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.
Same here. MUDs got my unix / network / C programming up to par (and to this day, decades later, I still work in the field). Incidentally, "my" MUD still runs (some 25 years after its start), although it's not thriving by any means. More like 2-3 concurrent players at a peak (we used to be small anyways, our max concurrent players peaked at some 40 in the late 90s and early 00s). There's still new people picking it up and raving about the depth of content in it though, so at least that makes me happy :)
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 :)
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.
Got into mudding back in 92. After playing the game for a while, 'ascended' to becoming a coder on the backend. I created realms, and did some of the conversion work when the mud went through its first huge shift from a base LP Mud. The mud is amazingly still running: https://www.bat.org
Some of my best computer memories of that era are from playing various MUDs, and even 20+ years later I still keep up with some of the friends I met playing MUDs during those years.
Many of the MUDs I played on are sadly long gone, but a few are still around. I still connect every so often and chat with folks, maybe do a little light RP. Some of those same friends I've been playing with, on and off, for since the early to mid 90s. Even though we're scattered all over the world, it feels like we grew up together. I suppose, we kinda did.
It always struck me odd that MUD playership kinda died off, seeing as how there are many many more people using the Internet now than there were in the 90s. Even accounting for cultural changes and technology moving on, I would have guessed that be enough new people interested in the old ways to keep the population at least level, but alas that doesn't seem to be the case.
The MUD I used to play (http://realmsofchaos.com/) is still going thanks to an intrepid admin who has kept it online since 1994. It is unfortunately desolate now but it is nice to see a piece of gaming history alive and well. I occasionally log on to wander through some of my favorite areas.
I have very fond memories of RoC as it's where I learned to program and had my first taste of algorithm development.
Awesome...I also spent years playing/coding/admining MUDs, though the one I was writing never got very large.
The mechanics you mentioned are interesting; what kind of MUD was it? I got hooked on DIKU MUDs in 1990 or so, and still play https://mume.org:4143/ from time to time.
MUDs were transformational for my life. I was an often lonely kid growing up with ADHD and a love of video games. I got into MUDs in 94 when we got our first PC right around my freshmen year of high school. I loved AD&D and this was the closest you could get on a computer. I became obsessed and learned Linux because they had the C compilers and Unix was how you hosted MUDs. I taught myself C with “C for dummies” vol 1, and 2, K&R C book, and Beej’s guides to networking, just released around that time. As well as learning every in and out of the CircleMUD code base, a Diku mud derivative. I spent a good chunk of my high school life building a MUD that got pretty popular (50+ users on the weekends). Coding new systems, learning creative writing. This led to me getting real jobs in web app dev in 98. The rest is history. I learned how to fix gnarly memory leaks with my own memory allocator and tools like libefence. Taming memory leaks meant my server could stay up longer, etc. I learned about graph theory, other algorithms, multi user networking. I never considered how hard or easy any of this was. It was just what I was obsessed with, so the difficulty had no real bearing on my mindset. MUDs gave me so much and for that I am grateful.
This is very cool! I have a MUD (that still has a fairly active playerbase) written in straight-up C. Been working on it 20+ years now, and always had some curiosity about rewriting it.
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/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.
I don't know how people discover MUDs these days. I discovered them in the mid 90s because I was bored and happened to find out about them on a Usenet feed.
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.
reply