8 ms·

Evennia: MUD/MU* creation system

111 points by raytopia 3y ago

Ancapistani 3y ago
Sigh. I guess I’ll build a MUD, then.
klibertp 3y ago
How nostalgic. It's like 15-20 years old at this point, no? From what I remember, I didn't like the Web-based content creation system back then. I grew up playing and coding LPMUDs - which are basically a text-based Smalltalk environments with vaguely C-like syntax - so the model where objects' features are part of the engine and objects are static data seemed too simplistic. I even tried writing a "real MUD" in Python at the same time Evennia was starting out. Obviously, I quickly realized that Python is not Smalltalk (though I'd only learn about Smalltalk many years later), and that I'm light-years away from being able to hack the interpreter enough to make LPC-like environment. Meanwhile, Evennia got some contributors and the project took off the ground. Evidently, simpler is better :) Kudos to the author for keeping it alive and updated. BTW: There's also this: https://www.amazon.com/MUD-Game-Programming-Development/dp/1592000908 https://www.amazon.com/MUD-Game-Programming-Development/dp/1... - a pretty good book that taught me how to connect compiled and scripting languages. Now that I think about it, while I did start programming before having access to the Internet (QBasic FTW), it was MUDs that made me really interested in coding. Without them, I don't think I'd be a programmer today.
- guessbest 3y ago
  The site itself is 'dated' as it has a massive right margin of blank space, a texture background and the following code:  Doesn't mean I'm not currently trying to install it. I am.
- Griatch 3y ago
  Evennia does have a web admin, but main development work is intended to be done in Python code, really; what would be akin to 'hardcode' in LPMUDs, I presume. Evennia's extremely extendable, but not so much over the telnet command line; the choice was made to instead make it easier to develop a game in Evennia using modern dev workflows, using version control and proper code editors. All a matter of taste of course. :)
- deltarholamda 3y ago
  >Without them, I don't think I'd be a programmer today. Same. LPC was ridiculously powerful considering how limited it was, and it was easy to learn things just by reading other source files. Not having to worry about graphics--you just described how things looked, can't get any easier--and making a thing that could walk around and act sort of independently was very satisfying. I wish there was something similar today. LPC and LPMUDs are still around, but the license is somewhat restrictive, and trying to get people to download and use a MUD client is too steep of a barrier for casual gamers. I get motivated every now and then to do it myself, but it's a lot harder than it seems.
  - klibertp 3y ago
    (Started replying to Griatch, went on a tangent, it'll fit better here I think. Skip the first paragraph to go straight to LPC advocacy :D) Last time I looked at Evennia it wasn't even in alpha, it just started out (and I was a jealous teenager that wanted to do everything himself, too). Since it was so long ago, I only remember (roughly) the basic ideas and some funny interactions on the mailing list, where the creator tried to convince some would-be contributor that no, you don't need money to start such a project... :) I do remember LPMUD stuff way better. You're right that, at least in the beginning and on the MUD I played and later coded on, the most common way of writing code was... a clone of `ed`. Really, the line-oriented editor, the one just a step before "magnetic needle and a steady hand". You wrote the code in Notepad, then ran `ed` over telnet, pasted the code and observed it being sent, line by line. You quickly learned what \n is and why it's important thanks to that :) Sometimes you missed a semicolon, so you also naturally learned about `s` and regexes, to ease the pain a little. At some point, though, admins figured out the permissions and it became possible to upload code via FTP. Progress! As for the architecture, the only "hard"-coded part was the "driver", which was just an interpreter/VM for LPC, plus some code to handle network and disk IO. Everything else was written in LPC. LPC was unique in a bunch of ways: it was gradually typed, it was object-oriented but didn't have classes and used prototypal (and multiple!) inheritance on top of providing #include. Imagine a cross between Ruby and JavaScript coupled with object database/object persistence built-in. Everything was an object, and the system was fully reflective - you could manipulate and change parts of the running system from within. Even the source files on disk were objects within the system - as soon as the file got created, it was already an entity you could manipulate with code (that `ed` clone was written in LPC, too). It was incredibly powerful and fun way of coding. Version control was a problem, of course - since code was a dynamic, run-time construct, versioning just files wouldn't cut it. It's the same problem Smalltalk images suffer from. It's possible to solve, but you'd have to code the version control system into the driver, and guys capable of hacking on the driver were few and far in between. Once again, simpler triumphed - although modern Smalltalks do offer VCSes comparable in features with mainstream ones. Much, much later I realized that what made it all possible was a version of "become" method from Smalltalk: a way to replace one object with another completely and invisibly. The lack of this primitive operation was what made all my attempts to fully recreate the environment in Python fail (along with problematic object model in Python 2.x, but that's another story). In the end, some ten years later, I learned both Smalltalk and Self, and realized I could get what I wanted by writing a rudimentary telnet server in Pharo. By then, though, MMORPGs ate most of the mindshare that kept MUDs alive, and I got distracted with other projects. I did a few prototypes while learning strange programming languages, but always stopped at ~2-3k loc and never finished any of them. I used these as tools for learning only, believing there's nobody who'd be interested in this way of playing by programming (or programming by playing.) > I wish there was something similar today. TL;DR: I researched ~20 programming languages and environments, and got reasonably close to the LPC experience in two of them: Io and Smalltalk. Io is not very actively maintained (last I checked), but there are mature, stable, and free Smalltalk implementations out there. An added bonus is that you get MUD client along with the environment and you don't need to build Web-based admin interface (most Smalltalks provide a GUI). I have some code I can share if you're interested; I get the same urge to build this thing from time to time, but never really followed through with any of the attempts. Though, I suspect the story would change a little if even just one other person was interested :)
- gabereiser 3y ago
  This fills me with warm fuzzy feelings. MUDs were my jam growing up. So much so that I became a programmer because of it (among others) and like you, have written a few myself. I still maintain old C codebases for modern gcc. Diku, Merc, Smaug, and a few of my own, SWR, exospace. Evennia was always this kind of weird alternative though. The web client was “just enough” and, honestly, was one of the first things people would customize and expand upon. That said, writing multi-threaded socket code isn’t for the faint of heart. Abstractions and libraries exist now - but back then it was a labyrinthine mess of segfaults and kernel dumps. BSD had some of the best tcp socket support and so a lot of muds were built upon BSD.
- waste_monk 3y ago
  >There's also this: https://www.amazon.com/MUD-Game-Programming-Development/dp/1 https://www.amazon.com/MUD-Game-Programming-Development/dp/1... Does this book still hold up today? It's ~20 years old at this point.
giraffe_lady 3y ago
Mudding is such a small niche, the one I've been playing for decades has a few hundred active players still. A really curious thing about muds is more people seem to want to make new ones than play them. There is probably about one unique mud per active mud player these days. Most have no one playing them though. And the established muds have a hard time finding people to work on them, since they are gnarly legacy codebases based on deeply out of favor programming paradigms. Much more fun to roll your own platform, even if it never gets played. I wish people would just pick one of the dozen or so active muds and play it. Mud client programming is a great outlet for recreational coding imo. The line between my character and the code I've written to manage it is very fuzzy in a good way. Plus everyone is always talking about how great lua is. Mud scripting is mostly lua, so it's a great way to find out that lua is just as bad as any other language.
- User23 3y ago
  It's kind of the next step up from writing your very own IRC bot. On another tangent, I wish I had known Common Lisp back when I cared about MUD implementation enough to actually pour a few hundred hours into it. Of course you'd face the problem of the extension language, at least in the naïve implementation, being entirely too powerful. Still, it could potentially make it easy to script truly interesting custom object behaviors. If I were to make a pass at it now, I'd try to structure the game system in such a way that it could power a roguelike or a MUD, since roguelikes have considerably more legs these days.
  - Griatch 3y ago
    The roguelike bits are mainly client-side; there are people using Evennia to develop roguelikes (not sure if any are actually released, but it can be done).
    - User23 3y ago
      Yep. So long as you separate concerns well it’s quite doable. The heavy lifting is deciding how to turn roguelike tiles into MUD rooms, or vice versa. There were some MUDs doing procedural content back in the ‘90s, and others that had a minimap, so there’s plenty of demonstrable overlap.
b800h 3y ago
Fantastic stuff. Now I can integrate an age-verification system so that don't end up in legal hot-water thanks to the Online Safety Act..... /s? In all seriousness, this looks like a fabulous project. Congratulations to those behind it, we needed something like this. I have bad memories of leafing through ancient C code to run a MUD. I've just starred it and will roll it out on a Raspi at home, OSA be damned.
jerrysievert 3y ago
I miss building muds. I miss it so much that I've extracted all of the sillymud rooms, objects, and mobiles into json to play with at some future point. so many lost months in mud-dom.
- ctoth 3y ago
  Several years ago, I built an area reader for a bunch of Merc/Diku/other old .are files which you might find useful[0]. [0]: https://github.com/ctoth/area_reader https://github.com/ctoth/area_reader
  - jerrysievert 3y ago
    I wrote mine in c, but I haven't released it yet. it's complete, and includes the sillymud extensions (figurine, etc). thrilled that more people cared enough to do it as well, though! likely I'll build one for epic as well.
bemusedthrow75 3y ago
I would much much rather see a reboot of the MOO concepts (persistent object-oriented world, global time). I know the existing LambdaMOO core and server are still being maintained, and web-ified, but even though I am something of a dissenter from the whole Rust trend, I'm very interested in this, which is going about it IMO the right way: https://github.com/rdaum/moor https://github.com/rdaum/moor MOO was a good time.
- citrinebanana 3y ago
  Why much prefer MOO stuff?
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    LambdaMOO straddled(straddles?) a fine line between being a more "serious" system that looks more like a multiuser Smalltalk & Lisp -- with a persistent shared networked database, a live shared programming / authoring environment with a prototype OO scripting language ... and a "less serious" MUD. You can (but don't have to) build a MUD in it -- that's what people did -- but in the TinyM* style not usually RPG type games, more social systems. But it was sitting on some very cool concepts, especially for its time. Predating the web, kind of another "path" that the Internet could have taken. It took the web 15 years to catch up to the idea of synchronous live interaction, and it's still more ... document based... than the kind of object/thing/room/narrative aspect we had going on in MOO. It's very clearly inspired by Lisp, Self, and Smalltalk. And LambdaMOO itself was, back then, a hub of some pretty nifty people. 'twas my (embarassing mostly) adolescence. And they handed out "programmer" bits easily, so it was full of people's self-programmed creations. The implementation certainly didn't age well. But the foundational concept is very cool. There were later iterations on the idea (CoolMUD, then ColdMUD/Genesis, a few other things) that refined things somewhat. Others have alluded to LPmud/LPC which had some similar-ish things going on, but that was less "persistent shared creation environment" styled and more "source code in files in a decent OO language for making MUDs" with transient objects/state between world resets. People built MUDs, games, in LPmud, but as said MOOs (apart from some exceptions) were less about games and more about what we'd these days might consider a form of social networking. Both were very cool, but MOO encouraged a more participatory programming environment, since you could just log in and start creating (cloning prototypes) and authoring (writing MOO "verbs" etc).
NikkiA 3y ago
I too miss MUD/Moo/MUSH/MUCKes I remember trying them all back in the early 90s, spending some time on lpmud instances and Amberyl's pennmush mostly, before writing my own. More recently I played a hellmoo inspired moo for a couple of years back around 2015 before I just stopped playing for some reason. Maybe I should try it again, it seems to still be running (good mud/moo/mush/mucks never seem to truly die)
- qvrjuec 3y ago
  > good mud/moo/mush/mucks never seem to truly die The original hellmoo is finally dead! Which fork were you referring to?
  - NikkiA 3y ago
    Inferno
serf 3y ago
I recently tried to play a 'modern MUD' . I loved MUDs as a kid, surely modern is better. In a popular shard, with a prime-time population of 110 people, there existed 60usd 'cosmetic' item for sale in a very modern cash shop. Unable to wrap my brain around the concept of a MUD cosmetic item, nor a MUD cash shop, I shop-lifted the item. I now give this , free, to you fine folks on HN : "prismatic crystal" Wear it with pride; I quit on this whole modern MUD thing until my brain re-solidifies.
- BlarfMcFlarf 3y ago
  I dunno, I have no problem with them using an f2p model to pay for full time ongoing development, moderation for events, etc. And a cosmetics cash shop isn’t more baffling then fortnight or whatever: you basically just took a screenshot, but that still doesn’t let you walk around with it in game on your character. No, the real problem is that it takes a strong direction for this sort of system to not devolve into selling power, and making the game shitty and grindy for free to play players to push them towards buying skips, and as far as I know, a lot of those Iron Realms muds have failed this hurdle.
- klibertp 3y ago
  On the MUD I spent most time on, when the feature of making haircuts (and later tattoos) landed it was a Big Deal. There were very few designs, you had to go to a remote location (through dangerous areas) and pay a lot (in the in-game currency) to get it done. All the effort for literally one short line of text added to the description of your character... It might seem strange, but that's kind of the point of MUDs (for many people). Cash shop? Possible and imaginable. There were always people willing to pay others to level their character, for example. Should it be actually (and officially) implemented, though? I have some doubts here...
- munk-a 3y ago
  Funding for MUDs has always been an extremely difficult topic. You've got basically two options - either rely on financially stable retirees with way too much free time or rely on college students with way too much free time. The hosting cost is essentially nothing and setting up a dono button but accepting that you'll probably spend about 1-2 hundred dollars a year of your personal money (as the owner/operator) to maintain the server can cover that cost... but staff is where the real challenge is. MUDs live and die by having a good, fair, engaged staff of RPAs (role-play administrators) or whatever you call them... and those people need to absolutely love the game world because the expectation levied on them is either (with good staffing) 4-6 hours a day or (with thin staffing) 8-12 hours a day of labor to watch player requests, set up events - etc... and while mud player bases skew towards experienced players who appreciate and respect the work an RPA is doing there are always new players that can be abusive and even experienced players have bad days (especially if your game is perma death - then drama will occasionally dial way up). One other thing to keep in mind is that when you accept the mantel of RPA you're losing a lot of your ability to enjoy the game, you have access to privileged information and will either 1) metagame and be a terrible person 2) manage to drive your character in a direction away from plots you're personally managing (only possible with sufficient staffing) or 3) (the most likely) find yourself having difficulty playing because you know the metagame temptation is there and it's hard to compartmentalize information. The TL;DR is that MUDs are freaking hard to staff for free - offering compensation (even if it's just an occasional 100$ gift card in thanks for a month of work) is a huge boon to the community... but given the size of the player base and the demands on staff actually paying a decent wage is pretty much impossible. In your 100 person MUD example the staff is probably somewhere around a dozen people - lets assume you have a staff ratio of 1:8 - that would mean that to afford 15/hr you'd need players (that tend to be logged on 4 hours a day) to pay two dollars an hour or sixty dollars a month. Employed people can shrug off this cost - but people with a full time job can't play MUDs... so you're looking at getting 60/mo out of college students and retirees and that's pretty impossible.
Graziano_M 3y ago
I used to love MUDding (I mostly played _Alter Aeon_). I tried to run my own mud (when I was 11 or so), and I remember learning a lot of C, toolchain stuff, etc, just trying to compile SMAUG.
audiodude 3y ago
As someone who has contributed to the Evennia codebase (Hacktober 22), I can say that it's OOP systems are largely well thought out and very flexible. There are hooks for things like when your object gets created/destroyed, picked up/dropped, etc. Per another comment in this thread, it does seem like everyone wants to create a MUD but no one wants to play them. All the people in the Discord seem to have several years long projects to create "their game", but I didn't hear much about anyone actually playing any of these games.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  That's been the rub with all these things since the mid-90s. They're fascinating to build and author in. But it's like a Trotskyist sect or an indie rock band or something: everyone's got one of their own, and nobody wants to join anybody else's. :-)
- klibertp 3y ago
  It's entertaining to create a world. It's excruciating, painstaking work to finish it and make it into something others can enjoy. Plus, people like different aspects of MUDs. Creating it from the inside (like in LPMUDs) with others is fun in its own right, even if no player ever logs in. It's like a slow-paced, continuous hackathon, where everyone tries to make "something interesting" to show to the others.
- InspectorCal 3y ago
  There's definitely a bunch of us with long-term projects, but I think that impression that we don't play is mostly because devs split off into their own servers or game communities once their game is playable. For example: Arx is supposedly slowing down in its "old age" (it's been around longer than I've been using Evennia) but the last time I looked, there were over 50 players online. Silent Heaven launched only a couple months ago, but it's consistently had between 15 and 30 players online every time I've checked. I haven't played it since I'm not into horror, but if it weren't for that I would definitely have tried it out. It's got its own Discord server so I figure all the chatter is over there. Secrets of Aelandris has only had one playtesting window so far, but several of us in the Evennia community played and are looking forward excitedly to the next one. Playing it comes up every now and then in the Evennia community, but mostly we talk about it on the Aelandris discord. Song of Avaria, which I also helped playtest, posts regular development showcases, and we've got multiple people in the Discord community looking forward to it launching alpha early next year. People ask about playing it every time a new showcase drops. (One should be going up this weekend, btw!) The Mystavaria builders and testers are also all over on their own discord, so I have no idea where they're at in terms of activity. They aren't payable yet, but several of us are looking forward to trying that game out as well. Machine Garden opened up a sandbox pre-alpha a while back (a year or two, i think) which got several players and active discussion on its discord, as well, although it's currently down for major code renovation. And those are just the ones I'm personally familiar with that have names! (Aside from mine, of course, but it doesn't count yet.) Most people who look into Evennia are looking to make a game, since that's what Evennia is for, so there's of course a bias in that direction in terms of the community discussion. But there's some games out there, and the ones that are playable definitely get players.
ludicity 3y ago
Evennia is an awesome project, and the community is fantastic. I've been working with a blind friend over the past two years to gradually piece together a MUD (the only kind of game he's really able to play), and while we've been very inconsistent, the community has had infinite patience for fielding our questions. It was also very professionally interesting to me - I'm not sure what the situation is for many of the Hackernews FAANG folks, but most of the corporate offices I've been in only require people to glue together Python libraries badly. There's never any scope for writing anything more complex than that, and many people can barely use Git. I've always done much better than that low standard, but there's a huge gap between trying to be good and learning from someone that's actually good. Evennia is the first codebase where, when doing development in my own time, I found it frequently useful to dig into the library's source code to learn about how something has been implemented. It really raised the bar in my professional life for what I consider acceptable... and it was also very thought-provoking that a free framework for making MUDs blows up what's being done at most shops around the world. We've got a real problem in industry, but Evennia has always been a little Zen garden for me. So thanks to the developers :)
- Griatch 3y ago
  Thanks on behalf of developers/community/contributors, this is high praise and a treat/big encouragement for any OSS developer to hear! :D
dlyons 3y ago
13 year old me learned to write code on FurryMUCK. No idea at the time what a Furry was, or why strangers in game were trying to "yiff" me. It was incredible though; I was big into books like Redwall, Watership Down, etc. So a social game of animals seemed fun. The language was MUF; Multi User Forth. Stack based, push, pop, etc. I helped port software into other MUCKs, like FluffMUCK. The people there were so kind and taught me all sorts of things about Linux, programming, building PCs, etc. I wouldn't be who I am today without the early MUCK communities.
- fouc 3y ago
  I thought MUF was magical. Like I was a wizard chanting incantations. It was my first experience with an interpreted language. As a teenager it was amazing to telnet into a TinyMUCK and then launch a line-based editor and start coding in it. And not needing to compile the program like C. Remember that editor? http://www.rdwarf.com/users/mink/muckman/muf3.html http://www.rdwarf.com/users/mink/muckman/muf3.html
  - dlyons 3y ago
    Oh wow, this is so great. Thank you for this. I haven't read this in 25+ years. The line editor experience of building a stack and calling a function, I have not really found again. Lisp REPLs are nice but something about using the stack abstraction as the whole language. So many amazing memories. It was summer, 1994. I was 12, we had to move houses and my parents let me buy a 50ft phone cord to connect a modem in my room. My mom was a teacher and found me access to our local university's Internet dialup. Dialup terminal programs to connect into their VMS server. VMS had telnet which was enough to connect to all the MUDs I read about on my local BBS. I think I had just upgraded to 14.4, 28.8 wasn't even out yet. During the summers, I would stay up all night, lay in bed pretending asleep when my dad had to get up for work in the morning, and then get back up to keep at it. Entire virtual worlds to explore, basically text MMOs, in 1994. I was in Kentucky, felt like the only person who knew. It changed the course of my life forever, just the magic of it all. Lots of "anthropomorphic Furry" MUCKs and TrekMUSE. The best of times.
    - 3y ago
VikingCoder 3y ago
Off on a wild tangent... I feel like people should be running MUDs on Linode $5/month servers... using xterm.js, websockets, and some back-end. The back-end I'm playing with is .Net Core, and I'm using async/await to make the code seem more like a normal terminal application. ...and I'm just in love with how LambdaMOO natural language parsing and matching works... But I want to use C#... so I'm implementing verb matching using Method Attributes. And I'm trying to layer that on top of how Inform 6 works... Not using Z-Machine. Or the language of Inform 6... but the declarative style of Inform 6 room and object descriptions really appeals to me. I get that I'm giving up the flexibility of user-created content in a scripting language... ...but if I still allow players access to the GitHub repository for the content... And make it easy for them to stand up test servers... That feels like a decent compromise? I'm not even sure I want to make a MOO... or just a server with single-player Infocom-like Interactive Fiction games...? But this is my hobby project right now.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  The MOO command parser is pretty meh, TBH, not much there, there (having just recently ported it to Rust, I got to know it a bit...). There were other adventure type systems that had something a bit more involved in terms of (English) natural language parsing. Anyways, have fun :-) You're playing with the fun toys.
  - VikingCoder 3y ago
    Can you share details about your Rust port? Do you have direct experience with other parsers that you can recommend? I like MOO because it feels very understandable. The documentation was great.
    - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
      https://github.com/rdaum/moor https://github.com/rdaum/moor (see the thread elsewhere in the comments) command parser & matcher stuff is partially here: https://github.com/rdaum/moor/blob/main/moor-lib/src/tasks/command_parse.rs https://github.com/rdaum/moor/blob/main/moor-lib/src/tasks/c... and https://github.com/rdaum/moor/blob/main/moor-lib/src/db/matching.rs https://github.com/rdaum/moor/blob/main/moor-lib/src/db/matc... https://github.com/rdaum/moor/blob/main/moor-lib/src/db/match_env.rs https://github.com/rdaum/moor/blob/main/moor-lib/src/db/matc...
haolez 3y ago
I've just realized that MUDs can become and absurdly incredible experience with the advent of LLMs and diffusion models. You can drawn the most absurd and complex situations. The NPCs can be truly intelligent. Now I want to retire and work on this :)
- Griatch 3y ago
  Evennia supports using LLMs for your NPCs if you like :)
- gardenmud 3y ago
  The use of models is fantastic even if only to provide easier ways of handling pre-written text; like taking player input and categorizing it according to sentiment or estimated topic. I'm playing with it in Evennia and dialogue and interactions with the game are somewhat night and day. Just not having to guess for keywords is a wild improvement. However, it's also very slow unless you want to throw money away; running on a cheap droplet using Meta's zero-shot-classification for relatively brief queries... each takes a few seconds. Text generation is where most people's minds go but as far as players are concerned UX is more important than a million different room descriptions; you can always write rooms yourself.
- johnbellone 3y ago
  When I was building them +20 years ago the hardest thing for me was finding people that could build the world. I can see where an LLM would be useful there, too. For a small team it’ll let you scale it up very fast.
varunk8685 3y ago
[flagged]
georgeoliver 3y ago
At the risk of slightly embarrassing the lead dev of Evennia, Griatch, let me say that they are one of the best maintainers of an open source project I've ever seen, guiding the 15+ year old project with skill and grace (and also an amazing artist btw). It's nice to know there are projects like this out there whenever you see the latest open source dumpster fire in the headlines.
- Griatch 3y ago
  Thanks a lot, this is great and very encouraging to hear. :D That said, Evennia is, of course, a collaborative project, I couldn't do it without the help of the great Evennia community!

111 points by raytopia 3y ago

Sigh. I guess I’ll build a MUD, then.

How nostalgic. It's like 15-20 years old at this point, no? From what I remember, I didn't like the Web-based content creation system back then. I grew up playing and coding LPMUDs - which are basically a text-based Smalltalk environments with vaguely C-like syntax - so the model where objects' features are part of the engine and objects are static data seemed too simplistic. I even tried writing a "real MUD" in Python at the same time Evennia was starting out. Obviously, I quickly realized that Python is not Smalltalk (though I'd only learn about Smalltalk many years later), and that I'm light-years away from being able to hack the interpreter enough to make LPC-like environment. Meanwhile, Evennia got some contributors and the project took off the ground. Evidently, simpler is better :) Kudos to the author for keeping it alive and updated. BTW: There's also this: https://www.amazon.com/MUD-Game-Programming-Development/dp/1592000908 https://www.amazon.com/MUD-Game-Programming-Development/dp/1... - a pretty good book that taught me how to connect compiled and scripting languages. Now that I think about it, while I did start programming before having access to the Internet (QBasic FTW), it was MUDs that made me really interested in coding. Without them, I don't think I'd be a programmer today.

guessbest 3y ago
The site itself is 'dated' as it has a massive right margin of blank space, a texture background and the following code:  Doesn't mean I'm not currently trying to install it. I am.
Griatch 3y ago
Evennia does have a web admin, but main development work is intended to be done in Python code, really; what would be akin to 'hardcode' in LPMUDs, I presume. Evennia's extremely extendable, but not so much over the telnet command line; the choice was made to instead make it easier to develop a game in Evennia using modern dev workflows, using version control and proper code editors. All a matter of taste of course. :)
deltarholamda 3y ago
>Without them, I don't think I'd be a programmer today. Same. LPC was ridiculously powerful considering how limited it was, and it was easy to learn things just by reading other source files. Not having to worry about graphics--you just described how things looked, can't get any easier--and making a thing that could walk around and act sort of independently was very satisfying. I wish there was something similar today. LPC and LPMUDs are still around, but the license is somewhat restrictive, and trying to get people to download and use a MUD client is too steep of a barrier for casual gamers. I get motivated every now and then to do it myself, but it's a lot harder than it seems.
- klibertp 3y ago
  (Started replying to Griatch, went on a tangent, it'll fit better here I think. Skip the first paragraph to go straight to LPC advocacy :D) Last time I looked at Evennia it wasn't even in alpha, it just started out (and I was a jealous teenager that wanted to do everything himself, too). Since it was so long ago, I only remember (roughly) the basic ideas and some funny interactions on the mailing list, where the creator tried to convince some would-be contributor that no, you don't need money to start such a project... :) I do remember LPMUD stuff way better. You're right that, at least in the beginning and on the MUD I played and later coded on, the most common way of writing code was... a clone of `ed`. Really, the line-oriented editor, the one just a step before "magnetic needle and a steady hand". You wrote the code in Notepad, then ran `ed` over telnet, pasted the code and observed it being sent, line by line. You quickly learned what \n is and why it's important thanks to that :) Sometimes you missed a semicolon, so you also naturally learned about `s` and regexes, to ease the pain a little. At some point, though, admins figured out the permissions and it became possible to upload code via FTP. Progress! As for the architecture, the only "hard"-coded part was the "driver", which was just an interpreter/VM for LPC, plus some code to handle network and disk IO. Everything else was written in LPC. LPC was unique in a bunch of ways: it was gradually typed, it was object-oriented but didn't have classes and used prototypal (and multiple!) inheritance on top of providing #include. Imagine a cross between Ruby and JavaScript coupled with object database/object persistence built-in. Everything was an object, and the system was fully reflective - you could manipulate and change parts of the running system from within. Even the source files on disk were objects within the system - as soon as the file got created, it was already an entity you could manipulate with code (that `ed` clone was written in LPC, too). It was incredibly powerful and fun way of coding. Version control was a problem, of course - since code was a dynamic, run-time construct, versioning just files wouldn't cut it. It's the same problem Smalltalk images suffer from. It's possible to solve, but you'd have to code the version control system into the driver, and guys capable of hacking on the driver were few and far in between. Once again, simpler triumphed - although modern Smalltalks do offer VCSes comparable in features with mainstream ones. Much, much later I realized that what made it all possible was a version of "become" method from Smalltalk: a way to replace one object with another completely and invisibly. The lack of this primitive operation was what made all my attempts to fully recreate the environment in Python fail (along with problematic object model in Python 2.x, but that's another story). In the end, some ten years later, I learned both Smalltalk and Self, and realized I could get what I wanted by writing a rudimentary telnet server in Pharo. By then, though, MMORPGs ate most of the mindshare that kept MUDs alive, and I got distracted with other projects. I did a few prototypes while learning strange programming languages, but always stopped at ~2-3k loc and never finished any of them. I used these as tools for learning only, believing there's nobody who'd be interested in this way of playing by programming (or programming by playing.) > I wish there was something similar today. TL;DR: I researched ~20 programming languages and environments, and got reasonably close to the LPC experience in two of them: Io and Smalltalk. Io is not very actively maintained (last I checked), but there are mature, stable, and free Smalltalk implementations out there. An added bonus is that you get MUD client along with the environment and you don't need to build Web-based admin interface (most Smalltalks provide a GUI). I have some code I can share if you're interested; I get the same urge to build this thing from time to time, but never really followed through with any of the attempts. Though, I suspect the story would change a little if even just one other person was interested :)
gabereiser 3y ago
This fills me with warm fuzzy feelings. MUDs were my jam growing up. So much so that I became a programmer because of it (among others) and like you, have written a few myself. I still maintain old C codebases for modern gcc. Diku, Merc, Smaug, and a few of my own, SWR, exospace. Evennia was always this kind of weird alternative though. The web client was “just enough” and, honestly, was one of the first things people would customize and expand upon. That said, writing multi-threaded socket code isn’t for the faint of heart. Abstractions and libraries exist now - but back then it was a labyrinthine mess of segfaults and kernel dumps. BSD had some of the best tcp socket support and so a lot of muds were built upon BSD.
waste_monk 3y ago
>There's also this: https://www.amazon.com/MUD-Game-Programming-Development/dp/1 https://www.amazon.com/MUD-Game-Programming-Development/dp/1... Does this book still hold up today? It's ~20 years old at this point.

giraffe_lady 3y ago

Mudding is such a small niche, the one I've been playing for decades has a few hundred active players still. A really curious thing about muds is more people seem to want to make new ones than play them. There is probably about one unique mud per active mud player these days. Most have no one playing them though. And the established muds have a hard time finding people to work on them, since they are gnarly legacy codebases based on deeply out of favor programming paradigms. Much more fun to roll your own platform, even if it never gets played. I wish people would just pick one of the dozen or so active muds and play it. Mud client programming is a great outlet for recreational coding imo. The line between my character and the code I've written to manage it is very fuzzy in a good way. Plus everyone is always talking about how great lua is. Mud scripting is mostly lua, so it's a great way to find out that lua is just as bad as any other language.

User23 3y ago
It's kind of the next step up from writing your very own IRC bot. On another tangent, I wish I had known Common Lisp back when I cared about MUD implementation enough to actually pour a few hundred hours into it. Of course you'd face the problem of the extension language, at least in the naïve implementation, being entirely too powerful. Still, it could potentially make it easy to script truly interesting custom object behaviors. If I were to make a pass at it now, I'd try to structure the game system in such a way that it could power a roguelike or a MUD, since roguelikes have considerably more legs these days.
- Griatch 3y ago
  The roguelike bits are mainly client-side; there are people using Evennia to develop roguelikes (not sure if any are actually released, but it can be done).
  - User23 3y ago
    Yep. So long as you separate concerns well it’s quite doable. The heavy lifting is deciding how to turn roguelike tiles into MUD rooms, or vice versa. There were some MUDs doing procedural content back in the ‘90s, and others that had a minimap, so there’s plenty of demonstrable overlap.

b800h 3y ago

Fantastic stuff. Now I can integrate an age-verification system so that don't end up in legal hot-water thanks to the Online Safety Act..... /s? In all seriousness, this looks like a fabulous project. Congratulations to those behind it, we needed something like this. I have bad memories of leafing through ancient C code to run a MUD. I've just starred it and will roll it out on a Raspi at home, OSA be damned.

jerrysievert 3y ago

I miss building muds. I miss it so much that I've extracted all of the sillymud rooms, objects, and mobiles into json to play with at some future point. so many lost months in mud-dom.

ctoth 3y ago
Several years ago, I built an area reader for a bunch of Merc/Diku/other old .are files which you might find useful[0]. [0]: https://github.com/ctoth/area_reader https://github.com/ctoth/area_reader
- jerrysievert 3y ago
  I wrote mine in c, but I haven't released it yet. it's complete, and includes the sillymud extensions (figurine, etc). thrilled that more people cared enough to do it as well, though! likely I'll build one for epic as well.

bemusedthrow75 3y ago

I would much much rather see a reboot of the MOO concepts (persistent object-oriented world, global time). I know the existing LambdaMOO core and server are still being maintained, and web-ified, but even though I am something of a dissenter from the whole Rust trend, I'm very interested in this, which is going about it IMO the right way: https://github.com/rdaum/moor https://github.com/rdaum/moor MOO was a good time.

citrinebanana 3y ago
Why much prefer MOO stuff?
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  LambdaMOO straddled(straddles?) a fine line between being a more "serious" system that looks more like a multiuser Smalltalk & Lisp -- with a persistent shared networked database, a live shared programming / authoring environment with a prototype OO scripting language ... and a "less serious" MUD. You can (but don't have to) build a MUD in it -- that's what people did -- but in the TinyM* style not usually RPG type games, more social systems. But it was sitting on some very cool concepts, especially for its time. Predating the web, kind of another "path" that the Internet could have taken. It took the web 15 years to catch up to the idea of synchronous live interaction, and it's still more ... document based... than the kind of object/thing/room/narrative aspect we had going on in MOO. It's very clearly inspired by Lisp, Self, and Smalltalk. And LambdaMOO itself was, back then, a hub of some pretty nifty people. 'twas my (embarassing mostly) adolescence. And they handed out "programmer" bits easily, so it was full of people's self-programmed creations. The implementation certainly didn't age well. But the foundational concept is very cool. There were later iterations on the idea (CoolMUD, then ColdMUD/Genesis, a few other things) that refined things somewhat. Others have alluded to LPmud/LPC which had some similar-ish things going on, but that was less "persistent shared creation environment" styled and more "source code in files in a decent OO language for making MUDs" with transient objects/state between world resets. People built MUDs, games, in LPmud, but as said MOOs (apart from some exceptions) were less about games and more about what we'd these days might consider a form of social networking. Both were very cool, but MOO encouraged a more participatory programming environment, since you could just log in and start creating (cloning prototypes) and authoring (writing MOO "verbs" etc).

NikkiA 3y ago

I too miss MUD/Moo/MUSH/MUCKes I remember trying them all back in the early 90s, spending some time on lpmud instances and Amberyl's pennmush mostly, before writing my own. More recently I played a hellmoo inspired moo for a couple of years back around 2015 before I just stopped playing for some reason. Maybe I should try it again, it seems to still be running (good mud/moo/mush/mucks never seem to truly die)

qvrjuec 3y ago
> good mud/moo/mush/mucks never seem to truly die The original hellmoo is finally dead! Which fork were you referring to?
- NikkiA 3y ago
  Inferno

serf 3y ago

I recently tried to play a 'modern MUD' . I loved MUDs as a kid, surely modern is better. In a popular shard, with a prime-time population of 110 people, there existed 60usd 'cosmetic' item for sale in a very modern cash shop. Unable to wrap my brain around the concept of a MUD cosmetic item, nor a MUD cash shop, I shop-lifted the item. I now give this , free, to you fine folks on HN : "prismatic crystal" Wear it with pride; I quit on this whole modern MUD thing until my brain re-solidifies.

BlarfMcFlarf 3y ago
I dunno, I have no problem with them using an f2p model to pay for full time ongoing development, moderation for events, etc. And a cosmetics cash shop isn’t more baffling then fortnight or whatever: you basically just took a screenshot, but that still doesn’t let you walk around with it in game on your character. No, the real problem is that it takes a strong direction for this sort of system to not devolve into selling power, and making the game shitty and grindy for free to play players to push them towards buying skips, and as far as I know, a lot of those Iron Realms muds have failed this hurdle.
klibertp 3y ago
On the MUD I spent most time on, when the feature of making haircuts (and later tattoos) landed it was a Big Deal. There were very few designs, you had to go to a remote location (through dangerous areas) and pay a lot (in the in-game currency) to get it done. All the effort for literally one short line of text added to the description of your character... It might seem strange, but that's kind of the point of MUDs (for many people). Cash shop? Possible and imaginable. There were always people willing to pay others to level their character, for example. Should it be actually (and officially) implemented, though? I have some doubts here...
munk-a 3y ago
Funding for MUDs has always been an extremely difficult topic. You've got basically two options - either rely on financially stable retirees with way too much free time or rely on college students with way too much free time. The hosting cost is essentially nothing and setting up a dono button but accepting that you'll probably spend about 1-2 hundred dollars a year of your personal money (as the owner/operator) to maintain the server can cover that cost... but staff is where the real challenge is. MUDs live and die by having a good, fair, engaged staff of RPAs (role-play administrators) or whatever you call them... and those people need to absolutely love the game world because the expectation levied on them is either (with good staffing) 4-6 hours a day or (with thin staffing) 8-12 hours a day of labor to watch player requests, set up events - etc... and while mud player bases skew towards experienced players who appreciate and respect the work an RPA is doing there are always new players that can be abusive and even experienced players have bad days (especially if your game is perma death - then drama will occasionally dial way up). One other thing to keep in mind is that when you accept the mantel of RPA you're losing a lot of your ability to enjoy the game, you have access to privileged information and will either 1) metagame and be a terrible person 2) manage to drive your character in a direction away from plots you're personally managing (only possible with sufficient staffing) or 3) (the most likely) find yourself having difficulty playing because you know the metagame temptation is there and it's hard to compartmentalize information. The TL;DR is that MUDs are freaking hard to staff for free - offering compensation (even if it's just an occasional 100$ gift card in thanks for a month of work) is a huge boon to the community... but given the size of the player base and the demands on staff actually paying a decent wage is pretty much impossible. In your 100 person MUD example the staff is probably somewhere around a dozen people - lets assume you have a staff ratio of 1:8 - that would mean that to afford 15/hr you'd need players (that tend to be logged on 4 hours a day) to pay two dollars an hour or sixty dollars a month. Employed people can shrug off this cost - but people with a full time job can't play MUDs... so you're looking at getting 60/mo out of college students and retirees and that's pretty impossible.

Graziano_M 3y ago

I used to love MUDding (I mostly played _Alter Aeon_). I tried to run my own mud (when I was 11 or so), and I remember learning a lot of C, toolchain stuff, etc, just trying to compile SMAUG.

audiodude 3y ago

As someone who has contributed to the Evennia codebase (Hacktober 22), I can say that it's OOP systems are largely well thought out and very flexible. There are hooks for things like when your object gets created/destroyed, picked up/dropped, etc. Per another comment in this thread, it does seem like everyone wants to create a MUD but no one wants to play them. All the people in the Discord seem to have several years long projects to create "their game", but I didn't hear much about anyone actually playing any of these games.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
That's been the rub with all these things since the mid-90s. They're fascinating to build and author in. But it's like a Trotskyist sect or an indie rock band or something: everyone's got one of their own, and nobody wants to join anybody else's. :-)
klibertp 3y ago
It's entertaining to create a world. It's excruciating, painstaking work to finish it and make it into something others can enjoy. Plus, people like different aspects of MUDs. Creating it from the inside (like in LPMUDs) with others is fun in its own right, even if no player ever logs in. It's like a slow-paced, continuous hackathon, where everyone tries to make "something interesting" to show to the others.
InspectorCal 3y ago
There's definitely a bunch of us with long-term projects, but I think that impression that we don't play is mostly because devs split off into their own servers or game communities once their game is playable. For example: Arx is supposedly slowing down in its "old age" (it's been around longer than I've been using Evennia) but the last time I looked, there were over 50 players online. Silent Heaven launched only a couple months ago, but it's consistently had between 15 and 30 players online every time I've checked. I haven't played it since I'm not into horror, but if it weren't for that I would definitely have tried it out. It's got its own Discord server so I figure all the chatter is over there. Secrets of Aelandris has only had one playtesting window so far, but several of us in the Evennia community played and are looking forward excitedly to the next one. Playing it comes up every now and then in the Evennia community, but mostly we talk about it on the Aelandris discord. Song of Avaria, which I also helped playtest, posts regular development showcases, and we've got multiple people in the Discord community looking forward to it launching alpha early next year. People ask about playing it every time a new showcase drops. (One should be going up this weekend, btw!) The Mystavaria builders and testers are also all over on their own discord, so I have no idea where they're at in terms of activity. They aren't payable yet, but several of us are looking forward to trying that game out as well. Machine Garden opened up a sandbox pre-alpha a while back (a year or two, i think) which got several players and active discussion on its discord, as well, although it's currently down for major code renovation. And those are just the ones I'm personally familiar with that have names! (Aside from mine, of course, but it doesn't count yet.) Most people who look into Evennia are looking to make a game, since that's what Evennia is for, so there's of course a bias in that direction in terms of the community discussion. But there's some games out there, and the ones that are playable definitely get players.

ludicity 3y ago

Evennia is an awesome project, and the community is fantastic. I've been working with a blind friend over the past two years to gradually piece together a MUD (the only kind of game he's really able to play), and while we've been very inconsistent, the community has had infinite patience for fielding our questions. It was also very professionally interesting to me - I'm not sure what the situation is for many of the Hackernews FAANG folks, but most of the corporate offices I've been in only require people to glue together Python libraries badly. There's never any scope for writing anything more complex than that, and many people can barely use Git. I've always done much better than that low standard, but there's a huge gap between trying to be good and learning from someone that's actually good. Evennia is the first codebase where, when doing development in my own time, I found it frequently useful to dig into the library's source code to learn about how something has been implemented. It really raised the bar in my professional life for what I consider acceptable... and it was also very thought-provoking that a free framework for making MUDs blows up what's being done at most shops around the world. We've got a real problem in industry, but Evennia has always been a little Zen garden for me. So thanks to the developers :)

Griatch 3y ago
Thanks on behalf of developers/community/contributors, this is high praise and a treat/big encouragement for any OSS developer to hear! :D

dlyons 3y ago

13 year old me learned to write code on FurryMUCK. No idea at the time what a Furry was, or why strangers in game were trying to "yiff" me. It was incredible though; I was big into books like Redwall, Watership Down, etc. So a social game of animals seemed fun. The language was MUF; Multi User Forth. Stack based, push, pop, etc. I helped port software into other MUCKs, like FluffMUCK. The people there were so kind and taught me all sorts of things about Linux, programming, building PCs, etc. I wouldn't be who I am today without the early MUCK communities.

fouc 3y ago
I thought MUF was magical. Like I was a wizard chanting incantations. It was my first experience with an interpreted language. As a teenager it was amazing to telnet into a TinyMUCK and then launch a line-based editor and start coding in it. And not needing to compile the program like C. Remember that editor? http://www.rdwarf.com/users/mink/muckman/muf3.html http://www.rdwarf.com/users/mink/muckman/muf3.html
- dlyons 3y ago
  Oh wow, this is so great. Thank you for this. I haven't read this in 25+ years. The line editor experience of building a stack and calling a function, I have not really found again. Lisp REPLs are nice but something about using the stack abstraction as the whole language. So many amazing memories. It was summer, 1994. I was 12, we had to move houses and my parents let me buy a 50ft phone cord to connect a modem in my room. My mom was a teacher and found me access to our local university's Internet dialup. Dialup terminal programs to connect into their VMS server. VMS had telnet which was enough to connect to all the MUDs I read about on my local BBS. I think I had just upgraded to 14.4, 28.8 wasn't even out yet. During the summers, I would stay up all night, lay in bed pretending asleep when my dad had to get up for work in the morning, and then get back up to keep at it. Entire virtual worlds to explore, basically text MMOs, in 1994. I was in Kentucky, felt like the only person who knew. It changed the course of my life forever, just the magic of it all. Lots of "anthropomorphic Furry" MUCKs and TrekMUSE. The best of times.
  - 3y ago

VikingCoder 3y ago

Off on a wild tangent... I feel like people should be running MUDs on Linode $5/month servers... using xterm.js, websockets, and some back-end. The back-end I'm playing with is .Net Core, and I'm using async/await to make the code seem more like a normal terminal application. ...and I'm just in love with how LambdaMOO natural language parsing and matching works... But I want to use C#... so I'm implementing verb matching using Method Attributes. And I'm trying to layer that on top of how Inform 6 works... Not using Z-Machine. Or the language of Inform 6... but the declarative style of Inform 6 room and object descriptions really appeals to me. I get that I'm giving up the flexibility of user-created content in a scripting language... ...but if I still allow players access to the GitHub repository for the content... And make it easy for them to stand up test servers... That feels like a decent compromise? I'm not even sure I want to make a MOO... or just a server with single-player Infocom-like Interactive Fiction games...? But this is my hobby project right now.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
The MOO command parser is pretty meh, TBH, not much there, there (having just recently ported it to Rust, I got to know it a bit...). There were other adventure type systems that had something a bit more involved in terms of (English) natural language parsing. Anyways, have fun :-) You're playing with the fun toys.
- VikingCoder 3y ago
  Can you share details about your Rust port? Do you have direct experience with other parsers that you can recommend? I like MOO because it feels very understandable. The documentation was great.
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    https://github.com/rdaum/moor https://github.com/rdaum/moor (see the thread elsewhere in the comments) command parser & matcher stuff is partially here: https://github.com/rdaum/moor/blob/main/moor-lib/src/tasks/command_parse.rs https://github.com/rdaum/moor/blob/main/moor-lib/src/tasks/c... and https://github.com/rdaum/moor/blob/main/moor-lib/src/db/matching.rs https://github.com/rdaum/moor/blob/main/moor-lib/src/db/matc... https://github.com/rdaum/moor/blob/main/moor-lib/src/db/match_env.rs https://github.com/rdaum/moor/blob/main/moor-lib/src/db/matc...

haolez 3y ago

I've just realized that MUDs can become and absurdly incredible experience with the advent of LLMs and diffusion models. You can drawn the most absurd and complex situations. The NPCs can be truly intelligent. Now I want to retire and work on this :)

Griatch 3y ago
Evennia supports using LLMs for your NPCs if you like :)
gardenmud 3y ago
The use of models is fantastic even if only to provide easier ways of handling pre-written text; like taking player input and categorizing it according to sentiment or estimated topic. I'm playing with it in Evennia and dialogue and interactions with the game are somewhat night and day. Just not having to guess for keywords is a wild improvement. However, it's also very slow unless you want to throw money away; running on a cheap droplet using Meta's zero-shot-classification for relatively brief queries... each takes a few seconds. Text generation is where most people's minds go but as far as players are concerned UX is more important than a million different room descriptions; you can always write rooms yourself.
johnbellone 3y ago
When I was building them +20 years ago the hardest thing for me was finding people that could build the world. I can see where an LLM would be useful there, too. For a small team it’ll let you scale it up very fast.

varunk8685 3y ago

[flagged]

georgeoliver 3y ago

At the risk of slightly embarrassing the lead dev of Evennia, Griatch, let me say that they are one of the best maintainers of an open source project I've ever seen, guiding the 15+ year old project with skill and grace (and also an amazing artist btw). It's nice to know there are projects like this out there whenever you see the latest open source dumpster fire in the headlines.

Griatch 3y ago
Thanks a lot, this is great and very encouraging to hear. :D That said, Evennia is, of course, a collaborative project, I couldn't do it without the help of the great Evennia community!