
Exploring 3-Move – A LambdaMOO inspired environment - tonyg
https://bluishcoder.co.nz/2017/04/09/exploring-3-move-a-lambdamoo-inspired-environment.html
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cmrdporcupine
I could say a lot about this topic, but I'll try to keep it brief.

There were a number of similar "post-LambdaMOO" systems built in the mid to
late 90s, and early 2000s. I wrote something of my own during a year long bout
of .com crash unemployment 2001ish time frame. But before that there was
"coolmud" [written by Stephen White who wrote the original MOO before Pavel
Curtis adopted it and created LambdaMOO] and then Greg Hudson's "coldmud",
which spawned "Genesis", a few other projects, and the thing I was working on
but never finished.

Basically they were attempts to generalize the "extensible object oriented
network service" side of MOO beyond the 'game' or 'chat' oriented of LambdaMOO
and to fix some technical weaknesses that LambdaMOO had.

IMHO these types of architectures/systems were sort of an alternative path for
how the internet could have developed if the web and HTTP based architectures
hadn't taken over and defined how we think about what the Internet is. (For
people who didn't use the Internet prior to the existence of the web it's hard
to imagine that, I know.)

I think the combination of prototype oriented object systems plus multi-users
plus networking plus group-authoring plus socializing is something that still
hasn't been realized to the depth that these systems had, even if they were
hobbled by their lack of multimedia capability.

I believe there were similar efforts on the LPC/LPmud side of things, but
there were some differences in philosophy there.

LambdaMOO itself lives on and gets some ongoing development here and there.

~~~
indigochill
Can you expand (or point to a resource that expands) on the "internet as
extensible object oriented network service" concept? I'm having difficulty
grasping what the key differences between that and the HTTP approach look
like.

My understanding of HTTP is essentially "send request with resource locator to
server, receive response usually with document" which seems at face value
similar to "send message to object, receive message back".

~~~
cmrdporcupine
Well, before the development of fat Javascript heavy AJAXy type apps, with
websockets, webrtc, etc. the difference was more marked.

A huge difference in granularity, at least. But also a conceptual one. In MOO
type worlds the 'physical' objects one 'sees' in the [textual] 'world' are
directly associated with programmatic objects (w/ prototypical inheritance but
nicer IMHO than Javascript's).

And the environment was such that any MOO user could author -- by creating
objects [cloning prototypes] and -- if they had programmer permissions -- by
adding "verbs" (methods) to those objects.

And code written in the language was well sandboxed with decent permissions
systems and a runtime that enforced good behaviour on programs. Tho in the
early days of LambdaMOO it was somewhat easy to DOS the system, that got
fixed.

Authoring was easy, barrier to entry low, but there was a consistent metaphor:
users in adventure-game-like rooms, with objects that could be manipulated
through English-like commands, and a descriptive narrative applied throughout.

I can't help but think this would all be much cooler in this day and age with
the arrival of robust natural language parsing, 'augmented reality', and so
on.

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doublec
If you don't make it to the end of the article, there's a server running on
bluishcoder.co.nz, port 7777:

    
    
        nc bluishcoder.co.nz 7777
    

or with SSL:

    
    
        openssl s_client -connect bluishcoder.co.nz:7778

~~~
daveloyall
Down at the moment.

~~~
tonyg
It's back now!

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pmiller2
Upvoted for LambdaMoo, even though I was more of an LPMUD guy. :) LPMUD was
the first environment I programmed in for an extended period outside of a
course, and it taught me a lot.

~~~
trengrj
I was an LPMUD guy too. I found once I got used to its verb syntax it was hard
for me to switch codebases to something like a MOO.

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Diederich
I've been off and on playing a DIKU-based MUD
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DikuMUD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DikuMUD)
called MUME (Multi Users in Middle Earth) since the early 90s:

[http://mume.org/](http://mume.org/)

telnet mume.org 4242

This is an amazing place; it's sort of like actually playing inside the Lord
of the Rings books. The world is enormous and gorgeous. It's designed to be
player vs. player (one side are the good races, like Humans, Elves and
Hobbits, the other side are the evil races, such as Orcs and Trolls.)

However, evil players rarely make it west of Bree. The Shire is a big and safe
Player vs. Environment area.

Here's the current global map of zones:

[https://www.realms.org/mume_map.txt](https://www.realms.org/mume_map.txt)

The B is Bree, R is Rivendell and the Ms are Moria.

~~~
zellyn
I clicked through to your map link, expecting something massive, sprawling,
and Tolkeinesque. In retrospect, what I got was what I should have expected.
Also, makes me grin: so perfectly typically MUD. :-)

~~~
Diederich
Hah! Well said.

You need to create a character and login to the world and start walking around
to enjoy the 'goodness' I described.

It's not conducive to a rapid 'check this thing out' kind of look.

~~~
zellyn
Yeah, I used to mud/moo back in the day (1994-1998 probably, since that's when
I was at school), but apart from infrequent ifcomp-inspired excursions, I
haven't tried any lately.

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grogenaut
Damn, just spent 20 minutes trying to figure out how to reset my password. I
think this would be one of my oldest accounts.

FYI: Connect info:

telnet lambda.moo.mud.org 8888

~~~
pmiller2
Most of the old MOO/MUDs didn't have password reset functionality, IIRC. The
best you could do is try and convince an admin to do it. I know my MUD of
choice didn't require an email address.

