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I'm thinking about building a MUSH, someone talk me out of (or into) building a MUSH.
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Jun 20, 2020 06:53
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BUG JUG posted:I'm thinking about building a MUSH, someone talk me out of (or into) building a MUSH. I'll try to convince you into using a more modern codebase, just because I want to see these labors of love get more use. What kind of MUSH?
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Jun 20, 2020 07:03
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piL posted:I'll try to convince you into using a more modern codebase, just because I want to see these labors of love get more use. What kind of MUSH? It would be generally sci-fi in nature, and built around this idea I have bouncing around my head -- I've been playing MU*s for 20 years and seen plenty fall apart due to the grid getting too spread out -- where the grid progresses with the playerbase. So, start out with a ship's crew (military, private, corporate, whatever) where they get their ship to explore and interact on for a week or two, then when they get to their destination open up a bit of a world for them to interact with before closing it off, etc. As the game grows (hopefully) new factions/races/RP avenues open up and it remains sustainable. That codebase looks...almost approachable with my level of python knowledge. Maybe I'll play around with that this weekend. Edit: I actually already play on an Evennia Game: Arx, and love it. BUG JUG fucked around with this message at 09:02 on Jun 20, 2020 |
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Jun 20, 2020 07:13
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BUG JUG posted:It would be generally sci-fi in nature, and built around this idea I have bouncing around my head -- I've been playing MU*s for 20 years and seen plenty fall apart due to the grid getting too spread out -- where the grid progresses with the playerbase. So, start out with a ship's crew (military, private, corporate, whatever) where they get their ship to explore and interact on for a week or two, then when they get to their destination open up a bit of a world for them to interact with before closing it off, etc. As the game grows (hopefully) new factions/races/RP avenues open up and it remains sustainable. Nice! Is everyone on the same ship, or are ship crews/passengers shuffling around? I think its a neat idea either way, as either a shuffling function to keep the player base intermingled, or as a way to continuously inject events episodically.
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Jun 20, 2020 16:16
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piL posted:Nice! That would be it exactly. Depending on player base and the like, build a five-ten room ship, maybe a space room for people to EVO around in that changes as they get closer to their destination (or maybe they start doing some training missions and then do a quick jump to their destination). I've always thought jumping into a military org is a quick way to pretty easily integrate into a theme, so maybe something like a Star Trek style ship where civilians and military have a role so not everyone is forced into that box. A game I played on when I started MUSHing, OtherSpace, had a story arc where everyone got stuck on the same ship -- Sanctuary -- as an attempt to flee an alien invasion, and they spent iirc 6-8 months on it, and it was the golden age of that game. Everyone was in the same boat, literally, and had to work together, as opposed to when they got back to 'normal space' and suddenly everyone spread out over 25 different worlds and didn't have a reason to interact anymore.
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Jun 20, 2020 16:58
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You could do a roving ship, that docks at a different planet/island/starbase/ruined space station every week. The players plunder/trade/quest while they can, then it goes to next week's location.
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Jun 20, 2020 23:34
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I like the idea of that--could you be left behind on a planet, though, and have to wait for the main ship to come visit again?
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Jun 20, 2020 23:36
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Sax Solo posted:You could do a roving ship, that docks at a different planet/island/starbase/ruined space station every week. The players plunder/trade/quest while they can, then it goes to next week's location. That would sort of be the idea, yeah. A Star Trek style exploration ship, or a military ship involved in a campaign, or something that has a reason to go roaming across the universe. Depending on how many players there were I was considering if you lost a character on the campaign somewhere, you'd be able to app as a member of the populace of the next port of call and play there for awhile. Dunno if it would be weekly per se, but I'd like to try to give it time for stories to build and mature. The one issue I have with Arx is they just recently launched a Crusade story arc and it took...forever to happen and then when it did it just blinked by without any real PC roleplay in the fighting/out on campaign/etc. I'd prefer to give players a couple of weeks (first week would be a 'shakedown' as it were) in the area -- or however long it takes me to build the next zone lol -- so they could get some attachment to what was going on. The more I talk about it, the more the opening few weeks feels like it should be some sort of military/govt. expedition. A Strange Aeon posted:I like the idea of that--could you be left behind on a planet, though, and have to wait for the main ship to come visit again? It's not impossible to @tel someone to the ship and come up with a plausible story as to where they were for the last few days. Unless they WANT to play out being stranded and then...enjoy sitting on an empty planet for X time?
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Jun 21, 2020 00:52
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Progress report: got evannia set up. Tomorrow's goal: dig the ship.
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Jun 22, 2020 07:50
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BUG JUG posted:It would be generally sci-fi in nature, and built around this idea I have bouncing around my head -- I've been playing MU*s for 20 years and seen plenty fall apart due to the grid getting too spread out -- where the grid progresses with the playerbase. So, start out with a ship's crew (military, private, corporate, whatever) where they get their ship to explore and interact on for a week or two, then when they get to their destination open up a bit of a world for them to interact with before closing it off, etc. As the game grows (hopefully) new factions/races/RP avenues open up and it remains sustainable. I've been working on a game for about half a year which sounds very similar to yours. I seem to be gunning more explicitly for a text-based space sim than I am for a tabletop-like game (though ideally the experience could scale up or down). Playerbase fragmentation is also a problem I've witnessed in other games, and I so far have had the notion of combating it by strongly incentivizing people to form large crews. Not really sure how effective that would be in the live game, but I have a lot of other nuts-and-bolts things to work on while I think about it. Overall, I'm envisioning a MUD-MUSH hybrid (which I've seen in the wild before), where players can build, but parts of the game like combat, the economy, and what individual PCs are able *to* build are enforced by hard rules and mediated by the engine. Meowspergers fucked around with this message at 18:19 on Jun 23, 2020 |
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Jun 23, 2020 18:17
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How hard is it to make a MUD? I have little desire to play one these days, but it could be fun to fill one out in a chill, "gonna write some room descriptions and lore" sort of way.
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Jun 23, 2020 19:08
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Meowspergers posted:Overall, I'm envisioning a MUD-MUSH hybrid (which I've seen in the wild before), where players can build, but parts of the game like combat, the economy, and what individual PCs are able *to* build are enforced by hard rules and mediated by the engine. RPIs (Role-play Intensive) have fit this bill pretty thoroughly in the past despite being pretty nonexistent at the moment, I know a decent amount of people who'd be interested in something new that fit the bill and who bring along other people. There's not a lot of options for coded combat/crafting that's core to the game and enforced roleplay ATM. Appoda posted:How hard is it to make a MUD? I have little desire to play one these days, but it could be fun to fill one out in a chill, "gonna write some room descriptions and lore" sort of way. It depends on your coding capabilities, writing skills--in which being able to write a lot of words is generally more important than making those words flowery, size goals, time investment, and community management skills. Having built and run a game before and known more than a few people who have done the same, turnover or abandonment is huge even when you ignore the people who start up and ghost after a few months. BUT if you can hit the checklist to a minimum level and set realistic time-investment expectations it can be as simple as grabbing a modern codebase like Ares and putting together the world. If you know Python Evennia is pretty accessible and has a huge and friendly development community and is very robust. There's also shitloads of older options that range from plug-and-play once you've installed them on a server to functionally-impossible unless you have a very specific idea in mind.
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Jun 23, 2020 19:19
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Appoda posted:How hard is it to make a MUD? I have little desire to play one these days, but it could be fun to fill one out in a chill, "gonna write some room descriptions and lore" sort of way. Depending on what you want the MUD to be and what (if any) pre-built engine you decide to use, it can range from fairly easy to pretty hard. Making rooms/mobs/items for an existing engine usually isn't too bad, but you can expect to have to read at least partways through an old manual to learn how. MUSHes are a slightly different story, as, the way I understand it, many let you write room descriptions, lore, and even design gameplay as a player through commands and softcode. Sab Sabbington posted:RPIs (Role-play Intensive) have fit this bill pretty thoroughly in the past despite being pretty nonexistent at the moment, I know a decent amount of people who'd be interested in something new that fit the bill and who bring along other people. There's not a lot of options for coded combat/crafting that's core to the game and enforced roleplay ATM. In my experience, Sab, you're pretty much right. Inside the MU* community, making a MUD has become (justifiably) known as a kind of pathological activity - it attracts many attempts: all of them ambitious, most destined for failure. It can, however, be a rewarding thing to do in and of itself, which in my opinion is a good enough reason to try. I've played several RPIs pretty seriously in the past. Unfortunately, I think the ones which are still kicking have gotten a reputation for increasingly "toxic" playerbases. (I've heard Arx is a happy exception, but haven't had the time to try it out.)
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Jun 23, 2020 20:56
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Meowspergers posted:I've been working on a game for about half a year which sounds very similar to yours. I seem to be gunning more explicitly for a text-based space sim than I am for a tabletop-like game (though ideally the experience could scale up or down). Playerbase fragmentation is also a problem I've witnessed in other games, and I so far have had the notion of combating it by strongly incentivizing people to form large crews. Not really sure how effective that would be in the live game, but I have a lot of other nuts-and-bolts things to work on while I think about it. I've been on games like that before. Star Wars MUSH in its original incarnation around 2006 was like that, Star Trek: ATS also (I forget what the ATS stood for). They can be a lot of fun and definitely scratch an itch for me, but the problem i ultimately run into is code can only take you so far. It either turns into a rat race where you're trying to keep up with the people who run every quest immediately when it's available and min-max to become pvp gods or it turns into a job where you need to worry about upkeep and the like. I prefer to be a bit more code-lite and let the players run things. A place that had a decent balance for a long time (despite a semi-dysfunctional admin team, myself included) was OtherSpace. One thing I am considering is cutting out the whole idea of a player having a "character sheet" as it were. I might put in something that simulates that for a character, but make it dark to them and move it based on RP logs and like to avoid some of that min-maxing, but that is so far away it's unimaginable. What codebase are you using if you don't mind me asking?
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Jun 24, 2020 05:58
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BUG JUG posted:I've been on games like that before. Star Wars MUSH in its original incarnation around 2006 was like that, Star Trek: ATS also (I forget what the ATS stood for). They can be a lot of fun and definitely scratch an itch for me, but the problem i ultimately run into is code can only take you so far. It either turns into a rat race where you're trying to keep up with the people who run every quest immediately when it's available and min-max to become pvp gods or it turns into a job where you need to worry about upkeep and the like. I prefer to be a bit more code-lite and let the players run things. A place that had a decent balance for a long time (despite a semi-dysfunctional admin team, myself included) was OtherSpace. Code-lite is definitely a good and valid approach. All the best roleplay I've seen has happened when players, by design or happenstance, have had the tools to run the show. When code only facilitates and doesn't restrict, as in a code-lite approach, this is the case by default. Player agency is not the only condition you need to foster great RP, of course - you need good players, for starters - but it's pretty important. With that in mind, I think there's still something to be said for having gamey elements: they can provide natural motivators for roleplay, provide grounding to the world (and thus a sense of realism), and give solo players stuff to do. I've seen problems with twinking(min-maxing) and awful grinds crop up in game after game, and have seen many ways of countering them - some useful, none perfect. The most interesting approach I've seen lately was in a game which tied skill progression to how much you emoted (posed) and how long your emotes were, and nothing else. Pretty effective at encouraging people to focus on roleplay first, but it had the unpleasant side effect of getting a few players to write tons of lousy, ornamental spam. Another countermeasure I've seen used to good effect has been to use skill timers in combination with the character sheet hiding you've mentioned. The way it works is character skill gains have a smallish chance of occurring with every failed use of a skill, and every time a skill gain happens, a timer set to about a RL hour begins for that skill during which additional gains in that skill cannot occur. Players have no way of knowing when skill gains have actually occurred, but can get a rough idea over time by observing how effective their character becomes at using them. It's not a perfect solution, of course, and can still lead to a situation where people who have more time to dedicate to the game dominate by wide margins. Permadeath can also be an effective way to get players to play their characters realistically, as it forces them to expose characters to actual danger sparingly (or at least carefully). Having characters who can permanently die gives weight to everything players do, but the downside is when beloved characters die or, god forbid, die to a bug. Ultimately, it's really up to the players to RP, as there's no such thing as a foolproof system - like you said, code can only take you so far. BUG JUG posted:What codebase are you using if you don't mind me asking? I'm using an engine I've been building from scratch, which I plan to release under a free-software license when it's closer to "turn key". The core is written in C and some C++, though it uses an embedded scripting language called AngelScript for actual game code. It only runs on Linux for now.
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Jun 24, 2020 17:31
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Sab Sabbington posted:If you know Python Evennia is pretty accessible and has a huge and friendly development community and is very robust. There's also shitloads of older options that range from plug-and-play once you've installed them on a server to functionally-impossible unless you have a very specific idea in mind. I started developing in Evennia thanks to this thread and can confirm that it's a really nice codebase to work from. I know almost nothing about Python and about muddev (though I do have a load of experience in other programming languages) and I've found it really easy to pick up.
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Jul 14, 2020 13:11
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Yesterday with my sorceress character, I hit level 31, with 3131 kills, 3 deaths, and 1 RP point. I took a screenshot because it was so awesome.   edit: just going to re-plug this MUD, because it's awesome. Lensmoor is awesome, has lots* of awesome enthusiastic users, has lots of cool ways to level up & get gold -- from stabbing people in the face to making furniture/armor/weapons to going on designated quests -- and encourages but does not REQUIRE actual roleplaying. I love this place; I've been there on & off since 2000 and recently regained an interest because I wanted a Terminal-based distraction. YeahTubaMike fucked around with this message at 17:07 on Jul 14, 2020 |
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Jul 14, 2020 16:58
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ConQUEST is back: play.conquestmud.ca 5000
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Aug 17, 2020 04:05
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Hello Sailor posted:ConQUEST is back: play.conquestmud.ca 5000 This is pretty fun. I did some dueling, now I'm doing come crafting. Several fun systems.
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Aug 18, 2020 07:00
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I got into Legend of the Red Dragon again i think 2016? If you miss just the first day then you'll never win. It's really dumb like, "ok here are my 7 minutes to play through my turns for the day," but I got to look forward to the little ritual that it was. TradeWars2002 was my life from maybe 6th to 9th grade. And all my friend's life. We were so dramatic about it. I think I'm so determined to do everything from the command prompt because my brain associates the terminal with the Trade Wars UI. If you're in bash it's essentially flying through space, sector to sector.
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Aug 18, 2020 10:23
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piL posted:This is pretty fun. I did some dueling, now I'm doing come crafting. Several fun systems. If nobody in-game has mentioned it yet, you do quests in the mage's tower to unlock access to 4 of the 6 magic trees (iirc, you have to unlock the other 2 with a raid drop). Doing several quests from the huntsman in the adventurer's guild will unlock more traits, in 2 sets. I'm in-game as Smuggins, but probably won't do much during the weekdays except login to refresh my crafting queue.
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Aug 18, 2020 11:49
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Hello Sailor posted:If nobody in-game has mentioned it yet, you do quests in the mage's tower to unlock access to 4 of the 6 magic trees (iirc, you have to unlock the other 2 with a raid drop). Doing several quests from the huntsman in the adventurer's guild will unlock more traits, in 2 sets. This nature quest is throwing me for a loop, but I didn't realize I'd get advancement points for the wand quests so now I'm doing them Edit: Figured it out. piL fucked around with this message at 02:54 on Aug 19, 2020 |
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Aug 19, 2020 00:48
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So do the people ITT telnet to play their multi user dungeons? That's how we used to do it, telnet to a BBS. While of course running epic scripts to handle the actual grinding.
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Aug 19, 2020 08:40
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Almost all of us will certainly use a purpose-built client for MUDs rather than a straight telnet client, but yes, that's the protocol these games run on.
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Aug 19, 2020 11:11
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I still have Mudlet installed as my go-to client for the rare occasion that I decide to log into SWMud and see if anyone that I used to play with back in like 2002 is online.
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Aug 19, 2020 12:39
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excellent bird guy posted:So do the people ITT telnet to play their multi user dungeons? That's how we used to do it, telnet to a BBS. While of course running epic scripts to handle the actual grinding. Please for the love of god do not use Telnet in TYOOL 2020, either use a dedicated app like Mudlet/Atlantis/MUSHClient/Blowtorch/any of the older z/cMUD clients or SSH instead. But yeah, most games still have a telnet-style option, though modern codebases like Ares and Evennia have browser connectivity as well, though the games running those are more roleplay oriented and don't really require complex (or literally any outside of maybe color) triggers or macros.
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Aug 19, 2020 20:31
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My current goal in Evennia is to make something that's almost entirely browser-driven: all controls are either clicking on a command in the toolbar, or clicking a hyperlink in the game's text. I reckon typing in commands, rather than lack of graphics, is probably the biggest barrier to entry for players joining MUDs: there are lots of people who love to read, but the idea of controlling something by typing a command in is something you only see nowadays in a job that involves coding.
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Aug 20, 2020 08:18
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Oh poo poo a MUD thread! I was big into the Iron Realms games (was a founding city head in Achaea, a newbie-helper in Imperian and dipped some toes into Lusternia) when I was in high school. Some of my friends were also into Achaea and as a result our classmates thought we were in a cult for a while because we kept talking about gods and orders and magic and stuff. The other main one I played was AVATAR, which appears to be still running and actively updated! It's a pretty basic hack-and-slash game with 0 roleplaying and a lot of Numbers Go Up and Grinding For Gear so it was a good complement to the politics in the IRE games. No idea what the population is like these days but once every year or two I'm extremely tempted to take up playing it again.
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Aug 20, 2020 13:34
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Organza Quiz posted:our classmates thought we were in a cult for a while because we kept talking about gods and orders and magic and stuff. That owns
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Aug 20, 2020 19:15
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Achaea? You probably WERE in a cult. Matt Mihaly is scary.
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Aug 21, 2020 03:33
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excellent bird guy posted:So do the people ITT telnet to play their multi user dungeons? That's how we used to do it, telnet to a BBS. While of course running epic scripts to handle the actual grinding. I spend like half my time playing on Telnet and half my time playing on Atlantis. Telnet is convenient for when I'm at work, and while I like Atlantis I'm not exactly sure what's so exciting about it. I mean, I can Ctrl-A my lines which is nice. 
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Aug 21, 2020 23:03
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Whybird posted:My current goal in Evennia is to make something that's almost entirely browser-driven: all controls are either clicking on a command in the toolbar, or clicking a hyperlink in the game's text. I reckon typing in commands, rather than lack of graphics, is probably the biggest barrier to entry for players joining MUDs: there are lots of people who love to read, but the idea of controlling something by typing a command in is something you only see nowadays in a job that involves coding. Excited to see these projects once they come to fruition.
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Aug 22, 2020 07:47
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How do I ssh into one of these? I like the simplicity of telnet but I don't want to be transmitting my passwords in plain text.
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Aug 25, 2020 18:48
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Ott_ posted:How do I ssh into one of these? I like the simplicity of telnet but I don't want to be transmitting my passwords in plain text. But that's part of the charm of MUDs! (I always just choose really lovely passwords and don't think any deeper about it.)
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Aug 25, 2020 19:30
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I played the hell out of Medievia in the late 90s. There was a "donation room" where you could go pick up equipment other players sent to it with the 'donate' command where there was always a large crowd of newbies trying to snag good stuff. There was the obligatory graveyard once you graduated from killing small children/janitors/cats in the town and I don't think I got much further than that, level-wise. I vaguely recall a desert town filled with snake-women that stealthed and backstabbed you a dozen times over, killing you instantly. Then there were trade routes, the dragons, the catacombs, and the global marketplace which actually worked really well. I think I stopped leveling after "graduating" the graveyard, pestered a moderator (whatever they were called) to give me a custom title of 'the Fisherman' and spent the rest of my days as Raifield the Fisherman, walking along rivers with a fishing pole, catching fish and wandering about. Medievia had a lot of content, but I remember logging in 2010 or so out of curiosity and being greeted with an insane screed from Vryce, something about how God placed him on this planet to create worlds and, if you really think about it, isn't real life a MUD?! And doesn't that mean any one of us could be a GOD?!?! I swear it went on for twenty screens. I also played on a MUD I can't remember the name of. It was one of the MUDs listed in the Pueblo MUD client back in the 90s. You could travel to different worlds, each in a different time period. One was Victorian England with firearms and the like. In the mid-90's I experimented with AOL's Gemstone, but was too young to really understand what was going on. Modus Operandi was also on AOL then, but I remember that was more of a role-playing framework for people to utilize rather than a game, a lot like the Dune MUD was.
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Aug 25, 2020 23:17
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Back when I used to play MUDs I used a client called GolteMUD. I figured it'd make sense to use something I'm familiar with, but... it appears to have disappeared off the face of the internet. I realise this is a wild shot in the dark here, but does anyone happen to know of a working download link for this client?
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Aug 30, 2020 01:54
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A few of us are playing https://empiremud.net/ lately. Feel free to stop on by. Look for the people with <Goon> next to their name.
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Aug 30, 2020 08:28
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Goons had the biggest empire in EmpireMUD for a while and then interest died off, I was the last goon left before I handed the empire off to a random and quit. The dev seems to dislike me so I have no intention of going back, but if you want a LUA script that prospects entire mountain ranges I should still have it lying around (no promises it'll still function as expected given it's been a couple years).
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Aug 30, 2020 11:21
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Gonna check out empiremud, seems right up my alley.
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Aug 30, 2020 15:26
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I'm really loving empiremud, but if I'm reading the help files right War and PVP are opt-in only, and requiring both sides to agree to the war? I'm still gonna play, but I can see why it gets boring after a while.
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Aug 31, 2020 19:10
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