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from the because-pigs-like-mud-its-a-bad-joke dept.
With all the announcements we've made today, and all the muffin and bacon drama, we've taken a break to roll out a new retro entertainment feature for the community, a MUD. If you're not familiar with the concept, a MUD is a text-based RPG, hosted online and free to play. This MUD, called SoylentMud for the time being, is available via telnet at mud.dev.soylentnews.org, port 9000. It is based on the ROM source code, that being what I am most familiar with, and is entirely programmed in C.
We've added this feature because we want dev.soylentnews.org to be a one-stop hub for all your nerd news and interaction. It is integrated with our IRC Network, allowing users on the MUD to chat with our IRC users, and vice versa, if desired. We'd like to offer the community a variety of outlets for interaction, and this seemed to be a good addition.
Historically, MUDs were pretty popular among nerds in the 1990s, and were the predecessors to the MMORPGs we now see everywhere. Additionally, most MUD source code was freely available on the internet for anyone to download and use, albeit with some weird licensing restrictions, such as having to send an email to a 24-year old account that no longer works.
It is pretty primitive and generally straight-out-of-the-box, last updated in 1998 (aside from my IRC port, which is largely based on sic), so stay tuned for updates. We will probably pursue running a completely FOSS MUD at some point, so feedback on that would be useful.
Telnet, while fully functional and the "best" client for the completely retro experience, isn't exactly the best client for actually playing MUDs though, so I recommend you pick up a dedicated MUD client, such as the FOSS client Mudlet. (Sourcecode available here. There is one known bug I've encountered, see here for the fix for login.) Using a dedicated client should allow you to use the color codes embedded in the software, as well as allow you to use triggers, one-keyclick commands, mapping, and the like. This will enhance the gaming experience, but isn't required to play.
NCommander adds: Although not open source, DikuMUD is an interesting piece of history, and despite its non-free license, I feel that users should have the ability to experience this living relic first hand. I have a hobby in software archaeology, and I'd like to build a collection of games and other software that time has more or less forgotten. At some point, I'd like to setup an actual games server hosting relics such as the original Rogue or Hunt the Wumpus. If possible, I'd like to see if we could recover the source to some of the old BBS games and host those as well.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by velex on Tuesday April 01 2014, @09:04PM
What about a LambdaMOO instance?
I'd also be very happy to see LORD or especially TW2002. It's too bad that TeleArena and MajorMud probably still cost an arm and a leg. Those were my first introduction to (possibly MM)ORPGing, but I also remember this weird game MUD-like game where you were a mutant in the post-apocalyptic future and you used your mutant powers to kill other things, just can't remember its name.
Oh, and while we're talking about BBS door games, does anybody in the house have a copy of Solar Realms Elite [wikipedia.org] or Falcon's Eye [wikipedia.org]?
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Tuesday April 01 2014, @09:30PM
http://lagg.me [lagg.me]
9467 6082 8A35 2E1E 2D6B 76C4 5E9A ED56 076F 9E89
(Score: 1) by cykros on Wednesday April 02 2014, @02:26AM
Tw2002 is now a standalone game server, and would really be trivial to have set up. It's also still in semi-active development, with a fairly active remaining userbase. Whether or not Soylent implements it, it's worth digging into if you loved the game. Just a word of warning though, the ever-popular unlimited turn games with huge universes played on heavily automated clients (macros and scripts) are a far cry from the old style 250-750 turn per day games. The old style games still exist as well, but you have to really look for them. Both gamestyles have their benefits (the unlimited turn games tend to end within a couple of weeks instead of a year+), and it all really just boils down to what kind of game you're looking for.
As for Lord and other games (Usurper, Barren Realms Elite, Solar Realms Elite, Falcon's Eye, etc) that would be cool to see, there's a project called Gameserv ( http://www.gamesrv.ca/ [gamesrv.ca] ) that allows you to host them without needing to run a full BBS. Though, I must say, if someone has the INSANE ambition it'd take to hack together slashcode with the Synchronet BBS server ( www.synchro.net ) (still actively developed, with gopher, http, ssh, telnet, ftp, nntp, smtp, and pop daemons, among others), I'd give them quite a bit of karma for it. I've seen it done with vBulletin, but slashcode is an entirely different animal...
(Score: 2) by rts008 on Wednesday April 02 2014, @04:28AM
Okay, I have heard this often, from many others also, but no one ever gives any info about why slashcode does not 'play well with others'.
Not being a programmer, I have become rather curious over the years about this, but never asked. (I just guessed that was something programmers learned in 'programming class'. I picture the professor, wild-haired, wild-eyed, foaming at the mouth, while yelling:"And whatever you do...stay away from slashcode...it's to much pain for even hard core masochists!!")
So now I have to ask...just what are some of the problems?(you can be brief, I would not mind learning from the research needed to understand what you may reply)
(Score: 1) by cykros on Wednesday April 02 2014, @10:23AM
I have a copy of SRE kicking around, though it does have a y2k bug in it, and the original author lost the source code ages ago. It can be set up by temporarily changing the system time during install though.
Either of those should be relatively easy to google for though, perhaps less so for SRE. Falcon's Eye and Barren Realms Elite I believe are still being actively curated and can be bought for something like $5 apiece. LORD LOOKS like it is in the same situation, but all of the chatter on the BBS networks seems to point to that not actually being something that works anymore, and most treat it as abandonware.
(Score: 2, Informative) by cykros on Wednesday April 02 2014, @10:27AM
So I decided to google for you, and here's where to download SRE from: http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/Article s/SRE-Documentation.html [stanford.edu]