A simple MUD server in Python which can be run on a Raspberry Pi

by raytopia • 2 years ago

126 65 2 years ago

jgalt212• 2 years ago

MUDs would work great inside WhatsApp.

AJ007• 2 years ago

The complete opposite of Raspberry Pi, but I predict that one result of generative AI models is we will end up with over 1 million concurrent players on MUDs.

#1 Dramatic simplification of navigation and actions, making them accessible for new users

#2 Significantly better role-playing enabled through NPC characters

#3 Access & visualization medium by choice: text, narration/voice, image, video, 3D

If I had the free time this is what I would work on now. I've messed around with LLM RPGs, but the big piece is there needs to be a stored structure to get around the context model issues, or at minimum reduce costs and speed up use since we now have huge context models.

import_awesome• 2 years ago

I have half a MUD that uses TTS and speech-to-text as the interface with LLMs generating the content and a database keeping the context. It works surprisingly well.

guestbest• 2 years ago

MUDs would work great with CarPlay and ChatGPT to convert input to structured text. Ouput would just be ai audio. It would be like an interactive podcast

bananamerica6• 2 years ago

Just be careful when approaching actual current MUD gamers with that idea. They're largely cynical towards AI. I don't really blame them, a lot of people coming at /r/mud with new ideas are either lazy, misinformed, or crypto bros.

cricalix• 2 years ago

Depends on the MUD type. I used to play, admin, and sysadmin on AVATAR MUD, and the sheer text scroll of a large group in combat just wouldn't translate to WhatsApp. A lot of the players used TinyFugue with complexish state management in the scripting to highlight things going on in the combat output.

Now, Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy as a text adventure game over WA could be interesting for some people.

jaccarmac• 2 years ago

Slight tangent, but The Whale's Keeper (https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=5k15omg0bdbddxfr) was an IFComp entry last year, built on a game engine for chat apps (https://plotopolis.com/). I'm not sure how much the format contributed, but did enjoy the game.

bee_rider• 2 years ago

I wonder what the reason for calling out the fact that it could be run on a Pi is. MUDs are not new, of course, so I guess they’ve been run on some very weak machines.

But, the license file seems to be 11 years old… I guess those older Pi’s are pretty weak.

Still slightly confused but less so.

chmod7752• 2 years ago

Even the oldest rPIs are more than tenthousand times more powerful than what you'd need to run a MUD. Pretty much anything that can run a telnet server users could do useful stuff with could also run a MUD. This is written in python, so it probably needs slightly more power than that though.

Most likely this is just a case of awkward English - the intended use of the project is to be run on a rPI. It's not a minimum requirement.

bcrosby95• 2 years ago

Color me suspicious. I ran a MUD back in 2005 that we opted not to add features to because of how CPU intensive they were.

Obviously if you took gamma diku and tossed it on an rpi, yeah, because that was built in the '80s with that hardware in mind. But muds evolve and get features and people come up with stuff that can't be ran on ancient hardware.

For example, most MUDs turn(ed) off mobile AI when players weren't in the zone. It wasn't strictly necessary to have it on, but it would be nice to have NPCs that did stuff when PCs weren't around so when they revisit something happened.

Espressosaurus• 2 years ago

Still seems confusing to me. MUDs were run on much weaker hardware than that even.

icedchai• 2 years ago

Definitely. I ran a MUD on a Sun Sparcstation with 32 megs of RAM back in the mid 90's. (The MUD only used a fraction of that, of course.)

treve• 2 years ago

Perhaps it's just meant to signal: Anyone can run this, hackers welcome!

globular-toast• 2 years ago

Most people don't run servers. RPi is seen as the way to run servers at home for most people.

geerlingguy• 2 years ago

For anyone else wondering what a MUD is, down in the README:

MUD is short for Multi-User Dungeon. A MUD is a text-based online role-playing game. MUDs were popular in the early 80s and were the precursor to the graphical Massively-Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games we have today, like World of Warcraft. http://www.mudconnect.com is a great site for learning more about MUDs.

grimgrin2• 2 years ago

I do love muds.

I sorta maintain: https://github.com/shmup/miniboa

There's a lot of rabbit holes if you ever want to explore the social/textual landscape of the 80s and 90s, especially the 90s and into the early 2000s. A LOT of stuff was written. Recently I've been absorbing more of it

Like this: http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/Virtual.Community.html

And also a book you may like to look up, "My Tiny Life": https://archive.org/details/mytinylifecrimep0000dibb_c6m4

Or read some papers indexed here:

- https://hayseed.net/MOO/

- https://lisdude.com/moo/

Bare with me, the topic of MUDs isn't mentioned here often and I've been wanting to link dump a little

JKCalhoun• 2 years ago

Super cool. MUDs were cool because they were open, free. I'm kind of repelled by the modern derivative, the Corporate Games like World of Warcraft.

Would a modern MUD be web based? What is the modern web version of a MUD?

I don't think immersive 3D like the aforementioned WoW is really a MUD but I am not sure pure text is to my liking. I think Rogue-likes might have hit the sweet spot — allowing you to explore somewhat graphically but there was still a degree of imagination required. The cost to create a Rogue-like world too would not be prohibitive (and I mean cost in terms of time and effort — like the time and effort that would be required to create a 3D immersive universe like WoW, etc.).

And, sure, I know Dwarf Fortress is a thing but the other aspect of MUDs that was cool was that so many existed with their own unique feel and character.

I guess I am looking for a web ring of Rogue-likes.

Even cooler if, while on different servers, they had a mechanism for linking or tunneling to other sites. I'm imagining two sysops cooperating and adding tunnels between their two worlds so that a player could wander into a completely new world — unknowingly moving from one site to another. You get enough sysops to join up and you kind of no longer need a web ring.

bananamerica6• 2 years ago

Web MUD clients exist.

I'm really not sure if modernizing MUDs is worth the effort. Actual MUD gamers will look at it with either contempt or distrust, especially blind players. And regular gamers are unlikely to play a text game. I could make a game with a MUD sensibility or even use a MUD engine, but I would never call it a MUD. MUD players want more of the past and I'm not really interested in that.

raytopia3• 2 years ago

There's a lot of muds with web clients now a days. Telnet still seems to be the most popular though because most of the popular clients support it.

If you're looking for something that isn't just text based Graphical Muds wmay be what you're looking for. For context they are the often times over looked link between muds and mmos.

I swear I remember reading something about connected mud servers but I can't remember it off of the top of my head unfortunately.

Palomides• 2 years ago

the modern equivalent of a MUD as a user-designed social experience is definitely VRChat

nextaccountic• 2 years ago

Would a modern MUD be web based? What is the modern web version of a MUD?

A month ago people posted Improbable Island here. It's not "modern" but it's a mud-like website

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39135779

I inquired about the relationship with muds. It's.. like a mud, but without a map (so rooms form an arbitrary graph, and edges don't have a cardinal direction like "north")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39141173

hnthrowaway0328• 2 years ago

Have you tried Neverwinter nights' persistent worlds? Not the NWN online game but the original 2001 game.

Back in the day I thought it is the best thing: players can create their own worlds and invite others. Of course builders cannot connect two worlds so that was a pity. Still, I believe it was a lot better than games such as WoW.

Nevertheless the game never achieved the popularity it deserves, and nowadays the persistent worlds are not played by many.

raytopia3• 2 years ago

I've been messing around with miniboa. Pretty fun to use!

Those links on Moos look interesting thanks for sharing!

troad3• 2 years ago

I too love MUDs / MOOs.

I still miss some of the features that Discworld Mud had, and mainstream gaming hasn't warmed to. Strange currencies, complex banking, different in-game languages, convenience features gated in RP ways (the Taxi guild of portal wizards!), etc. The conventional wisdom holds that that'd be far too much friction for modern games, but it contributed so much to making the world feel more than an inch deep, which is something modern gaming needs all the help with it can get.

I also think scripting in LambdaMOO may have been my gateway drug to coding. Once I learnt I was able to expand the world myself, I was intoxicated. Yib's Guide to MOOing [0] is a great read for anyone interested in how that all used to work.

And the social scene of these services in the 90s and early 00s is hard to describe. Honestly, @go #17 in LambdaMOO at its height felt more like the Metaverse to me than anything Facebook has made to date.

[0] https://www.lisdude.com/moo/ygm.pdf

jamilton• 2 years ago

Discworld Mud is still around, active, and getting updates fyi! I'm sure it's not the same as it's heyday but . I love the language feature in particular, I also want it to be used in other games. Having to change currency I could do without though :P How many Ankh-Morpork dollars to an Agatean rhinu? Can I convert Djelian talona to Lancre pounds in this town? Writing that out though, it is great for the roleplaying experience.

mdtrooper• 2 years ago

Another good mud server and open source in python is https://www.evennia.com/

xedrac• 2 years ago

MUDs were a lot of fun back in the day when I had fewer demands on my time, and had friends that played and competed with me. Unfortunately they can be very time consuming, similar to an mmorpg, and hardly anyone plays them anymore.

VikingCoder• 2 years ago

I've wondered about SMS for a MUD. I'm guessing it would be crazy expensive...

skulk• 2 years ago

I used to play a MUD that has a sizeable player population that used Mxit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mxit

It was... strange. I still don't understand how it could have possibly worked.

mvkel• 2 years ago

This is some really nice to read code

tito2• 2 years ago

This just sparked me to look up my old favorite. Just a 20 year old thread with posts over the years: https://alt.mud.narkive.com/No6CZyd7/questwars-quest-for-fae...

What's a good MUD to play now?

raytopia3• 2 years ago

https://www.mudlet.org/ is a client with a lot of muds to choose from. You can also connect to others of course.

Diederich• 2 years ago

I still play https://mume.org/ from time to time. It's been running (almost) continuously since 1991. I started it in 1992.

justsilverman• 2 years ago

http://www.eotl.org/ was great in the 80s and was still great when I played a few years ago.

rascul2• 2 years ago

The Wheel of Time MUD has been around since the '90s and I've been playing it on and off for the last couple decades.

https://wotmud.info/

tito2• 2 years ago

thanks for the suggestions everyone. just played the LoTR through MUDlet for a bit.

palmfacehn• 2 years ago

https://www.legendsofthejedi.com/

melon_tusk• 2 years ago

My favorite MUD is definitely Midnight Sun II. It's one of the MUDs in the selection you get when you start Mudlet from mudlet.org, which is an excellent/modern client.

bkcooper• 2 years ago

I spent quite a bit of time at the end of high school into early college playing on a Forgotten Realms themed MUD. It accomplished two valuable things: it durably increased my typing speed by 20-30 wpm, and it also inoculated me against the MMOs which would have been way more destructive for me.

rascul2• 2 years ago

MUDs can be wonderful. They can be even better with a proper MUD client. A couple of the popular ones are TinTin++ (text) or Mudlet (gui).

https://tintin.mudhalla.net/

https://www.mudlet.org/

LispSporks22• 2 years ago

I did my first mud on a 386. It was dos or Linux I can’t remember. I was learning C at the same time so you can imagine it was the software equivalent of pruno.

nottorp• 2 years ago

Humm, you can run anything on a Raspberry Pi as long as it has an arm linux version? Or it's interpreted and the interpreter runs on said arm linux, as in this case.

It would have been interesting enough without the Raspberry Pi part.

A simple MUD server in Python which can be run on a Raspberry Pi

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