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.
> A really curious thing about muds is more people seem to want to make new ones than play them.
I think it makes a lot of sense that the remaining MUD players are those that have the most complete affinity for the system. While MUDs draw a technical distinction between making and playing, I think psychologically the lines are very blurry, because part of playing is making.
One reason Minecraft really took off is that embedded in the choice to "live" in an expansive virtual world is a desire to affect that world. It mirrors the malleability of our world but on a larger scale. Climbing up an RPG power curve is only a pseudo-satisfier of that desire; you're not actually changing the world, just changing your position in it. Actually being able to modify the world you occupy is the base desire. In that respect, Minecraft is really the spiritual successor to MUDs.
Yes, and Minecraft also inspired a generation of new makers to create Minecraft-y games. It's what happens with good genres and the evolution of games.
I think it's fantastic that MUDs inspire people to want to create them. There's something really great about crafts that look approachable enough to not scare people away. Something about text makes people confident that they can do it themselves. So many people are happy to take a shot at writing a book or a screenplay or a text adventure or a MUD that would never try to get into, say, 3D modeling or stained glass. Is it perhaps that everyone has enough intuitive know-how that they can start making something immediately with no study, even if they need just as much practice and study as the other disciplines to make something of quality?
Yes, I think this is very true; following the Evennia discord, there's a lot of newcomers in there - newcomers to game development or even to programming overall, using Evennia/MUDs as a vehicle to learn.
Not to mention that a graphical MMORPG is one of the most expensive online games you can develop. Whereas a MUD (a text-based MMORPG if you will) can be created by a lone dev or small hobby team (not to say it's simple, no multiplayer game is, but it's at least achievable).
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.
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).
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.
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.