Dev.SN

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.