Issue 0x06 - exit %x34b4

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Greetings, adventurers!

Okay, first things first: For those of you who haven’t been paying attention to r/MUD or the official Slack channel, the first-ever MUD Coders Guild Game Jam has been announced! Enter the (Multi-User) Dungeon will be a month-long game jam where competitors will be challenged to create a MUD that utilizes procedural generation in some way, shape, or form.

Enter the (Multi-User) Dungeon starts on April 15th, and will run until May 15th, with the winners being announced in the June 1st newsletter—and yes, there will be prizes! For more information, head on over to our official announcement, and may the odds be ever in your favor… or something.

- Zach

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> notes

Enter the (Multi-User) Dungeon

It’s been 2 years since the creation of The MUD Coders Guild, and I couldn’t be more excited with the state of this community. In that time, we’ve grown to nearly 300 members, launched a popular (for…

The Help Files ep4: Clem and All Those Beacons

As one might have guessed from prior entries in The Help Files, I’m playing a bit of Warframe. Like most multiplayer online worlds, it has its share of in-jokes. The two more prevalent ones in…

My Favorite Design Word: Visceral

I wanted an RPG so I downloaded “HIT” from Nexon. I’ve always been a fan of Nexon’s designs from a mechanical perspective. Like most Korean and Chinese games, they devolve into pay to win PvP or pay…

> open source

smudge

Smudge is an ncurses-based Multi-User Dungeon (MUD) client scriptable with Scheme.

RMUD

RMUD is an open-source, community project initially conceptualized on the MUD subreddit in 2014. Garnering enough interest, several now core members came together and work began on creating a game that was something different from all the high-fantasy in the genre, opting for the less popularized Fantastique genre.

Node Mud Server

The goal of the Node Mud Server project is to establish a barebones mud server that supports common mud protocols and takes care of the fundamentals of network programming within the Node.js environment. This isn’t meant to be a fully playable game but instead offer a starting point for developers to design and implement their own game mechanics.

> inventory

ASCII Image Generator

This pages takes an image and creates an ASCII-art derivative of it using an edge-detection algorithm. While image-to-ASCII conversion isn’t usually very impressive, this method is unique in that it outputs ASCII-art in every sense of the word.

gti

Gti is a silly git launcher, basically. Inspired by sl.

Introducing Agones: Open-source, multiplayer, dedicated game-server hosting built on Kubernetes

Agones is a new open-source project that uses Kubernetes to host and scale dedicated game servers. While modern MUDs are hardly expected to reach the scale necessary to justify something like Agones, it is still an impressive learning opportunity.

> train int

Objects on Rails

Objects on Rails is a “developer’s notebook” documenting some guidelines, techniques, and ideas for applying classic object-oriented thought to Ruby on Rails applications.

The Trust Spectrum

“The Trust Spectrum” is a practical design lens for designing multiplayer games, particularly ones involving co-operative play.

Pierre Menard, Inventor of LISP

The visible open source work left by this programmer is easily and briefly enumerated. It’s sad, therefore, to see all the criticism he’s posthumously receiving for the repositories he left unmaintained. The lovers of free work are never satisfied.

exercism.io

Download and solve practice problems in over 30 different languages. Practice having thoughtful conversations about code.

What I Wish I Knew When Learning Haskell 2.3

You’d think the title says it all here, but… wow… this is an incredibly thorough document.

npm Best Practices

Learn the best practices of using npm: Installation, finding & investigating packages, saving or locking dependencies, securing projects and more!

Finite State Machine vs Behaviour Tree, A True Story

Finite State Machines are great because they are so simple and intuitive. When they get big, however, they become so complicated…

Forde's Tenth Rule, or, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and ❤️ the State Machine"

A finite state machine, or simply a state machine, is a mathematical model of computation. It is an abstract machine that can be in exactly one of a finite number of states at any given time.

> quaff elixir

Erlang pg2 Failure Semantics

Unsure of how pg2 actually performs during node unavailability and cluster topology changes, as well as reports of problems due to race conditions and partitions, Christopher Meiklejohn set out to figure out exactly what the failure semantics of pg2 actually are.

Designing scalable application with Elixir: from umbrella project to distributed system

Elixir/Erlang OTP abstractions enforce developers to split programs into independent parts. While “gen_servers” encapsulate parts of business logic on micro-level, “applications” present a more general (“service”) part of the system. Complex programs written in Elixir are always a collection of communicating OTP applications.

Elixir Language Server

The Elixir Language Server provides a server that runs in the background, providing IDEs, editors, and other tools with information about Elixir Mix projects. It adheres to the Language Server Protocol, a standard for frontend-independent IDE support. Debugger integration is accomplished through the similar VS Code Debug Protocol.

Phoenix on Heroku: Our Experience Getting CoinRecap.io Deployed

Heroku is a powerful service that abstracts away most of the typical DevOps work one must do to deploy a modern web app to the cloud. It’s therefore ideal for getting a service off the ground quickly. But is it a good fit for Elixir and Phoenix?

Compiling External Resources with Elixir

Unsatisfied with YAML as a help text solution, TMCG member Eric Oestrich cooked up a macro that could compile a text file into Elixir functions.

Alice

Alice is a Slack bot framework for Elixir.

> cast 'inspiration'

Loot Generator

This is an interesting homework assignment out of the University of Pennsylvania about procedurally generating loot for video games.

KingdomGame 2

Created by TMCG member @paulhutson, KingdomGame puts you in control as the absolute leader of a fledgling nation as it begins on it’s path to riches, glory and political intrigue.

Hex Describe

Hex Describe is a little web application that combines Text Mapper with a random text generator like the fantastic Abulafia. Abulafia is a collection of user-contributed random generators housed within a special kind of wiki.

So1um

So1um is a solo Role Playing Game designed & written by Matt Jackson.

Microscope RPG

Microscope is a “fractal roleplaying game” that is all about worldbuilding.

The Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel (1565)

I… I don’t know what to say about this. I’ll just leave it here and let you judge.

Sea of Thieves team put anti-toxicity strategies into game’s core design

Part of Rare’s decision to build anti-toxicity measures directly into Sea of Thieves’ core design can be seen almost immediately upon playing. Players have a brig aboard their pirate ship, for example. Jerome Hagen, a user researcher at Microsoft, said that feature was one of many implemented to let players deal with others griefing their game.

> afk

Micro Adventurer Issue 11

This is just awesome. It is a map of the original Multi-User Dungeon (aka MUD1) published in 1984 in Micro Adventurer #11. What I’d give to have a hard copy of this issue…

> quit

A small gecko takes your hand and rushes you to the departure lounge.

The MUD Coders Guild is a community for people with a passion for creating text-based games. Join us on Slack!