What do you think happened to LPmuds?
 

As a player, I loved LPmuds. I played LPmuds about 95% of the time compared to 5% (or less) playing DIKUs.

In the early/mid 90s, LPmuds were at least as popular as DIKUs. I don't think we have any way to know their comparative usage for sure, but LPmud usage was definitely up there.

But nowadays, LPmuds seem almost non-existent. There are a few great ones out there, of course, but it seems like almost every new mud you read about is some variant of DIKU. Of the popular muds still running, more seem to be DIKU derived than LP.

Anyone have any theories as to why this is?

Anyway, I wonder what the rest of you think. Or maybe you think it is no different now than it was in the past.

Re: What do you think happened to LPmuds?
 

I know your post is mostly a reflection on the past - why people made the decisions they did 1 year, 5 years, 10 years ago. That's a much longer answer for another time.

For anyone looking at starting a MUD today, whether from scratch or using a stock codebase, I just can't see a compelling reason to go through the learning curve of LPC or any other proprietary language.

Assuming someone has a decent amount of coding knowledge, integrating a LUA, Python or other interpreter is fairly staightforward. You have the advantage of potential builders learning a widely used language they can even put on their resume, all the flexibility of something like LPC, and still have the performance benefit of pure C on the back end.

Technology has moved on from the days I regretted not using LPC and thanks to LUA, all the things I wished we'd used LP Mud for in the past are now available. Pretty much all attributes of any MUD object are available to LUA and if we gave it access it could post notes, send emails, handle sockets itself, drive commands, handle delays and state, etc. There's even a LUA web server available. I haven't looked at embedding Python much personally but I believe that's the same way. We did experiment with a PHP integration using the Zend engine and it worked up to a point, but was cumbersome and we felt like we were constantly fighting with the technology rather than leveraging it - LUA on the other hand is designed to be used exactly for this kind of thing.

I remember contacting the owners of DGD at one time before starting the rewrite - they wanted 5 figures for a license and would only guarantee performance up to 200 online, it was a non-starter. Not to imply LP can't handle more than that, clearly it can, but it was the most they'd recommend officially.

Anyway, not to disrespect LPC, it's extremely powerful and was years ahead of its time. But looking at things today, I'm just not sure it makes sense any more if you don't already have a huge time investment in it.

Re: What do you think happened to LPmuds?
 

Until quite recently, I hadn't really seen any work done on LPMUDS for years. As you say, most of the LP community disappeared, and many still appear elusive. LPUniversity and the Dead Souls community have done a great job in breathing some life back into the area (I've really pleased that the Lima mudlib has finally been updated by [url]http://lpmuds.net/[/ur] so it can be complied without major headaches).

From the Intermud router currently run by , I wouldn't really say LPMUDs are anywhere near dead, it's just the amount of work required seems a lot more.

The I work on runs on a hugely modified Lima mudlib and has been in progress for 10+ years (much longer than that if you count it's ). That, of course, has been a huge commitment on the part of the creators involved in the MUD/s, and though would have probably been easier with a DIKU-based MUD, wouldn't have advanced in the same ways.


Summing up, I think it's mostly down to the lack of interest in LPMUDS for so many years, as well as the time and commitment required to build a successful MUD.

Re: What do you think happened to LPmuds?
 

Well, don't hold back. I find the history of our little community very interesting and would love to wax nostalgic about it and ponder the twists and turns of its evolution.

When you say proprietary, are you referring to the fact that LPC (or more specifically, LP mudlibs) had restrictive licenses and were therefore not suited to most commercial uses? Otherwise, I'm not sure what is any more or less proprietary about LPC than python or perl or any other language.

About the only thing I know about LUA is what I have seen from a handful of graphical games I have played when I poked around the install directories. From your glowing description, it sounds pretty powerful. I will have to read up on it more in the future.

Well, at least I know it was nothing personal when they quoted me the same thing. Maybe they came down in price a bit for you at least. (This is from memory, I may be off slightly in the details). When I spoke to the people at Skotos (that is who owns the DGD license), they wanted a minimum $100,000 for one game, with some maximum number of players that I do not recall. And that was not a one time fee. That was an annual fee.

The amazing thing is, they were actually serious. I asked the person I was communicating with if what I really needed to understand is they did not really want to license it, and instead wanted people to make muds under the Skotos banner. He was quite insistent that they really did hope to license DGD, and that this is what they thought was fair. Unbelievable.

As far as I know, they never successfully licensed it to a single person. So maybe they should have rethought that.

But that gets to one of my points. Dworkin wrote DGD, and I definitely don't blame him for selling it to Sokotos, but that was certainly a bad development overall for the LPmud community. I often think things would have been VERY different for LPmuds if DGD had remained a GPL product like it was originally. I worked with DGD once for a few months on a mud project, and I thought it was quite good. People definitely could have used it to make some excellent MUDs - commercial or non-commercial.

I think you are definitely right. I find LPC extremely easy to use, and the ability to make massive changes to a game without needing a recompile or a shutdown is just great. But I could not see myself making a new game using LPC. There are a lot of things about it that just get on my nerves now that I have spent a lot of time doing MUD programming in a different language. And the shame of it is, its not like LPC is going to improve or evolve with the times since its development is basicaly dead.

The game we are currently programming does not use LPC, but (without giving up any details we are not yet ready to talk about) the language we use is similar in many ways. It is a widely used language, however, with international support and a design that was intended for massive commercial use from the beginning. It is also under constant development and improvement.

So with all of that said, why then did DIKU not suffer any of these same problems? Is it the fact that once you get into the nitty gritty of coding for DIKU, you are working with C code and learning C? I can see how that has a lot of inherent and widely applied benefits outside of mudding. That is certainly true, but I don't know if that would really affect a mud designers decision when choosing to make a mud. Maybe it would though. I don't know.

Re: What do you think happened to LPmuds?
 

I think the reason is that it is easier to divide staff into categories on DIKU-muds. Builders can pretty easily write their areas and don't need to know much about coding. It is pretty easy to train a builder on DIKU but I imagine it might be much tougher to teach a newbie how to build for a LPMUD.

If I was to chose a MUD base to work with I would probably avoid LP drivers if they were too restrictive(e.g bad license). In fact if I really wanted to use LPC, then it is far more likely I would try code my own driver.

Re: What do you think happened to LPmuds?
 

On the subject of the licenses, my home MUD inquired about the possibility of using Lima and MUDOS commercially. This was the reply from Tim Hollebeek:

This was in 1998, so (even if all the original owners were contactable) I don't know what the story would be like now.

Re: What do you think happened to LPmuds?
 

All I can say about the subject is what my experience has been:

1. Most drivers only work well on *nix.

2. The one's that where hacked to work on PCs have to have the internals of the library rewritten anyway, in most cases, since they tried to *adjust* the code to work with the older FAT OSes, which didn't support the long file names (or the filenames contain/contained things that even the new Windows systems can't support). And this presumes the driver wasn't rewritten, like Dead Souls was, to only run on NT or higher systems (which back when I went looking for one was a no-go, since I had 98).

3. Database support is an addin, not standard, and its not supported by most libraries.

4. Finding a binary is nearly impossible, and compiling the driver yourself, especially to add things like DB support, is hit or miss. Sometimes it won't work at all, due to the translation code needed to convert between *nix and Windows being written for make file formats, or other tools, that *where* available 10 years ago, but which are no longer part of MS' compiler suites today, or worse, had enough changes made to them that you can't even import the make file any more.

5. There was never much of a "simple" example world for most of them, and when there was, it relied on code that usually got completely rewritten by anyone running the driver (see 2 above, for one reason this happened).

6. Its not as easy to create things in it, which meant you could *technically* do stuff that Diku and others can never manage, at least without compiling the driver, *even* if all you want to do is add a protocol layer, like MXP, and especially if you want to do something that doesn't lend itself to "standard" room/mob/object design. However, it also meant that you couldn't sit someone down for five minutes and have them coding areas.

Issues 1-5 is why I haven't bothered to try, even now that I have XP, to fiddle with one much. Issue 5+6 is why, on one hand, I don't want to screw with LPC, but also why I won't go with one of the "modern" ones, which limit what I can attempt. For one, trying to do anything interesting means a non-trivial steep learning curve, while the other, may just flat not let me do what I want.

In any case, the problem I think was simply that it was a pain in the ass to get working a lot of the time, but "also" that once you had one that worked, you couldn't use it commercially anyway, even if you wanted to. At least not without, apparently, the "owners" thinking you where bloody asking them to run your own WoW server... This day and age, if the MudOS or Lima people tried to babble something like $30k + a cut of the profit, it would take me a week to stop laughing my ass off. And even *then* it was absurd.

Re: What do you think happened to LPmuds?
 

Interesting discussion, particularly since my world construction toolkit is based around LPMUD ideology (lots of scripting for customizability), instead of DikuMud (fill in fields). I chose the LPMUD ideology because it can lead to more variety in worlds.

Looking through your list of issues with LPMUDs, my decisions so far have some hits and some misses. I'd appreciate any comments:

- Unix/linux vs. Windows - Shadowfyr mentions a need for Windows, which I support. I DON'T support *nix, however, my server might well run on Wine (haven't tried). (Last year some players ran my client on Wine and it almost worked.) I know that Linux servers are cheaper than Windows. How many find no Linux support a problem?

- Database - built in.

- Simple example world - What kind of example world is desirable? Very small? A large one?

- Difficulting of teaching new people - This is a problem for my system as well as LPMUD. I've tried to make it easier by including an IDE, but scripting is difficult for many people. (Generic objects can be added without scripting, and become more of a "fill in the field" exercise, but not as easy as Diku.)

- Licensing - My planned licensing is free server, free (Windows) client, EXCEPT that some advanced features in the client (like voice chat, better text-to-speech voices, and better graphics) require a one-time fee of $20. Any thoughts?

- Modify script when MUD running - I could implement this, but haven't, mainly because it seems to me that changes to the script are always in several places, creating for messy/buggy real-time integration into currently-running code. Thoughts?

- One comment about max 200 players at once - I'm not sure how many players I can max out at with my server. One issue is that my core scripting library is fairly complex and tries to take many MUD features (such as parsing, AI, etc.) and go one step further.

- What other problems (mentioned or not mentioned) with LPMUD have I missed?

Re: What do you think happened to LPmuds?
 

Maybe that NewWorlds guy would be able to contribute more insight on the discussion. His game is LP-based (even though here on TMS his listing says it's custom).

Re: What do you think happened to LPmuds?
 

Unix/linux vs. Windows - Well, I had the need, because I wanted to work with the code, so I could learn it and work on ideas, *before* coding for the mud I played at. Building a *nix machine to do that wasn't high on my list. But yeah, being able to run something one either one is nice. As for the "almost worked" issue they had with yours. Are you using ActiveScript? If so, you need to be aware that a) this only works on "some" WINE installs, the installers for the languages often don't work, and its usually easier to just drop the dll into the directory with your server. Second, ActiveScript has, for most languages, *huge* problems with reloading script. The client I play with used it initially to support scripting, but now uses Lua as its default. Since then we discovered that there is a bug in ActiveScript for some/all languages, where quick loading short segments of code over and over results in memory being used up, but not released fast enough. This might be the equivalent of loading the script for an npc 500 times in quick succession, or some such. And that is presuming you get the language to work at all, since some of the ActiveScript implementations for a few languages proved so flaky that they wouldn't load, crashed the client as soon as you loaded script into them, or just hung.

In any case, I think relying on Windows scripting to do anything that may require a lot of switching in/out of code, is "not" a good idea.

Simple example world - Doesn't need to be that big, I think, but it you support grid systems, it should show it, and work right, same with any other "features" of the library. And, document the hell out of it. The ones for LPC I have seen are a) badly documented, b) incomplete, and c) if they did work on Linux, it was almost *always* broken on Windows.

Difficulting of teaching new people - This is a problem only if the library is badly made. You "can" make code so that it could be generated by GUI and is easy to code, and *still* get a lot of function in the scripting. OOP style stuff is good for that, since you can handle things that happen as events, and simply have it execute the code "if" you supply it. If you don't, default to ignoring the event, or using the standard library behavior. Its only if you force people to code "everything" that you run into a problem. Fact is, for most cases, the fill in the blanks method of Diku is quite reasonable, it just goes to far, by not providing a way to override the original behavior, without overriding the entire core server's combat, room handlers, etc.

Licensing - ... Good luck with that. The problem you have here is you presume you have control over the client (or will for the foreseeable future). The reality is, unless you add overhead via encryption, to add a "DMCA" style protection to those features, people *will* crack the communications and replicate the features in other clients. Heck, I have been pushing for years to redesign parts of the client I use to add true object support to the script system it uses. With that, nearly "anything" could be duplicated with it. The only reason it hasn't happened yet is that it was written with MFC, and that set of libraries and macros doesn't allow events to be registered and passed back to the script system. Otherwise, I doubt there is much you could think of that someone wouldn't already be producing for existing games, by parsing the data already available. Figuring out how to create interoperability with your server's features wouldn't even get a yawn at that point.

Frankly, I am not sure how long the "if you want to use these features in my client, pay me!", model will keep working. The only model that I think, imho, *does* work is to turn on/off the features on the server end, and let who ever wants to implement the support of it (if they opt to create support for it for their clients). The only thing that keeps it from happening more already is that no one has made a client which is that flexible yet. When they do.. All bets are off.

Basically, you might be able to give away the client, and the server, then charge for a "library" which implements the features. The people running the servers are likely to buy it, because the client supports it. You players though... They are either going to ignore the game, try to break the protocol, ignore the features, or *maybe* pay for it. I don't give good odds on the later being *at all* significantly larger than the first three groups. And, once people start breaking the protocols, you have to release new clients with patches, to prevent the breach, changes to the server to have it work, etc. The server users are not likely to comply (you already told them they don't need to by giving it out free) and.. Well, I think you get my point.

Re: What do you think happened to LPmuds?
 

As I understand it even if it is a LPMUD it might be custom. The MUDOS seem to act like the Java virtual machine, and the MUD coder writes their MUD using the programming language LPC. You wouldn't expect people to write "Java" in their codebase field in the listing.

Re: What do you think happened to LPmuds?
 

Posting this has had me thinking about the subject a lot lately, so I've been talking with numerous folks about it.

Some ideas that came up in discussion:

Thoughts?

Re: What do you think happened to LPmuds?
 

You would be absolutely correct. While Threshold and New Worlds were both programmed in LPC, it's extremely doubtful that we could even share code if we wanted to do so because our code bases are most likely vastly different. They're the same only in that they're both programmed in LPC.

Re: What do you think happened to LPmuds?
 

Then, what makes Threshold think there's such a dearth of LPMuds? How would he know? Every single game that calls itself "custom" could be one, and there are a decent number of games that call themselves custom. Maybe it's not as lonely in LPworld as he thinks. Maybe it's an incredibly popular system. If the code bases can be that different, then there really isn't any way he, or you, or anyone else, would know. Then why would Threshold create this thread in the first place?

I don't know anything about LPMud. I just know some game operators tell people their game is an LPMUd. If there's no way to tell, and if it doesn't violate copyright by -not- saying so, why do some people specify and others don't? I thought it was a codebase, like Diku, GSL, and MOO are codebases. I never had any reason to know it was something else.

Re: What do you think happened to LPmuds?
 

It's the same as saying merc/rom/circle are diku.

They're not.


LPMuds work on a driver/codebase partnership. that with the use of the LPC scripting language is what makes a LPMud. there are a number of diffrent drivers and then a number of diffrent codebases on top of them.

As the above posters have mentioned you can't share code because there's never been a formal design spec and all_inventory() in one codebase isn't going to act the same way as another.


There's no means of copy and paste code sharing.. thats why you won't find a LPMUD community as such but you're more likely to find a LIMA/Dead Souls/TMI communtiy instead.

Anyone with a 'custom' codebase can get little from the other communitys other than spit-talking hyopthetical ideas which can be done with any community of mud developers.


At the end it is the Implementation that differs between LP and DIku and most times it also differs from LP too LP

Re: What do you think happened to LPmuds?
 

I am going to assume this is a real question and not just a flippant, sarcastic remark. I hope I am right. :)

First, the thread title is "What do you think happened to LPmuds?" If there are tons of LPmuds out there flourishing, and new ones being created frequently, then a valid answer is "They are doing fine <insert examples>." Since nobody seems to be saying that, then my belief that LPmuds (and the use of LPC) are fading seems to be somewhat accurate.

Second, I have a very nostalgic interest in the topic of LPmuds and LPC, and thus I pay attention to what muds out there are LP-style. Since I see very few of them, and I hear about new ones even less frequently, that just lends evidence to my hypothesis. Every now and then I will read about a new mud, or a mud looking for coders, and they will say "We use MudOSand LIMA" and it is actually a shock. It makes me think "Wow, I don't hear that very often!" Compare that to how often you hear someone say their mud is Smaug or Merc or ROM or something like that.

Re: What do you think happened to LPmuds?
 

I think part of the problem is that there really isn't a *usable* stable core you can start with when using LP. I don't know of anyone personally that didn't modify damn near everything from the combat code to the inventory management for players, to the spell/skill lists, etc. By the time you debug the stuff that didn't work well in the original library and add it stuff that isn't cookie cutter code, the odds of you having anything *remotely* similar to anyone else's code is nearly non-existent.

Imho, to do what LP intended, and at the same time have a solid reusable code base, there needs to be a core library that works for "everyone", which won't change much, unless its to fix bugs, **but** which also allows enough flexibility to do significantly different things, if you want to. To take an example from OSes, you might have a core library with "default" behaviors for how a window works, which doesn't need to be changed for most uses *but* you could then skin the window, and/or alter a lot of its behaviors, if you wanted to. So, in mud terms, this means you have the "base" combat system, but if you want to, you tack on an override to that, so that certain mobs behave via your "new" system. By isolating things such that they only effect those npcs, items, etc. that "need" the new code, your new whatzit becomes plugable, not something that is unusable to everyone else. At worst, you might need to have your DB, or how ever you store player, and other, data, add some extra records for "that" feature, but the core library remains intact, the main data remains intact, and the result becomes something you can drop into any world.

This is in contrast to what has been described as the current method, which rewrites the entire system of functions and calls, such that changes to one feature cascade into ever other feature, rapidly making the code non-reusable for everyone else running the driver. Imho, a system that modularizes things from the ground up, with some level of independence between modules and data storage for them, is *bound* to be easier to debug too. Far fewer cases where changing a bit of code in one part of a library turns out to effect 90 other things, because someone threaded each one into the other so completely that they are now all interdependent.

Mind you, modularizing is *bound* to be more work to a) get working right, and b) keep people from screwing up with existing practices. lol

Re: What do you think happened to LPmuds?
 

Another way to share code could be to use some standard script language and setup a standard interface. Then different kind of MUDs could implement the script language and connect the interface to its functions to its best ability.

The question is if you really need to share that much code though. Discussing and writing tutorials might be more beneficial in the long run.

Re: What do you think happened to LPmuds?
 

Well, yes and no. The problem is, different drivers, different security models, etc. Too much of it *not* kept separate enough that user privilege escalation didn't land you in the core of the mud code, if it broke, and other similar issues. Stuff that should have been in the driver was in the library, stuff that should have been maybe, at least handled more gracefully, by the library, relied instead in the driver too much, almost nothing was standard, and anything that was often wouldn't work, for various reasons, under certain configuration or one certain OSes. And even basics where often added much later than the example code, so that even if you had discussions or tutorials, someone using Lima instead of TMI would be looking at you like you where trying to describe Lua code on Windows to them, while you where using Java on BSD. Not even enough of the function names would necessarily be recognizable to figure out what was going on (and even if it had the same name, it might not do the same thing).

I think, if you wanted to fix the issues LPC has, you would need to start from the ground up, and put things where they need to be, provide different access for different parts of the code (instead of trying to cludge some of the goofy security methods used in the past) and generally try to come up with some standard model for how the most basic features need to work, so that modifications are just addons, not complete rewrites of stuff that a 10 years later will be unrecognizable as deriving from the same library. Discussion and tutorial is useless without a common frame of reference.

Re: What do you think happened to LPmuds?
 

The Intermud listing for the router shows quite a few LPMUDs connected. I also know of at least 4 others which have been running for at least 5 years (at least 2 of them are over a decade old).

Re: What do you think happened to LPmuds?
 

First, yes it was a sincere question. I really wanted to know, how anyone -would- know, if an LPMud was an LPMud, if the code is so different from one to the next that they don't resemble each other -and- that they can call themselves custom, without specifying that they are LPMud.

Second, I don't know why you feel you can come to a conclusion of fact, based on a belief. The only thing you can know for sure (as of this post), is that no one has given you a difinitive answer yet. WHY they haven't - you have no way of knowing. It could be a number of reasons. It could be that your guess is corrrect - that there really aren't that many LPMuds.

It could be, that the people who DO know the answer, haven't read this thread and didn't know you were asking. It could be, that they have read the thread, and just didn't feel like answering. It could be that they read the title of it in the "recent threads" thing on the main topmudsites page, and never bothered reading the actual thread, and therefore haven't answered. It could be that everyone who -might- have answered, refuses to be cause they don't like you. Or maybe they don't like me, and are offended enough by my presence in this thread that they will boycott it.

It could be a lot of things, the the Occam's Razor application of the question, would come up with the most likely answer: no one who knows, has had the opportunity and/or desire to answer you.

Re: What do you think happened to LPmuds?
 

Well, yes, it could be any of those things, or it could simply be that, like any semi-intelligent being, we can observe changes in trends that have occurred over years. How would anyone even know except to ask and wonder? Since Threshold isn't the only person to notice a decline in LPMuds, and since some of us actually know the problems with coding in LPC when other things are available now, the hypothesis could actually be a correct one.

Scientific method:

1) Use your experience
2) Create a conjecture
3) Deduce an explanation
4) Attempt to disprove
5) Revise your hypothesis
6) Rinse and repeat

This is pretty tried and true considering the entire scientific community uses it. There's really no way to even test your conjectures. Once this thread exists, people can point to further evidence and help review the hypothesis/conjecture. So far, from reading posts of the people who have worked with LPC as well as going off my own knowledge of working in LPC, I would say that it's a decent hypothesis. For example, we chose to punt LPC for our newest game even though Threshold has done well and lots of people enjoy it. A lot of it for reasons stated here, and some of it is for our own personal reasons.

Ultimately, it really doesn't make a difference why people want to wax nostalgic about the days where LPC muds were popping up everywhere. That's definitely not the case anymore.

Re: What do you think happened to LPmuds?
 

Yeah, those numbers sound about as low as I feared (though I got a kick out of the "mycrappymud" and "Pussy Planet" mud entries on that list). I remember 10+ years ago I hooked up to one of the intermuds and there were many hundreds of LPmuds on it. And usually, half the admins were slagging Descartes for something.

Errr...... Isn't the whole point of a discussion forum to DISCUSS things? If I already knew the answer with absolute certainty then I wouldn't have bothered with the thread. Seriously, I have to wonder why you are even bothering to post in this thread if you are just being contrary for the sake of being contrary, and don't even seem to have the slightest interest in the actual topic.

Every single person that ever lived in the universe could come to this thread, read it, post their honest opinion, and we STILL wouldn't know "for sure" why LPmuds tapered off in popularity. But that doesn't mean a discussion of "why" is not interesting and valuable. If it didn't interest people, they wouldn't be posting.

Re: What do you think happened to LPmuds?
 

Just because they don't call themselves an LPMud doesn't mean that there aren't some characteristics that remain the same. Plus, there's definitely a distinct difference in "now" and "then". When I first started playing Threshold, LPC seemed to be the big trend. There were several rather large LP muds such as Darkwind and Realms Mud. I've lost touch with Darkwind and haven't heard anything about them for a long time. (Sad, because I totally loved the Garou race. I quit playing when they weren't open to players during an overhaul.) Realms Mud has a few players still, but it's nowhere near the busy mud that it used to be. It seemed like back in the late 90s, tons of LP muds were opening their doors and looking for players. You can go look at the posts now and see that there aren't very many.

I would assume that Threshold started the thread because this is a topic of interest for him and hardly likely to cause a flame war. It's a trend that some of us have noticed and discussed amongst ourselves. Maybe he just thought it'd make for interesting conversation. And ultimately, he got his start in LPMuds. Why wouldn't he think fondly of them and lament the fact that some the old big ones are gone?

Most places don't give you an option to be very specific about your codebase or the language you programmed your mud in. Most players don't actually care unless they hope to be programming or building for the game they actually play. Now, for some codebases, naming the code base also denotes a "look" and "feel" to the game as well as the mechanics. In that case, it helps for people to know. You can list LPMud, but it won't tell a player jack about how the mud is going to look, whether or not it has auto-prompts, or how the combat is going to operate. I'd probably guess that a lot of muds would list themselves as "custom lib, coded in LPC" if they could, but even then, that's really not going to be useful for the players.

Re: What do you think happened to LPmuds?
 

Ah, cool! I used to log on to Discworld for kicks and stuck around because I was okay with their gameplay style. I'm frankly not a fan of most DIKU and DIKU derivatives unless they've been heavily modified. I didn't actually know Discworld as an LPMud, though.

It's good to see some of the old ones still up and running. There's a few there I've never heard of, too, so it might be time to go exploring again. I think I'll start with this one:

mycrappymud Coffee CoffeeMud v5.3. CoffeeMud v5.3.0 67.58.170.55 5555

ROFL. That just cracks me up. :)

Re: What do you think happened to LPmuds?
 

On the note of muds that are LP. Not sure if its listed as such, but one called Ages of Despair is a TMI-2 (massively modified) on MudOS, so that is one at least. And, imho, its showing its age. Despite revamping of combat, and a lot of other things, there are compromises made to get them to work that make no real sense to me, but didn't work when done the opposite way around, and some things, like the outdoor grid system, are limited to an *allowed* size, so adding in a larger outdoor world would require new grids, or other annoyances. From what I understand this may be a practical limitation of the library, or maybe the server, or both. There are definite problems with it that only a new driver with better modern support and/or even more extreme changes to the library would require. Hmm. Another example. They upped max levels to 150, and then added in some special "powers" you could work towards at that level. They then had to completely change how total exp was stored, because the allowed integer size in MudOS was too small to "fit" the value into it (and I am not sure what they did to fix it, since reals would have the same problem, but add precision errors, which would make "gaining" exp impossible if the value was small enough to fall below certain thresholds, or recompute it for death, etc.).

Re: What do you think happened to LPmuds?
 

That's interesting. Do you think that it's "showing its age" because of the limitations of the MudOS and TMI-2 codebase, or do you think it's a matter of game design and code?

One of the biggest things, in my opinion, that limits "updating" an LPMud game is the sheer amount of actual coding that has to be done by anyone who is involved. You can't really hand off making anything to people who have no idea to code, and it seems that it's harder and harder to find people who can code. (Though, I think that this is because MU*ing actually has become more mainstream. It's not composed mostly of hardcore computer geeks anymore.)

I have to say that I'm pretty shocked that anything really got too big for the interger size in MudOS, which is 2 to the 31st power. It seems like anything you really want to do could be done at 2^31-1.

Re: What do you think happened to LPmuds?
 

This also makes the training burden enormous. If you had a really creative player that you were interested in bringing on board as a builder, the amount of training involved just so they could BEGIN to express their creativity is quite significant. A lot of people just give up before that.

That raises another possible reason for the LPmud fade. 10+ years ago, a much higher percentage of people that were online and playing MUDs were already technically oriented. They were either involved in computer science in academia, or doing something with computers or engineering. If none of those were the case, they were at least people who were so into technology they knew about "this new fangled thing called the internet."

Now the internet is pretty darn close to a cross-section of society in general. So the average person is not already interested in programming like was once the case.

Re: What do you think happened to LPmuds?
 

Umm. Yes? lol Seriously, even modified TMI-2 has issues. Unmodified.. I don't even want to think about the nightmare it was to look at when I tried to work out what it did. MudOS isn't exactly a spring chicken either. Its almost the oldest one around (almost), and there are a lot of things about it that could be improved, not to mention other that only sort of got added later, including DB support, which *most* muds never bothered to use, since it wasn't something they, at the time, needed or knew how to take advantage of.

Yep. And that is a "huge" issue. Interestingly I think one of the issues is *actually* the fact that is uses a form of C. It wasn't ever really a user-friendly language to start with, but its got stuffed into the role of being used to code stuff for what "requires" usability code wise. Then again, I would likely have similar issue with someone using Java, which I also think is a bit annoying in the same ways. But, that goes back to the library. You need something where creative design of the "idea" can be done with little or no coding. Much of the rewrite of TMI-2 that got done on AoD, I think, may have been simplification of some of the room design requirements, and other similar stuff. Imho, unless you have script that needs to make an NPC or a room do something odd, it never really made sense to have to "code" them. Put it in a DB, or generate a DB entry from code, maybe, but, in practical terms, once you know what your rooms need to look like, what npcs look like, how your combat works, etc., there just isn't any damn reason to not just make everything, except the extra script needed to "change" that behavior in specific cases, be written in C. It makes it hard to learn, hard to change, etc. And, it tends to make it harder for people to learn how to do the basics, so they can go on to the advanced stuff they "wanted" to do in the first place.

As I said, I am not quite certain what the problem actually was, or how it was fixed. Maybe they where using floats to store it, or signed integers. One would automatically end up with precision issues, while the later would cut your available values in half. But, people where getting into like 2.5 billion exp and more when things started to go fubar on them.

Re: What do you think happened to LPmuds?
 

I'm going to repost this here since the cesspool atmosphere at TMC has made participation there entirely useless:

Threshold,

I think you may well have hit the nail on the head more or less exactly. DIKU based muds tend to be pretty quick an easy to set up, you can get people building areas using OLC within an hour, and there are tons of snippets to be used as add-ons. The ease with which most DIKU bases can be run in Windows also seems to have a big impact.

Many DIKU codebases are still actively maintained with a very public presence from their current stewards. Even if they happen to have taken over a project after the original authors left it behind. From my experience it seems that once an LP project is set aside by the original maintainers, it's a huge undertaking to revive it.

I've also seen a bit of a perception of seclusion among LP maintainers, in that they tend to stick within their own niche and rarely seem to venture out to more general places. This is also true to some extent with some DIKU communities, but not nearly as much.

Cratylus has done a rather amazing job of reviving several old projects that had been laying dormant for awhile. Getting them to work in environments they weren't intended for, offering help where needed, that sort of thing. He's just one man though.

It could also just be that the LPs are the first sign of something more general, such as a shift away from text based games in general. You'd be surprised how many school and college age kids these days have no idea what a MUD even is. Let alone the differences in all the codebases out there.

Re: What do you think happened to LPmuds?
 

Agreed, which is why I think there's still hope for muds and potentially even growth. If they'd all heard of MUDs, all tried MUDs and written them off as boring that would be a different situation.

MUDs still have a lot to offer and while they will by no means appeal to the majority, it only takes 1% or .01% of MMO players to play a MUD and we'd all see a huge jump in population.

Which, of course, brings us right back to how to get the message out there...

Re: What do you think happened to LPmuds?
 

I have always wondered why so few LP projects get successfully passed on by the original author. It is a shame, because a lot of good mudlibs, drivers, and other projects died on the vine as a result.

Good point.

Here's a very minor suggestion to everyone:

On the graphical MMOs you play, post on their forums. Have a link in your .sig file either to your favorite MUD, Top Mud Sites, or both. On most graphical MMO forums, tens or hundreds of thousands of people will see your posts. Surely some of them will be interested enough in the idea of text games to check out your link and learn about our community a bit.

Re: What do you think happened to LPmuds?
 

I think you're being a bit optimisic.

I'm not trying to flame you, but your response, light of the LPMUd extinction discussion, brings to mind the potential extinction of MUDs in general... which is probably better posted onto the end of another well-tread thread. (But I'll post here anyway.)

To use an analogy, it's like saying, "Even though most people haven't heard of clog dancing () , it only takes 1% to 0.01% of all night/dance-club dancers to jump in and there'd be a huge clog-dancer population"... which implies that the reason there aren't more clog dancers is largely because people haven't heard of it.

Yes, advertising will bring in some people.

But the fact is, clog dancing is no longer in vogue, not since the 18/19th century according to Wikipedia.

You can (a) admit that and live with a dwindling and aging population of clog-dancers (staving off the decline with clog-athons and other occasional advertising), or (b) change clog dancing so it fits with the times more.

(I'll post more about LPMuds and clog dancing when I get my world-toolkit functioning better.)

Re: What do you think happened to LPmuds?
 

I was going to reply here, but that really warrants its own thread.