sup/tg/

[#] Of MUDs and MUCKs

10:27am UTC - 5/06/2008

What is my fascination with technology that mostly exists on pages dated "Copyright 1999"? I know I've got other projects to do, like finishing the DH chargen (just need to let it save to a database), continue cleaning out the archive, maybe do more work on the bots...

So what do I do instead? I start screwing around with MUDs and MUCKs because I am apparently a masochist. (Well, not a super masochist but we'll get to that.) It turns out it's exceedingly easy to actually *host* a MUD or MUCK, to the point where I can just unzip and run it from my desktop. We fucked around with it a bit (I recreated Candyland in the MUCK) but when we went to the MUD, I ran into more problems.

See, for a MUCK it's really easy to create objects, rooms, etc. because it's basically just text descriptions. With few exceptions, you can build a MUCK fairly rapidly without needing much programming knowledge. @dig room, @describe room, @create items, @describe items, @open door, @dig a new room... With MUDs, of course, you need to define stats and actions for everything. Every creature has to have the full gamut of stats, abilities, drops, speech, and so on. Rooms are more difficult to make and describe, every item has to have attributes assigned to it... it's exponentially more involved than a MUCK/MUSH because it actually focuses on combat.

Add to this the fact you need to either do all of the content creation in-game, or through a text editor messing with the esoteric raw files, and it becomes a massive pain in the ass. I really would like to play around with this, make some kind of fucked up /tg/ MUD, but I need a server that was written sometime in the past half-decade and I absolutely require an offline editor with a decent GUI. We were playing around with SmaugFUSS until I realized the editor that worked with it only works with something five versions out-of-date.

So, /tg/, if you have any suggestions on MUD server software with an external editor, I'd be extremely grateful.

~Lord Licorice

I'm sorry, I can't hear you over how awesome my moustache is.

View All by Author

Comments