[OrangeBlossomBaby]

I'm opening this thread because it seems to be a topic of interest, in the middle of topics that have nothing to do with it! Me and my big mouth, heh.

I'll paste some folks questions and we can start a new discussion here about it!

[Malsua]

Were you playing muds in the 90s?

Do you remember Illusia?

Did you happen to get in on the Alpha test of the Graphical Mud "The Highlands"?

That was the game that I created. I built the client, my wife and friends built content and we had a team of gods who ran around fixing the world. Another guy dealt with the server but I hosted the game server at my house in NJ! We were using Smaugwiz as a placeholder for the Alpha test.

We had 1500 folks in on the Alpha test and the server crashed frequently. About 3 months later, Everquest launched. We started playing that, lol.

[OrangeBlossomBaby]

Malsua asked:

Were you playing muds in the 90s?

Do you remember Illusia?

Did you happen to get in on the Alpha test of the Graphical Mud "The Highlands"?

That was the game that I created. I built the client, my wife and friends built content and we had a team of gods who ran around fixing the world. Another guy dealt with the server but I hosted the game server at my house in NJ! We were using Smaugwiz as a placeholder for the Alpha test.

We had 1500 folks in on the Alpha test and the server crashed frequently. About 3 months later, Everquest launched. We started playing that, lol.

My first MUDding experience was actually a turn-based game on a telnet-based BBS in 1989. I don't remember anything about it other than it was some kind of dungeons and dragons high-fantasy "I cast magick missile against the darkness" nonsense.

Eventually I found out that Prodigy was a thing, and I got one of their free trials. I went immediately to their new-age chat area and become an online tarot reader. The co-owner of that chat area assigned me to be their file librarian. That netted me free Prodigy service. I got to playing GemstoneIII right after it broke out from its origins, GemstoneII, which was available on GEnie.

I got into Gemstone and even went to one of their "gatherings" in Chicago, and met up with a few fellow gamers at the NY Ren Faire. Gemstone was written primarily in GSL (Gemstone Scripting Language) and they insisted they weren't a MUD (They were, and they still are). At one point, Gemstone had I believe over 7000 players. And then - EverCrack was invented.

GemStone outlived its origins on CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL, and GEnie. They had just been introduced on Prodigy when I started playing, and I continued through to their debut on the WWW. People kept selling their characters and special items for real-life money, and it really degraded what was already not all that great roleplay. I didn't feel like paying anymore for something that was just - not fun anymore. So I went on to another game, Inferno, which was a MOO - and not to be confused with InfernoMud, which was also a MOO, but not the same one.

I ended up being head builder of Inferno for a couple of years, but they were having financial troubles and things went south when they tried charging subscriptions to play. The owners turned the game's management over to one of the other players who had some coding experience, and eventually the game died. It was a great game though, and I really loved the codebase.

I shifted to Armageddon and started playing there around 2002. I became a builder a couple of years ago, and I'm on staff now. Arm started out as stock DIKU, then the original owner named Dan added his own spin to it using DMPL (Dan's Mud Programming Language). Eventually they ended up rewriting pretty much the entire code, turning it into something that has parts that resemble DIKU but is really not DIKU at all anymore. It's got a lot of javascript in it now, something that didn't exist in the 1990's (js started as Mocha in 1995 but wasn't available as an available coding option for game developers until early 2000-2005).

I don't remember Illusia. I've never played any graphical mud at all. The only "graphics" games I've played were the Kings Quest series, Myst (the original), and Kingdom of Loathing, which is a stick-figure browser game.

[Polar Bear]

Prodigy was my very first internet service.

I started out with the Zork games. I got heavily into Everquest. I still think back proudly on my Troll Ranger. A Troll could not become a Ranger unless he completed a long and complex “betrayal quest”. I did and had a very rare character as a result..

My current game is Elder Scrolls Online. Don’t play it that much any more, but still very enjoyable. Anybody else?

[Two Bills]

I had one of the first Binatone tennis games, which was quite 'with it' at the time.
Got bored to death with it, and threw it in the garbage.
Wish I had kept it!
Never played another game, or had any inclination too.
My grandsons are into Minecraft bigtime.

[Tmarkwald]

OMG - Deja Vu!! Hadn't crossed my mind in YEARS!!

[OrangeBlossomBaby]

Originally Posted by Polar Bear

Prodigy was my very first internet service.

I started out with the Zork games. I got heavily into Everquest. I still think back proudly on my Troll Ranger. A Troll could not become a Ranger unless he completed a long and complex “betrayal quest”. I did and had a very rare character as a result..

My current game is Elder Scrolls Online. Don’t play it that much any more, but still very enjoyable. Anybody else?

Somewhere in the original box, in another box, tucked away in my shed or closet, is my Lost Treasures of Infocom. With the 5-1/4" floppy disks (there was a stack of those disks), user guide, and lore pamphlet with hints for some of the quests that involved the player finding clues and maps.

[Windguy]

In the late 1980s, I helped teach MUD coding at TMI (The MUD Institute) for a short while. From there I was recruited by David Bennett (Pinkfish) to help build a new MUD he was starting. It is called Discworld and is based upon the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett. It still exists and I pop in every few years. I created the forest east of Ankh-Morpork. You can read about it here: Discworld MUD - Wikipedia. You can play it here: Discworld Mud.

It was fun, but also frustrating. The MUDLib was undergoing rapid development in the early days and whenever they released a new library, all my code broke and I was spending more time reworking old stuff than creating new game material. I really loved writing the stories and adding silly humor. Check it out if you’re so inclined.

At TMI, we spent a lot of time talking about how to break out of the room-based design to allow free movement in 2-D space. We also tried to figure out how to make it graphical instead of text based, but all we had then were 9600 BAUD modems. About a decade or so later, my nephew told me about a new MMORPG he was playing. It solved both those problems. It’s called World of Warcraft and I’ve been playing it or Rift ever since.

[Taleena]

Played a whole lot of PernMUSH for several years back in the 90s. Was even a god for a while on SouCon MUSH, their sister offshoot. Good old TinyMUSH codebase. Fun times!

[realmoxies]

My wife and I have played, and still play, several MMO's.
Lord of the Rings Online, WOW and tried Elder Scrolls Online as well.

[Funkman]

Just started playing LOTRO last year after being away from those games for awhile (I was a WoW addict)

We have cable at home and it's not bad, how does the connection/lag hold up with the wifi down here?

[GrumpyOldMan]

Originally Posted by Funkman

Just started playing LOTRO last year after being away from those games for awhile (I was a WoW addict)

We have cable at home and it's not bad, how does the connection/lag hold up with the wifi down here?

We use Spectrum and normally get around 20 ms to 30 ms ping times to online games using the supplied WiFi router..

I play HC WoW Classic and have played ESO since the beta. My wife plays retain WoW and has since it first launched.

[Funkman]

Good to know, thanks. I solo most of the time anyway, don't want to be the guy that's responsible for the group going down because of the lag

[OrangeBlossomBaby]

Originally Posted by Funkman

Just started playing LOTRO last year after being away from those games for awhile (I was a WoW addict)

We have cable at home and it's not bad, how does the connection/lag hold up with the wifi down here?

There is no lag with MUDs, because you're basically just using a telnet client to access it. If there's lag, it'd usually be a choke in the network somewhere, or a server issue. Because almost all muds are free, they're usually kept on hosted servers for free, which means a LOT of people are using the same server for a variety of things (usually the host runs a business so he gets to write off the server, and he gives out space on it to hobbyists).

Some muds have horrible connections to their servers. Ours is cloud-based and there's very rarely any lag at all. Downtime is also rare.

[OrangeBlossomBaby]

Originally Posted by Windguy

In the late 1980s, I helped teach MUD coding at TMI (The MUD Institute) for a short while. From there I was recruited by David Bennett (Pinkfish) to help build a new MUD he was starting. It is called Discworld and is based upon the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett. It still exists and I pop in every few years. I created the forest east of Ankh-Morpork. You can read about it here: Discworld MUD - Wikipedia. You can play it here: Discworld Mud.

It was fun, but also frustrating. The MUDLib was undergoing rapid development in the early days and whenever they released a new library, all my code broke and I was spending more time reworking old stuff than creating new game material. I really loved writing the stories and adding silly humor. Check it out if you’re so inclined.

At TMI, we spent a lot of time talking about how to break out of the room-based design to allow free movement in 2-D space. We also tried to figure out how to make it graphical instead of text based, but all we had then were 9600 BAUD modems. About a decade or so later, my nephew told me about a new MMORPG he was playing. It solved both those problems. It’s called World of Warcraft and I’ve been playing it or Rift ever since.

Heh Armageddon competes with Discworld on TopMudSites for placement on their top 10 list all the time.

Completely different themes, I've heard good things about Discworld. Love Terry Pratchett.