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💾 A consistently inconsistent digest of text-based game development successes, failures, inspiration, news, and anecdotes from the members of The MUD Coders Guild.

Issue 0x0B - B is for BASIC

Zachary Flower

Apr 7, 2019

Greetings, adventurers!

Whelp… it’s been a while. The past six months have been a whirlwind of chaos that forced me into an unexpected hiatus from the guild, however things are starting to calm down now and I am ready to kick things back into gear. With that said, I do want to take a minute and thank my fellow administrators @eric, @swiftausterity, and @trevoke for their steadfast dedication to the community. Despite my absence, they’ve done an amazing job that has resulted in incredible Grapevine growth, a new newsletter (which will be rolled under the Grapevine umbrella), a new game jam, and even a podcast!

Now, without further ado, I’d like to present the next issue of The MUD Coders Guild newsletter!

- Zach

P.S. - Since the last newsletter the world has celebrated a number of holidays and events including, but not limited to, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years, Valentine’s Day, and St. Patrick’s Day (to name a half-dozen), so rather than trying to play catch-up on everything we’ve missed, this issue focuses on more recent developments in order to keep things as relevant as possible.

> notes

Re-Enter the (Multi-User) Dungeon

I’m not sure I can bring the eloquence that was had with last year’s announcement but it’s a year later and we’ve got a new MUDJam. Entry period is straight through the end but the jam officially…

Substrate: noun; an underlying substance or layer

It’s been a while and things have progressed far deeper than I had originally anticipated…

> wiznet

The Grapevine Gazette

The Grapevine Gazette was originally conceived as a replacement of this very newsletter, however with my return we’ve decided to keep the guild newsletter as is and roll out the Grapevine Gazette as a general-purpose MUD newsletter that focuses on the genre as a whole.

Vineyard

In partnership with Grapevine, underneath a new umbrella called Vintner, Vineyard is a new free MUD hosting provider.

Last Outpost MUD: A Review

The Last Outpost has been around for nearly as long as any MUD could have been having gone live in 1992. Given its age it’s no surprise it started life in Diku but it has clearly been improved over…

Covenant MUD: News

Run by one of the members of the guild, The “Covenant” is the name given to the political alliance between the central provinces located on the only explored continent.

Mudlet 3.19 – better dark themes support, more translations

Better dark themes support, more of Mudlet translated for Chinese, German, Russian and Italian, and mapper improvements are all in this update! More

> open source

fantasy-time-crunch

A way of handling time and time-related state changes in a highly customizable way, for use with games and virtual worlds.

Warrens

A c# mvc routing js client text world platform.

dumserver

A modern MU* engine re-imagined, actively developed and properly tracked.

> inventory

How would you design a MUD to run on ephemeral resources?

Super interesting thread about MUD development using non-standard technologies like AWS Lambda. Definitely worth a read, if only for a little inspiration and fascinating outside-the-box thinking.

If I Can Get Everything, Choices Don't Matter

Great article about the importance of impactful player choice. In a nutshell, it’s just hard to care about picking specific perks or abilities when it becomes clear you will get them all.

So Let’s Get Practical

It is no accident that in virtual communities, admins are often titled gods, wizards, and immortals. This is of course an essentially paternalistic structure. One has to ask the very tough question: can an online community ever truly flower if it always has to run to Dad to deal with problems? The reason this is a critical question is because the presence of an all-powerful being is not a philosophical question in a virtual setting. In final analysis, it’s the guy with the ability to flip the power switch on the server.

Amit’s Thoughts on Grids

Grids are commonly used in games for representing playing areas such as maps (the standard room-based design in most MUDs might ring a bell). This is a great article that takes that concept and expands it out into an impressively large number of ways to think about player positioning in a game.

> quit

Character Saved. Thanks for playing!

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