7 ms·

WolfMUD: World of Living Fantasy

117 points by chungus 4y ago

ozarker 4y ago
I was born in 1995. I love reading stories like this about the early days of software. My heart yearns for that time. Wish I was there, but accounts like these are the next best thing.
- chrisco255 4y ago
  I'm curious, what about the early days of software or computing appeal to you? And what do you think today's software or tech culture lacks that those days had?
  - Cardinal7167 4y ago
    The minimalism of necessity that previous years had can’t be imitated. Of course, one can intentionally limit their art now, but it’s not the same. That minimalism necessitates creativity.
    - shanebellone 4y ago
      I agree with this. Constraint fosters innovation.
- ilaksh 4y ago
  Well the next best thing is actually emulators or just directly trying the software. For example someone has WolfMUD online here http://bbs.kd3.us/htmlterm4000.ssjs http://bbs.kd3.us/htmlterm4000.ssjs telnet://bbs.kd3.us:4001 There are lots of online emulators for old computers https://www.livingcomputers.org/Online-Resources/Online-Emulators.aspx https://www.livingcomputers.org/Online-Resources/Online-Emul... Well the real next best thing is buying and using actual old computers.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- progre 4y ago
  I think we are still in the early days of software. No need to sit around in nostalgia, the software revolution is still happening.
ilaksh 4y ago
It would be really interesting to see what's possible taking one of the more advanced/featureful MUD engines and combining them somehow with LLM text generation (especially text-davinci-003 from OpenAI since its so human-like). I guess AI Dungeon is attempting something a bit like that. But what I am thinking is keeping the core as the MUD, which will ensure that game state and things stay consistent. Then having the AI generate things based on this core state fed as part of each prompt, to add a bit of variety to descriptions, or allow NPCs to have conversations. But always anchored by the world state tracked by the MUD. Except maybe for some random encounters inserted here and there. That's the biggest issue with AI Dungeon is that it tends to not quite track whats going on properly from one sentence/paragraph to the next. Although they have improved it recently.
- ianbicking 4y ago
  I've been playing around with this idea a bit from a world building direction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUEXo3wrf70 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUEXo3wrf70 – it generates cities in a top-down way using GPT. From city to neighborhood to buildings with individual rooms and items, though having implemented it I think anything smaller than buildings is the wrong approach. A particularly neat part is generating characters with backstories. Now I'm trying to experiment with giving them some personal perspective and autonomy. I haven't actually tried to move the data into a running game... I'd like to but I feel like I'm going to put it off indefinitely :-/
  - aww_dang 4y ago
    I experimented with something similar at the conceptual stage. I used XML and a basic GPT2 model. The focus was on NPCs and quest items. Throw away invalid XML and prompt for NPCs to produce or consume quest items. Looking at reworking it, but ultimately it is something which has to be semi-supervised.
  - ilaksh 4y ago
    That's amazing! Reminds me of this site: https://www.litrpgadventures.com/ https://www.litrpgadventures.com/ which I think also uses OpenAI.
bitexploder 4y ago
Year was 1995. I was a 15 year old kid who discovered Diku muds. CircleMUD to be specific. My life revolved around building MUDs and PC gaming. My family bought a Pentium 133, it cost my family a fortune and we were not well off. I got good at C and Linux, went off to work in 1999 after almost not graduating high school. The rest is history. I owe so much to MUDs, which lit my brain on fire and led me to a life I never could have dreamed of. MUDs still exist, you can still build them and they are as much fun now as they ever were. Give it a shot :)
- vinhboy 4y ago
  Around the same time, middle school I think, I was in the SF Public library playing MUD on the little terminal they reserved for searching books. We couldn't afford a computer, or internet, at home. The librarians tolerated us. Eventually led to me learning C and running my own ROM MUD. I remember sending some random person $5 or $10 and they hosted my MUD on their server. I too owe MUD everything.
- abathur 4y ago
  I gather this happens a lot, relatively speaking. In early 2001, a junior in a webmastering class I took (I was a sophomore) introduced me to an LPMud, and it's ~recursively changed my life again and again. It was what finally taught me to touch-type in high school. It wasn't where I learned to program, but it was where I really cut my teeth (even though it took 9 years for me to decide to try). It isn't open source, but a related yak-shave did lead me to my first major OSS contribution merged into another project. I've talked to at least a handful of other people who've worked on our game with similar stories, and at least one who used something he built for the MUD to get his first programming job.
  - pixelfarmer 4y ago
    The LPmud driver is quite some insane piece of work, considering it was done in 1990/91 initially. It is a VM, OOP C dialect featuring lists and hashtables (LPC), has lambda-closures (and things like map() + filter() with that), and allowed reloading of most parts of the game without having to restart the entire MUD for that, a big issue Diku and others suffered from. There were a number of spawn-offs from that like MudOS and there was something called LPC4 which eventually morphed into Pike, the language the Roxen webserver was/is written in. I actually used that on my local machine over Apache, because configuring latter back in the early days was a nightmare while Roxen had a pretty simple and straightforward webinterface for that already. LPmud eventually got developed further and runs under the LDmud label now. The MUDs based on LPmud/LDmud are quite diverse and are interesting in themselves, if you have access to their core sources. I also remember statically linking MudOS which resulted in a binary of like 500kB back in time, meaning it was possible to use that as a very powerful scripting language in embedded systems.
Imnimo 4y ago
MUDs (specifically Achaea) got me from hunt-and-peck to competent typist. Not even Mario Teaches Typing could manage that.
- libraryatnight 4y ago
  For real. I thought I had already become a good typist chatting between commands in Starcraft but MUDs took it to another level.
- orthoxerox 4y ago
  Same here, but I found Achaea incredibly toxic with its pay-to-win mechanics and hostile playerbase.
  - Twisol 4y ago
    I didn't find the playerbase very hostile at all -- although I wasn't involved in most PVP combat activities, which IIRC is also where most of the "pay to win" is focused. (never did save up enough to buy wings, though)
    - jddj 4y ago
      I had a character that led one of the cities and a couple of different orders for a while there. I would never have the time for it now that I'm a bit older, but I had a great time and probably played for 6 or 7 years in total. It's 100% where I learned to code and to coherently structure ideas and arguments. Quite a lot of PvP, city scale and 1v1. Loved it.
- ryanchants 4y ago
  It was a combination of MUDs and IRC that did it for me.
helf 4y ago
Man I miss MUDs. Anyone here ever play RockyMUD? I had literally over a year of actual pay time in that one. My accrued hours of play surpassed a year. That is with like a decade of playing though. But still lol
- cess11 4y ago
  No, but my main on discworld.atuin.net has a couple of years of playtime logged since 2014. Since 2002 it's probably a couple of years more on tens of characters. It's still the game I play the most, and for the hardcore it's easy to run the client in tmux on a VPS and be active constantly, all day, every day, from phone or bigger computer.
shever73 4y ago
This is great, I discovered MUDs around 1995 and even tried to write my own in Perl. The real-time interaction with other characters that we take for granted now seemed revolutionary back then.
- islic14111411 4y ago
  100% agree! I have a mud with no developers left - I guess that is the way of life eh?
artem_dev 4y ago
Is it possible to play it on-line? I downloaded the sever and it works fine and I can telnet it locally but looks like I can't telnet to wolfmud.org (tried the default port).
- scandum 4y ago
  There's a list of online MUDs that are still in active development here: https://mudhalla.net/mudlist/ https://mudhalla.net/mudlist/ Especially on Windows you'd be better off using PuTTY or TinTin++ to connect, since Microsoft's telnet is pretty much broken: https://tintin.mudhalla.net/download.php https://tintin.mudhalla.net/download.php
ryanmercer 4y ago
It's crazy to think I've been (fairly consistently) playing MUDs for 29 years now...
gww 4y ago
I have been playing a MUD sporadically for almost 25 years. It's desolate now which is sad. However, someone occassionaly logs on from years ago and it's great fun. MUDs were my first exposure to a C-like language (LPC) and are where I learned to program to a reasonable standard. I still remember a CS major helping me learn recursion when I was still in high school.
Longlius 4y ago
I love these class of games, especially the MUSHes. It's weird how there's not really an equivalent to 'shared world that's user-scriptable by its players' in the modern gaming ecosystem. Closest would probably be something like Roblox but even that's really just a pale echo of what a lot of these text games would let you do as a player-creator.
- ilaksh 4y ago
  Second Life exists..although I do know we are all supposed to pretend it doesn't.
snthpy 4y ago
Am I the only one that thought this was going to be about a Wolfenstein 3D MUD? Anyway, I loved playing the Dune MUD in 1997-1998 in my first years at university.

117 points by chungus 4y ago

I was born in 1995. I love reading stories like this about the early days of software. My heart yearns for that time. Wish I was there, but accounts like these are the next best thing.

chrisco255 4y ago
I'm curious, what about the early days of software or computing appeal to you? And what do you think today's software or tech culture lacks that those days had?
- Cardinal7167 4y ago
  The minimalism of necessity that previous years had can’t be imitated. Of course, one can intentionally limit their art now, but it’s not the same. That minimalism necessitates creativity.
  - shanebellone 4y ago
    I agree with this. Constraint fosters innovation.
ilaksh 4y ago
Well the next best thing is actually emulators or just directly trying the software. For example someone has WolfMUD online here http://bbs.kd3.us/htmlterm4000.ssjs http://bbs.kd3.us/htmlterm4000.ssjs telnet://bbs.kd3.us:4001 There are lots of online emulators for old computers https://www.livingcomputers.org/Online-Resources/Online-Emulators.aspx https://www.livingcomputers.org/Online-Resources/Online-Emul... Well the real next best thing is buying and using actual old computers.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
progre 4y ago
I think we are still in the early days of software. No need to sit around in nostalgia, the software revolution is still happening.

ilaksh 4y ago

It would be really interesting to see what's possible taking one of the more advanced/featureful MUD engines and combining them somehow with LLM text generation (especially text-davinci-003 from OpenAI since its so human-like). I guess AI Dungeon is attempting something a bit like that. But what I am thinking is keeping the core as the MUD, which will ensure that game state and things stay consistent. Then having the AI generate things based on this core state fed as part of each prompt, to add a bit of variety to descriptions, or allow NPCs to have conversations. But always anchored by the world state tracked by the MUD. Except maybe for some random encounters inserted here and there. That's the biggest issue with AI Dungeon is that it tends to not quite track whats going on properly from one sentence/paragraph to the next. Although they have improved it recently.

ianbicking 4y ago
I've been playing around with this idea a bit from a world building direction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUEXo3wrf70 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUEXo3wrf70 – it generates cities in a top-down way using GPT. From city to neighborhood to buildings with individual rooms and items, though having implemented it I think anything smaller than buildings is the wrong approach. A particularly neat part is generating characters with backstories. Now I'm trying to experiment with giving them some personal perspective and autonomy. I haven't actually tried to move the data into a running game... I'd like to but I feel like I'm going to put it off indefinitely :-/
- aww_dang 4y ago
  I experimented with something similar at the conceptual stage. I used XML and a basic GPT2 model. The focus was on NPCs and quest items. Throw away invalid XML and prompt for NPCs to produce or consume quest items. Looking at reworking it, but ultimately it is something which has to be semi-supervised.
- ilaksh 4y ago
  That's amazing! Reminds me of this site: https://www.litrpgadventures.com/ https://www.litrpgadventures.com/ which I think also uses OpenAI.

bitexploder 4y ago

Year was 1995. I was a 15 year old kid who discovered Diku muds. CircleMUD to be specific. My life revolved around building MUDs and PC gaming. My family bought a Pentium 133, it cost my family a fortune and we were not well off. I got good at C and Linux, went off to work in 1999 after almost not graduating high school. The rest is history. I owe so much to MUDs, which lit my brain on fire and led me to a life I never could have dreamed of. MUDs still exist, you can still build them and they are as much fun now as they ever were. Give it a shot :)

vinhboy 4y ago
Around the same time, middle school I think, I was in the SF Public library playing MUD on the little terminal they reserved for searching books. We couldn't afford a computer, or internet, at home. The librarians tolerated us. Eventually led to me learning C and running my own ROM MUD. I remember sending some random person $5 or $10 and they hosted my MUD on their server. I too owe MUD everything.
abathur 4y ago
I gather this happens a lot, relatively speaking. In early 2001, a junior in a webmastering class I took (I was a sophomore) introduced me to an LPMud, and it's ~recursively changed my life again and again. It was what finally taught me to touch-type in high school. It wasn't where I learned to program, but it was where I really cut my teeth (even though it took 9 years for me to decide to try). It isn't open source, but a related yak-shave did lead me to my first major OSS contribution merged into another project. I've talked to at least a handful of other people who've worked on our game with similar stories, and at least one who used something he built for the MUD to get his first programming job.
- pixelfarmer 4y ago
  The LPmud driver is quite some insane piece of work, considering it was done in 1990/91 initially. It is a VM, OOP C dialect featuring lists and hashtables (LPC), has lambda-closures (and things like map() + filter() with that), and allowed reloading of most parts of the game without having to restart the entire MUD for that, a big issue Diku and others suffered from. There were a number of spawn-offs from that like MudOS and there was something called LPC4 which eventually morphed into Pike, the language the Roxen webserver was/is written in. I actually used that on my local machine over Apache, because configuring latter back in the early days was a nightmare while Roxen had a pretty simple and straightforward webinterface for that already. LPmud eventually got developed further and runs under the LDmud label now. The MUDs based on LPmud/LDmud are quite diverse and are interesting in themselves, if you have access to their core sources. I also remember statically linking MudOS which resulted in a binary of like 500kB back in time, meaning it was possible to use that as a very powerful scripting language in embedded systems.

Imnimo 4y ago

MUDs (specifically Achaea) got me from hunt-and-peck to competent typist. Not even Mario Teaches Typing could manage that.

libraryatnight 4y ago
For real. I thought I had already become a good typist chatting between commands in Starcraft but MUDs took it to another level.
orthoxerox 4y ago
Same here, but I found Achaea incredibly toxic with its pay-to-win mechanics and hostile playerbase.
- Twisol 4y ago
  I didn't find the playerbase very hostile at all -- although I wasn't involved in most PVP combat activities, which IIRC is also where most of the "pay to win" is focused. (never did save up enough to buy wings, though)
  - jddj 4y ago
    I had a character that led one of the cities and a couple of different orders for a while there. I would never have the time for it now that I'm a bit older, but I had a great time and probably played for 6 or 7 years in total. It's 100% where I learned to code and to coherently structure ideas and arguments. Quite a lot of PvP, city scale and 1v1. Loved it.
ryanchants 4y ago
It was a combination of MUDs and IRC that did it for me.

helf 4y ago

Man I miss MUDs. Anyone here ever play RockyMUD? I had literally over a year of actual pay time in that one. My accrued hours of play surpassed a year. That is with like a decade of playing though. But still lol

cess11 4y ago
No, but my main on discworld.atuin.net has a couple of years of playtime logged since 2014. Since 2002 it's probably a couple of years more on tens of characters. It's still the game I play the most, and for the hardcore it's easy to run the client in tmux on a VPS and be active constantly, all day, every day, from phone or bigger computer.

shever73 4y ago

This is great, I discovered MUDs around 1995 and even tried to write my own in Perl. The real-time interaction with other characters that we take for granted now seemed revolutionary back then.

islic14111411 4y ago
100% agree! I have a mud with no developers left - I guess that is the way of life eh?

artem_dev 4y ago

Is it possible to play it on-line? I downloaded the sever and it works fine and I can telnet it locally but looks like I can't telnet to wolfmud.org (tried the default port).

scandum 4y ago
There's a list of online MUDs that are still in active development here: https://mudhalla.net/mudlist/ https://mudhalla.net/mudlist/ Especially on Windows you'd be better off using PuTTY or TinTin++ to connect, since Microsoft's telnet is pretty much broken: https://tintin.mudhalla.net/download.php https://tintin.mudhalla.net/download.php

ryanmercer 4y ago

It's crazy to think I've been (fairly consistently) playing MUDs for 29 years now...

gww 4y ago

I have been playing a MUD sporadically for almost 25 years. It's desolate now which is sad. However, someone occassionaly logs on from years ago and it's great fun. MUDs were my first exposure to a C-like language (LPC) and are where I learned to program to a reasonable standard. I still remember a CS major helping me learn recursion when I was still in high school.

Longlius 4y ago

I love these class of games, especially the MUSHes. It's weird how there's not really an equivalent to 'shared world that's user-scriptable by its players' in the modern gaming ecosystem. Closest would probably be something like Roblox but even that's really just a pale echo of what a lot of these text games would let you do as a player-creator.

ilaksh 4y ago
Second Life exists..although I do know we are all supposed to pretend it doesn't.

snthpy 4y ago

Am I the only one that thought this was going to be about a Wolfenstein 3D MUD? Anyway, I loved playing the Dune MUD in 1997-1998 in my first years at university.