No it's not that one. Mordormud.net is the one I played on and my husbands still imms on time to time.

Very novel accurate and even have ascii tengwar and cirth (dwarven runes).

Jamie what do you use as your mud client?

I think that one's a bit smaller but still in the 20,000 to 50,000 range.

@ Celticfox: I am teh oldskoolz and I use a telnet connection because it's what I'm used to and I'm resistant to change.

Ouch that's pretty bad.. even I use gmud .. used to use a cracked version of zmud before that puter crapped out on me.

I don't like gmud. I like my telnet connection. It works. It's in colour. What more do I need?

See I like a few macros, played a healer and made things a bunch easier to grind through the levels with.

Discworld has a very well-developed "alias" command that you can use to set up short commands to trigger more complicated ones.

I know all about those, Mordor has them too. To much of a headache for me. I like my macros.. easier for m to get a handle on.

@Jamiet

That's interesting. I recalculated and my MUD will probably hit 100,000 rooms. I think most MUD that are over 10,000 are classified as big. I certainly will never come near the 1,000,000 mark until computers get a little bit faster.

If you don't mind my asking, what goes into a good MUD? I'm interested in player opinions.

What goes into a good MUD?

I guess that varies from player to player, but for me:

- A reasonable advancement curve so that newbie characters are quickly able to at least do something, but with room for continued advancement for a very long time. Discworld achieves this by having HUGE skill trees.

- Lots to explore (which you've covered)

- A wide variety of quests / missions, at least some of which encourage or even mandate player co-operation.

And:

- A large player base. This is the hardest of all. If I log in to a MUD for the first time and there are less than, say, 20 other players, I get a real sinking feeling.

(That is, less than 20 other players actively logged in at that time)

I have to agree that a large player base does make a huge difference, especially with rp oriented MUDs.

@Jamie

Thank you for your response. I can agree with what you've said, and having an opportunity for newbie players to jump in and actually affect the game is one of the core design principles of what I'm attempting to do. I'm convinced that a lot of people try MUD but then quickly wander off because they either feel that they don't have enough to do or worry that none of their character actions matter.

The player-base issue is certainly one that I recognize. I'm considering setting a target (one year from opening) of having 300 players online for peak events. While 300 players doesn't sound like much, I have several tactics in mind for converging the playerbase with the result that your average player, one who were not deliberately playing a loner, could easily find them-self on a team of fifty other people playing at least some role in the completion (or prevention) of a major quest. In this regard, I think that having 300 players online will be better than 1,000 players if the thousand players are all spread out and pursuing non-related goals.

I'm interested in your opinion of the skill tree issue. I think your point is that you'd like to have enough of a grind that you'll have something to do if you log on at 1:00 AM and feel like hacking/slashing for a couple of hours. Basically some kind of objective, right? The reason why I bring this up is because most RPI MUD will typically only start you off with something like 10 skills. A fully branched character may have something like only twenty skills.

How many skills were you expecting? Even if I stretched (doubled) the amount of skills available to forty, my suspicion is that some players like yourself would still view this as a paltry amount.

My intended way to combat this problem would be to create a wealth of (somewhat meaningful) stuff for your character to accumulate, as well as a reputation system and a multiclassing system. That way, even if you weren't really interested in collecting gratuitous stuff, you could still pursue game activities that would contribute (painstakingly, over time) to your reputation as well as eventually mastering entirely different skill branches.

Comments? Obviously I worry about giving players enough to do.

My question is how are you planning on getting 300 people to play.

Having 300 players online at the same time is actually quite a lot, Al.

As for skills, Discworld MUD is my frame of reference. That has a huge range of skills. The main skills are: Adventuring (a catch-all for anything not covered in the other skills), Covert, Crafts, Faith, Fighting, Magic and People. These then break down into sub-skills each of which breaks down to specific skills.

Taking the Fighting base skill, for example. That splits into Fighting.Melee, Fighting.Range, Fighting.Unarmed, Fighting.Defence, and Fighting.Special.

Fighting.Melee, to continue the example, breaks down into Fighting.Melee.Dagger, Fighting.Melee.Sword, Fighting.Melee.Heavy-Sword, Fighting.Melee.Axe, Fighting.Melee.Mace, Fighting.Melee.Flail, Fighting.Melee.Polearm and Fighting.Melee.Misc.

And so on throughout all the skills...

The Discworld's "taskmaster" system is also something you should take a look at, Al. Basically in Discworld there are two ways of improving your skills. The first way is to spend experience points. But the second way, which is interesting, is by practising. Each time you use a skill there is a tiny chance that your skill will improve (xp free) as you practice. That's a little feature I really like.

@CelticFox

Thanks for asking.

While 300 may indeed seem like a lofty goal, it's sometimes better to set a lofty goal than a moderate goal. Three hundred players online at the same time having fun would certainly be an accomplishment worth celebrating.

How would I plan to achieve this? Slowly and carefully, of course. I'm sure I can count on maybe three of four of our friends here to join as alpha testers, and probably like three or four people from other games as well. Then I can maybe get like two or three of my real life friends to help as well (Mlle. R offered to help last night!!) then that should bring us to ten. If needed I will hire a couple of professional staff to work as coders or testers.

And we as alpha testers will work our butts off, do a good job, and build the sort of game that it would be a *pleasure* to beta test on. At that point, let's suppose that half of our initial alpha testers (five) will remain with the project, and that each person asks ten of our friends to play. And let's assume that half of our friends take us up on that. In my mind, that puts us at That should put us as five alpha testers who will lead and probably supervise a team of twenty-five beta testers. It will be a lot of work to get to this point. There's no point in inviting in beta testers unless the game is already awesome.

And that's where social media kicks in. My belief is that if we craft a truly awesome game and begin to advertise a couple of the unique features of the game, then we can really get the word out there and create a lot of buzz around the game. If half of the game staff makes if half of the staff makes it through beta testing (fifteen), and each of them invites ten friends to opening, and if only half show up, that should put us already at seventy-five players at opening. Which is really quite a lot.

We'll probably loose a lot out of the first batch, but here is where I think we will have an edge over other MUD. Most MUD put a lot of effort into promotion but very little effort into retention. I suggest that we will do the opposite. In my opinion, it's much easier to save an old player than it is to recruit a new player.

Am I missing something?

It will take time. It can easily take a year or more to get ready for opening, and then easily take a couple of years to reach three-hundred players. But I think if we spend most of our effort on player support and building a fun community then the odds will definitely be on our side.

Wanted to update you guys that our coding efforts are now involving something called a "chinese room" reverse engineering effort. Details to follow. Please stay tuned.

Something tells me that reinventing the wheel may be a better approach, but i await your details...

Count me in for beta testing.

What are you writing it in?

I'd be willing to Beta test if need be. Be careful since MUDs are dying due to MMO's. Kids these days just don't appreciate it the same way.

I'll beta the shit out of it.

@orathaic

Oh no, I agree with you. My first step was to do the background reading on the available MUD software. The commercial stuff is never suited to RPI. Of the open source software, I was surprised to find that nothing decent existed for RPI either. Taking some general-purpose open source mud software and re-purposing it for RPI was briefly examined and discounted for the reason that most of it would require significant retooling.

Finally, homebrewing the entire thing was considered as well. But here is the problem. The main advantage of mature software (over new software) is the bug fixes. Most (all?) software contains bugs, and it is the bug fixes that give the software its value.

That established, I realized that most of the existing software was mired in various licensing drama that I found to be prohibitive.

By clean-rooming the entire thing, I will be able to escape any accusations that I am using a derived work. It's silly but that's how the software market is these days. People would rather spend a week arguing with each other on forums about licenses rather than just writing beautiful software. I'm side-stepping that entire possibility. My goal is to make a project that could, potentially at least, run for forty years. I'd like my grand-children to be able to play this game. All of this additional effort is needed not for engineering reasons, simply to satisfy licensing sillyness.

But at the end of this brief struggle, I will be providing the community with a stable, pristine foundation - decent open source video game software that no one will be able to accuse of being a derived work, no matter what happens. My belief is that there are only so many ways to code a telnet daemon, so many ways to process the physics behind a sword-fight, so many ways to structure character movement that my code may end up resembling the structure of other MUD. I want to make sure that everyone can understand that this outcome will be the result of adherence to good design principles rather than deliberate copying.

@abemacht
You are in, my friend. Thank you. Testers happens to be our area of greatest need.

@PSMongoose
I a have chosen the language of development as C. Certain aspects of the game world will be "alive" in the same way as some Bay 12 games are, and so some parts of the world engine will be computationally intensive, at least by the standards of the indie gaming community. Obviously the back-end will be in SQL, some of the web technology will be developed in PHP. It's also possible that the mud engine will contain a script interface for builder's to use, possibly LUA. Thank you for asking.

@Celticfox
Your input would be valuable, as you have experience both playing and staffing other MUD as well.

I did want to point out, that I am not worried so much about recruitment. If this game provides an environment where eight or nine of my friends can meet up twice a month to go whack some orcs, then this is fine. If the group grows to the size of twenty, then even better. If four people are online at the same time and having a good time together, then I will consider the project a success.

You mentioned Graphical MMORPG as a potential competitor, but I see them as a potential recruitment pool. In my opinion, most of the people who are (bored) playing on the RP server of WoW, etc. serve as potential candidates for this game.

Please compare my ambitions to the work of this web game, or perhaps something like Dwarf Fortress. I believe that there are plenty of people who would want to play a tactical exploration game that has a compelling narrative, a creative atmosphere, a fun community and an engrossing, evolving storyline, where where the actual landscape can be transformed by players. Halo will never offer that. Diablo III will never offer that. My game will be more challenging and therefore more rewarding than MMORPG.

And hey, I happen to like Halo and Call of Duty. They're fun every once in a while.