Issue 0x07 - AFK

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Greetings, adventurers!

First things first, I’m sorry for the late delivery on this month’s newsletter. April was a whirlwind of activity and I dropped the ball a little bit, but things are stabilizing and I’m more pumped than ever!

If you’re just joining us, welcome! The Enter the (Multi-User) Dungeon Game Jam has been more successful than I ever imagined! Since the announcement, we’ve been able to break the 100 subscriber mark on the newsletter, the 300 member mark in the Slack community, the 100 follower mark on the official MUD Coders Guild Twitter, and are approaching 60 participants in the jam itself!

While the jam is in full swing, there are still two good weeks left, so if you’re on the fence about participating you still have time! There’s been a ton of amazing discussion and guidance in the #gamejam channel to help out new members and old ones alike, so if you’ve been looking for a reason to make your first MUD, this is it!

- Zach

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> notes

Off the Cliff ep5: Progression – The MUD Coders Guild

Of the numerous Discworld MUD inspired things, the level-less skill tree system has probably had the most impact on my world. As with many things, though, even that has been left behind in the…

Kick out the Jams: ep1

Ok so technically the MUD Coders game jam has been going on for 8 days but it’s been pretty busy here in the midwest for me so I’ve been a bit quiet. This is going to be more of a personal devblog…

> open source

MarkovianEchoes

A Game Jam submission by one of TMCG’s moderators, @swiftausterity.

timekeeper

Keep track of how long your workstation has been running during the day. It updates time in 15 minute increments every time the script is run.

MUD_Advanture

Another Game Jam submission by two new TMCG members, @Jack and @CorporateDoge.

mapbot

A Slack bot that provides tactical map functionality for D&D / Pathfinder play-by-chat.

mudmap2

A mapping tool for text-based games, like text adventures, MUDs and MUSHs.

Space MUD

TMCG veteran @sazzer’s Game Jam entry.

Pymug

Pymug is a Python multi-user game package. It uses pure Python 3, TLS sockets for network communication with clients, and rethinkdb for server-side storage.

slack-term

slack-term is a Slack client for your terminal. Not gonna lie, this thing is pretty damn cool.

> inventory

Tracery

Tracery is a super-simple tool and language to generate text, perfect for the game jam theme!

io language

Io is a programming language focused on expressiveness through simplicity.

FoundationDB is Open Source

FoundationDB is a distributed datastore, designed from the ground up to be deployed on clusters of commodity hardware, and it has just been open sourced.

Raft Consensus Algorithm

Raft is a consensus algorithm that is designed to be easy to understand. It’s equivalent to Paxos in fault-tolerance and performance.

> train int

How does one get started with procedural generation?

Great, and thematic, StackOverflow question about how to get started with procedural generation.

Andre's Blog

Interesting blog series about creating a roguelike in Haskell.

Visually Mapping Gopherspace in 2018

A visual representation of the current state of Gopher Servers in 2018.

A Course About Game Balance - YouTube

In this 2016 GDC session, game designer and educator Ian Schreiber presents a summary of his college-level course in game balance, examining the major topics covered in the syllabus and a set of assignments that can be used to further build balance skills by putting the theory into practice.

Climbing the Leaderboard

Great HackerRank challenge that consumed one of our Slack channels for the better part of a day.

Fred Hebert - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Unexpected

Bugs you know you will happen in production are usually easy to handle since you know about them. The problem is that we, as humans, have limited knowledge and understanding about the problem domains we write programs for and very often about our programs themselves.

Skill-based Mission Generation: A Data-driven Temporal Player Modeling Approach

Games often interweave a story and series of skill-based events into a complete sequence—a mission. An automated mission generator for skill-based games is one way to synthesize designer requirements with player differences to create missions tailored to each player.

Governance in F2P Multiplayer Games - YouTube

In this 2014 GDC talk, Spry Fox’s Daniel Cook explains how to handle players that self-organize into poisonous factions or social structures.

Naomi Clark [暗悪・直美] on Twitter

Great live Tweet of a GDC18 talk about how so many naively-implemented social systems (like say, twitter dot com) are deeply dehumanizing, and that we could do so much better at creating spaces to foster friendship.

> quaff elixir

To spawn, or not to spawn?

That is indeed the question! Whether it is better to keep everything in a single process, or to have a separate process for every piece of state we need to manage?

Looking at ExVenture's Supervision Tree

TMCG member @eric posted a great writeup of walking through the full supervision tree for his game, ExVenture.

The Long Strange Saga of Wolfenstein 3D On The Apple IIGS

Great four-part story about the creation of Wolfenstein 3D on the Apple IIGS. The first looks at Castle Wolfenstein, the game that inspired it all; the second deals with the PC development of Wolfenstein 3D on the PC; the third with the Apple IIGS development; and the fourth with comments about the game itself.

esshd

Simple SSH server for Elixir and Erlang applications.

Riak_Core with Elixir : Part One

How to build a riak_core application using elixir.

ExVenture Updates for April 2018

ExVenture’s April change log. Always a great (and inspiring) read!

The BEAM needs an APL-y language

the BEAM, which already has Prolog-y (Erlang), Algol-y (Elixir) and Lisp-y (LFE) languages needs an APL-y language wut looks like the pic at the top of this post.

> cast 'inspiration'

Legend of the Sourcerer: A Text-based Adventure Game in Ruby

Long before computers could handle fancy 3D graphics, MUDs, or Multi-User Dungeons, were the go-to multiplayer role-playing experience. These games allowed users to interact with a virtual world through text commands. They could explore the land, battle monsters, and even fight other humans in this text-based virtual construct.

3-MOVE

3-MOVE is a multi-user networked online text-based programmable virtual environment.

17 years on the same game

Awesome Hacker News thread, filled with memories and reminiscing about the MUD days of yore.

A Science Fiction Workshop Lexicon: the Paragons Iterarion (1996)

People often ask where science fiction writers get their ideas. They rarely ask where society gets its science fiction writers. In many cases the answer is science fiction workshops.

Dwarf Fortress is giving dwarves memories, managing them like Inside Out

To test it, the developers dropped a boulder on someone’s lover. Nobody asked me, but if they did, I would have said that’s how an AI apocalypse gets started.

C Is Not a Low-level Language

In the wake of the recent Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, it’s worth spending some time looking at root causes. Both of these vulnerabilities involved processors speculatively executing instructions past some kind of access check and allowing the attacker to observe the results via a side channel. The features that led to these vulnerabilities, along with several others, were added to let C programmers continue to believe they were programming in a low-level language, when this hasn’t been the case for decades.

MUD-Dev Archive

Browse the old MUD-Dev newsgroup archive for a blast from the past and, let’s face it, there are no new ideas are there?

> afk

How Mindfulness Actually Works, and Why It Can Change Your Life

It all began in 1972. As a 29-year-old Ph.D. student at Penn State University, he felt that he was struggling for control over his own brain.

QUESTING | Luminous Fridge

The unofficial-official Enter the (Multi-User) Dungeon Game Jam soundtrack!

> quit

‘If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable, what then?’ – George Orwell, '1984’

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