Planet MUD-Dev Update

Added the following links to Planet Mud-Dev.

Appendix G:

Last activity: August 2011.
Summary: Regularly updated, enthusiastic for a sandbox game with player created cities and more. Hodge podge theme including western, fantasy, post appocalyptic and more.

Thanks for the link Kavir!

Planet MUD-Dev Update

Added the following links to Planet Mud-Dev.

Chrysalis Games:

Last activity: August 2011.
Summary: It had gone silent for a while, but recent posts indicate that interest is still present. The theme seems to be Wheel of Time. The last posts touch on stats and choice of races.

Karintha:

Last activity: December 2007.
Summary: Has been dead for a while, but posts touch on roleplaying, design and the state of MUD forums among other things.

SlothMud:

Last activity: November 2009.
Summary: Has also been dead for a while, but posts touch on dwindling player numbers, and summaries of periodic updates made to the gameplay.

A Personal Tour de Mud:

Last activity: November 2010.
Summary: Dead also, but still twitching compared to the previous two. I hesitated to add this one, as it isn't strictly development related. But I find a lot of value as a MUD developer in reading reviews and comparing to my own ideas and preconceptions of what I would like to do, so I think this contributes from that angle. Reviews also make allusions to code for the MUDs.

Thanks for these links Kavir!

MUD-Dev discussion: August 8th-14th

Rather than work on one of my many hobby projects, procrastination drives me to summarise MUD discussion during the past week at the various major forums. I think it is quite clear that if you want to productively discuss MUD development, MUDBytes is the place to go.

MUDBytes

Struggling with my object sys...

Nich using the Python code-base Evennia wants to program an object system that empowers players to create content, perhaps by data or perhaps by access to the scripting system. Composition, object orientation, multiple inheritance and entity systems are touched on. Tyche chimes in with a promising but mostly incomprehensible post about Genesis and ColdC. One of a "No-SQL" database or GIT is suggested for use, despite not really having any bearing on the subject at hand. Otherwise devolves into Evennia/Python-specific discussion.

Anachronism, my Telnet library, Brand-new

This topic is a few months old now, but still alive.

"Anachronism allows you to consider Telnet as a set of data channels, rather than a stream of text with embedded data. Telopts are treated almost like ports, and when you attach a channel to one, Anachronism handles negotiation automatically and presents subnegotiation data as just another stream of data. This makes it really easy to keep Telnet away from the part of your code that actually does stuff, and it makes it possible to create a channel implementation once and share it with everyone."

Developed using a Ruby parser generator, and examples are given using Ruby so are inscrutable unless you have learned that scripting language. However, the project itself is c-based. Sounds like a nice idea in theory, but no evidence of uptake yet.

Using Css Server-side For MVC

Suggests that MUD text is marked up server-side using CSS definitions. An interesting idea that hasn't been suggested before. There are some silly suggestions, like custom colouring for different areas in a MUD. But also interesting speculation on how it would work with MXP. Also an working proof of concept Ruby-based implementation is provided. Mark-up approaches are then discussed, with forum-like mark-up being suggested as a replacement for HTML. Discussion devolves into someone's implementation of some extremely stripped down implementation, not using CSS or HTML.

KMPH (FUSC)

Uploaded code from Kavir, was updated by Scandum. Written in C with support for several common code-bases. Intended to be hooked in to process incoming and outgoing text, handling telnet negotiation, unicode, colours, protocols and more. The update does the following: "handle broken packets and resolve a cyclic TTYPE issue with windows telnet."

Top Mud Sites

Community survey: What do MUD players want?

About the only sign of life in these forums, and is probably pointless given that most people doing this never complete their efforts. However, contains useful information like how worthwhile it is to actually use compression. Also touches on other topics like what races to offer.

The Mud Connector

Registration and required e-mail addresses

Discussion about whether it is acceptable to request email addresses from players, and what might be done about them.

AJAX Mud Forums

Link: forums.ajaxmud.net

Searching for new blogs to add to Planet MUD-Dev, I stumbled across this forum site I hadn't seen before or perhaps looked at in detail if I had. I'll go over and briefly summarise interesting posts.

1. HTTP Streaming testing results: A good and straightforward overview of AJAX approaches, with notes detailing experimentation by the poster.
2. Socket.IO NodeJS library: Brings up socket.io which is a library which implements AJAX approaches, the fallback approach using Flash and web socket support.
3. jsMUD - the NodeJS MUD Engine: Notes on an effort to write a node.js MUD engine, which resulted in a few magazine articles.

That's pretty much it. The forums are pretty bare and only really go into detail on specialised subjects. Again, the best place to discuss these topics is within the major MUD forums.

stackoverflow / gamedev.stackexchange

Searching for new blogs to add to Planet MUD-Dev, I stumbled across the "mud" tags on both stackoverflow and gamedev.stackexchange. Both of these resources now serve to collect questions from the both the clueless, the lazy and also those who are a combination of both qualities.

I've done a quick survey of the worthwhile questions posted and their answers, and the results follow.

stackoverflow:

1. Generating grammatically correct MUD-style attack descriptions
   The top two answers are very good, one going into detail on the subject and the other pointing to useful libraries that can be employed to solve the problem.

gamedev.stackexchange:

None!

It is not surprising to me that there aren't many worthwhile questions and answers. These sites are good for generic questions, like generalist programming language specific questions, even if they are MUD related. But it is a place unsuitable for questions better targeted at MUD developers, particularly in any of the MUD-specific forums. However, you can't help those who won't help themselves...

Planet MUD-Dev Update

Did another trawl of the search engines (Bing, Duck Duck Go and Google) for "text mud development blog" and added the resulting links to Planet Mud-Dev.

Ilyrias MUD:

Last activity: September 2006.
Summary: Most likely a dead blog for a failed commercial MUD. Very few posts, one of which is on NPC behaviour and scripting.

Sea of Souls:

Last activity: December 2009.
Summary: Most likely a dead blog, but the MUD behind it is still live. A Wheel of Time themed Smaug. Tens of posts tagged with development.

If you know the URL of a MUD or MUD developer that has interesting development related posts and isn't already present here, let me know. Similarly, if you think a blog on this feed should be removed, also let me know. Post in the comments for either of these, or any other thoughts.