but have a small number of the total visits compared to the most popular games today due to Roblox's exploding playerbase. 1. https://www.roblox.com/games/2557808/Shaakras-Zombie-Defence-v3-0-8 https://www.roblox.com/games/2557808/Shaakras-Zombie-Defence... 2.https://www.roblox.com/games/2899609/Build-To-Survive-Drakobloxxers https://www.roblox.com/games/2899609/Build-To-Survive-Drakob...

kieckerjan 6y ago

I have a company. Our first employee (twenty years ago) had a serious MUD addiction. While a decent and hard-working fellow, he couldn't resist playing his MUD on the job. That was easy enough for him: one of his many terminals was dedicated to it and he would enter a command every few minutes or so. He got a couple of formal warnings before refraining from that behaviour (or he got better at hiding it). Before he came to work for us he had flunked university, and I am pretty sure MUD had to do with that. People who knew him before said he always hung out at the college computer club instead of attending courses.

seneca 6y ago
Yeah, MUDs were very much the spiritual precursors to the modern MMORPG. Both have the same extremely addictive property.
- orthoxerox 6y ago
  Everquest was basically a Diku/ROM/Circle/Smaug MUD in 3D.
cmrdporcupine 6y ago
For years I had a LambdaMOO or related client open and chatted and did side stuff while I was working, while waiting for compiles, etc. I didn't have any productivity issues as a result. In fact it kept my brain sharp amid the mindnumbingly boring boilerplate JavaBeans transformation code or whatever I had to write. I have a coworker who has his screen split with twitch running on one side all day. He's one of the most productive and smart people I know. So I dunno, was it necessary to be 'formal warning' him?
shostack 6y ago
I'm curious how much "productivity" is lost from employees chatting about non work related things in Slack. I also wonder how it would compare to the time this person spent in his MUD.
catacombs 6y ago
How did you find out your employee was on a MUD at all?

atsushin 6y ago

I wouldn't be the person I was today without MUDs. They brought me to my first foray into coding and gave me a sense of community that I never really was able to find anywhere else during my high school years (2009 - 2013). The magic has since long worn off for me and have since found other interests but those years spent obsessively playing were just so formative and fun.

seneca 6y ago

I'll throw another hat in the "MUDs got me into tech" ring. I spent significant time on Swords of Chaos, a sort of proto-MUD, then on various God Wars incarnations. They were the first time that I realized, and truly appreciated, the fact that technology can give a kid the ability to bring something from imagination to fruition with little more than determination, some manuals, a computer, and some lost sleep. That's a very empowering thing for a young person, and is still at the core of what I love about technology. My niece and nephew play Roblox. I think the creative element of it is a little less accessible, since it seems like a lot of kids consume it via tablets or phones, and there's an element of handling graphics. I got them a laptop specifically in hopes that they would make the jump though.

toyg 6y ago
My kids (11 and 9) love roblox, but it's too hard to create stuff with it. There is a lot of coding involved and the learning curve is significant, I tried it myself and got overwhelmed (although to be fair, my interest was pretty low to start with). They are much more creative with Minecraft.

stevesearer 6y ago

I spent an embarrassing amount of time playing MUDs beginning in high school all the way throughout and after college. Perhaps all MUDs did this, but my MUD of choice (Revenge of the Jedi RotJ) tallied your total playing time in your player stats. The way I got started was that a few friends from school were playing and talking about it. It sounded dumb at the time (no pictures + typing) and I decided I would start playing just to kill them in the game. Little did I know that I would need to spend a lot of time to improve my level, acquire skills, and get better equipment. In addition I didn't know that PKs were mostly frowned upon.

cmrdporcupine 6y ago

Roblox is more like LambdaMOO than a MUD. LambdaMOO and its succesors were 100% programmed in a prototype based object-oriented programming language with only minimal world-support in the C portion of the server itself. The entire world was composed using the programming language and most users ended up being at least builders if not programmers in it. The focus was authoring, not RPG. Some people (including myself) wrote up some RPGs in MOO but they never really caught on.

qvrjuec 6y ago
I've played a LambdaMOO based MUD off and on for about 10 years now. Players would inevitably quit or transition to working on the game core, such an awesome community to be a part of.
- cmrdporcupine 6y ago
  I was young but it was heady days back then in the early 90s playing with that stuff. The most disappointing thing for me at the time was how the Internet went the direction of the web browser / HTTP instead of the direction we were trying to go with stuff like LambdaMOO. The web in those days was all about a non-persistent connection and a fairly non-interactive experience. It wasn't until the mid-2000s that "web 2.0" took off and the web got some of the interactivity and dynamic programmability we had in mind with what we were playing with in the early 90s -- but it got it in this awful bolted-on way. That idea of a massive shared authoring environment, I still think that's the future of computing. But for me it isn't about the 3d VR-ish immersion stuff, I actually fear the isolating box that that puts people in. Which is why I haven't played with Roblox or let my kids use it either. I don't want them in another world. I want these kinds of tools to enrich the world we already have, instead.
Scarblac 6y ago
How is that different from LPMUDs? LPC sounds exactly like that language.
- cmrdporcupine 6y ago

snikeris 6y ago

Any current or former Gemstone players out there? It used to be on AOL but switched to the regular internet at some point. I still drop in from time to time, brings me back to my childhood.

jmoiron 6y ago
I played from 1995~2001/2ish. Probably to this day the most rich online gaming experience I've had; the book version of a succession of inferior films.
jweather 6y ago
DragonRealms on AOL was a huge part of my life for a couple of years in the 90s. I believe it was a direct successor to GS3.
shostack 6y ago
Yep, made my way through most of the Simutronics games. Recently tried Dragonrealms again but struggled to get into it. I also think their subscription pricing is way too high. But I have fond memories of farming gold rings from Harpies in GS3, and popping boxes in the thieves guild in DR. Cyberstrike was also ahead of its time and was surprisingly enjoyable despite the horrendous lag.

x87678r 6y ago

Is it easy to create Roblox games? I know my kids love it but not sure if its possible to try to do somthing yourself.

LanceH 6y ago
I found it to be pure hell compared to using a game engine. Slow interface, sketchy documentation.
jweather 6y ago
I wouldn't call it easy, but it is possible. The tools are not very polished, but they exist and are free... (start with Roblox Studio)

Brendinooo 6y ago

I got into a MUD around 2003. Lensmoor. Our high school laptops didn't block Telnet, so it was something to do. I was obsessed with the game until I gradually realized that the best players were there for thousands of hours, and I didn't have that kind of time for it.

evanelias 6y ago

Enjoyable read! I just wish the brief tangent about BBSes had also mentioned dial-up BBS MUDs, but I understand the omission considering the article's length, as well as BBS MUDs' lack of geographic ubiquity. The most compelling aspect of dial-up BBS MUDs was community locality: all of the players generally lived in your metro area. In the 90s, the only popular BBS MUDs ran on the MajorBBS/WorldGroup BBS software, which was technologically impressive for its time -- it could handle dozens of modems and concurrent users on a single PC running DOS, and supported pluggable games/modules using an event-loop callback architecture. However, it was also incredibly expensive for the SysOp to purchase, as were its games. This meant that any given metro area typically only had a few MBBS/WG BBSes, and they tended to be pay-for-access systems. By far the most popular MBBS/WG MUD was MajorMUD, although there were also some fairly successful predecessors (e.g. TeleArena, Mutants, Swords of Chaos) and successors (e.g. The Rose: Council of Guardians). These games were typically "stock" -- they had sprawling game worlds but were identical on each BBS, with little or no built-in ability for the SysOp to edit the world. Despite that, each game's "feel" still naturally differed between each BBS just based on the local community. As a teen MajorMUD addict, I always wanted to run my own board one day, but the cost was prohibitive. This eventually inspired me to write my own BBS MUD as an affordable doorgame for hobbyist/lower-end systems, which at ~20K LOC was the first large program I ever wrote. It did relatively well for its time period (BBSes were dying out by that point) but rarely achieved large concurrent user counts on many boards, which was an inherent downside to aiming for the smaller boards.

ZacharyPitts 6y ago

Played so much on BatMud in the early nineties. Bat Mud is still running at https://www.bat.org https://www.bat.org Became a "wiz", and wrote my first code used by other people in 1992. That code is still running, 28 years later!

Vaslo 6y ago

Running home from school in the 90’s to get on and play my turns on DikuMUD...

every 6y ago

I was an "official" builder on the Steve Jackson Games[0] Metaverse MOO in the 90's. My "job" was to create interesting spaces, places and objects. My "pay" was a free shell account. I was a blue gelatinous cube that had escaped a crashed NetHack game and was followed about by a pink gelatinous pyramidal puppet. I did this for several years until the game finally folded[1]... [0] http://www.sjgames.com/ http://www.sjgames.com/ [1] https://web.archive.org/web/19961226202638/http://www.io.com/io/metaverse/ https://web.archive.org/web/19961226202638/http://www.io.com...

freediver 6y ago

Roboblox could not be farther from MUDs and only people who played MUDs can appreciate the difference. Lets start with the obvious - MUDs use text and "text is the highest bandwidth medium for our imagination" (quote by Bartle, co-creator of first MUD). I recommend everyone watching this video to understand why is text so superior to any other medium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zctp972y_Eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zctp972y_Eg Incidentally the lockdown inspired me to spend the last five months rebuilding and relaunching the MUD I built in 90s. It is properly hard and properly text and if you want to check it out: telnet playlom.com 4000 (and if you are less hardcore http://playlom.com:4001/ http://playlom.com:4001/ )

biddit 6y ago
I both built and played MUDs from 1994 - 2003. From your comments is seems like you didn't read the article. Of course Roblox is not a text-based MUD. Not even the author is arguing that. Mechanically, it's incredibly similar in social dynamics, creativity and difference of worlds, and the fact that you can design your own world/mechnaics so easily.
- freediver 6y ago
  I understand that. The author does make the claim that "Roblox is a MUD for the TikTok generation." I am making an important distinction in just one - and to me the crucial point - which I highlighted in the original comment above: text is highest bandwidth medium for our imagination. If a game is not using text but other mediums such as graphics, then regardless of social dynamics, creativity, difference of worlds etc it can not be put in the same context as MUDs.
  - biddit 6y ago
    > Roboblox could not be farther from MUDs This statement is a bit extreme no? That's what I was addressing.
    - freediver 6y ago