Chapter 1. "What are Virtual Worlds and how did they come about." Translation of Richard Bartle's book “Designing Virtual Worlds”
I invite everyone to join the translation of the book. For the translation of the first chapter, thanks to Lilia Kutueva.
Start here .
Despite the fact that there may be (and there are) more fundamental definitions of this concept, however, Virtual Worlds (VM) always adhere to certain conditions that distinguish them from other related virtual spaces. The most basic will be the following:
Game chat is not VM, because it does not have the specified physical parameters. A wargame strategy does not project a player onto the character he plays. E-mail game does not occur in real time. Playing with a single player is not multiplayer. The world of first-person shooter is unstable.
In some examples, the arguments are not so unambiguous. For example, are desktop RIs virtual worlds? No, because they are not automated, but not far from that. Can an educational MMM of two players be called virtual? Maybe. Will it be the world of the game for 500 players, a world so big that some players may never meet each other? Yes, but this is a controversial issue.
In actual fact, determining whether the world is virtual or not is quite easy - it is enough to verify its origin. If its device is largely written off from the device of an existing VM, it is almost certain to be a VM; if not, then it is almost certainly not him.
')
Virtual worlds are often called MPM (MUD), because MPM was the first VM that was a success. Although earlier worlds were textual and could be defined as VMs, nevertheless, their seeds fell on barren soil. MMM, on the contrary, developed to spawn their seed.
The first MPM was developed in the MACRO-10 assembler program on the DecSystem-10 computer in the fall of 1978 at the University of Essex, England. Its author was a talented graduate of the Faculty of Computational Sciences Roy Trabshaw. The first version was just a test program designed to find out the basic principles on which a multiplayer world can be built. When she earned, Roy immediately took up version II, which was the text VM. To this day, this program remains a model of VM. The second version was also created in the assembler MACRO-10, but this decision led to the fact that as more and more new characteristics appeared, the program became more cumbersome. Therefore, in the fall of 1979, Roy decided to begin work on the third version of the game, which this time he divided into two parts. The game engine was written in BCPL (the predecessor of the C language). And the world of the game itself was written in the language of his own invention - MUDDL (definition language for multiplayer strategy). The idea was that multiplayer worlds could be created in MUDDL, but they would work on one constant engine (which was actually an interpreter program).
By April 1980, Roy already had a basic work program, but this was only a small part of what he planned to do. That year was a graduation year, and he realized that he did not have enough time to complete the project. Needed someone else.
From the very beginning, Roy was always open to suggestions from his friends on how to expand and improve the MUD. Many of these ideas came from his fellow students Richard Bartle (that is, me) and Nigel Roberts. Unlike Nigel, I was younger than Roy and I did not need to graduate from university the following year (in fact, I had to stay there until 1989, first as a graduate student and then as a lecturer). Fortunately, among other things, I was also a first-class programmer and had serious experience in game modeling. Therefore, Roy shifted the creation of MPM (MUD) to my shoulders, and I subsequently wrote the rest of the engine and almost the entire world, so that the result could be what became the paradigm of the whole genre. On this, to your relief, dear readers, I stop bragging and continue.
Roy had two reasons for inventing a MMM (MUD). Firstly, he liked single-player storyline games such as ADVENT Krauter and Woods, ZORK Anderson, Blanca, Daniels and Lebling, HAUNT Laird, and he decided to create a multiplayer game of their type. Secondly, he was seriously engaged in writing programs - parsers and interpreters. And he combined these two programs into one when he discovered the way to share DEC-10 recording memory areas and thought about the possibilities of using them.
In the acronym MUD “D” means “Dungeon” (eng. - “tower, dungeon, dungeon”). Contrary to popular belief, this term has nothing to do with the role-playing game D & D, and does not mean that the game world must have a DnD setting2. On the contrary, the word “Dungeon” appeared in the abbreviation due to the fact that the version of ZORK, which Roy played, was programmed in Fortran and was called DUNGEN3. Roy wanted to create something similar to multiplayer DUNGE (o) N, and he immediately thought of calling the game MUD (MPM).
2 But this does not mean that it may not be.
3 In DEC-10, six-digit file names were used, written in capital letters. Therefore, old admins like me call Dungeon - DUNGEN, and Adventure - ADVENT.
The University of Essex is only 45 minutes walk along a country road from the main research center of British Telecom (before there was a post office) in Martelshem Hif, near Ipswich. This circumstance was the reason that the university was chosen to test a new, experimental electronic packet-switched data transmission system, abbreviated as EPSS (electronic packet-switching service). Among other things, with the help of EPSS it was possible to exchange data with the ARPA network (Advanced Research Project Agency - an agency for promising research projects) located in the United States. Thus, Roy was able to talk about MUM (MUD) with his colleagues from America, and some of them even came to England to try4 this program. As for the ARPA network, over time it has become what we call the Internet today.
4 This fact put an end to not one fake patent application.
However, during its formative years, MUD (MPM) continued to be a phenomenon, mainly of the University of Essex, existing mainly due to the generosity of the Computer Services team and their manager, Charles Bowman. In the intervals between complaints about the wasted funds spent on them, members of the University Computer Society were allowed to spend their free time on scientific research by doing what they wanted. Many chose to play MPM (MUD).
However, some were inspired by the idea to write their games in MUDDL using the MUD engine, and quite a lot of them appeared. The most outstanding games were ROCK (based on the Fraggle Rock puppet show), MIST (original and masterful); BLUD (original and bloody); and UNI (Faculty of Computer Science in the virtual world of Might and Magic).
In addition to EPSS connections, the University of Essex also had several dial-up modems. MUD news reached the ears of a small BBS user community (bulletin board system) from the United Kingdom, and they obtained permission to play MUD through a direct connection. At times they flirted to such an extent that any normal person at this time would have had a tenth dream. And the demand for the game was so great that those who wanted to play had to unite and pick up university for more modems so that you could cope with such a load!
Network coverage has increased and gradually all universities in the United Kingdom have united into a system called JANet (Joint Academic Network). The EPSS from the experimental connection became publicly available PSS (packet switch service - packet switched data transmission system), allowing people who had access to PSS accounts either at work or simply had sufficient money to connect to the university’s computer systems in ever increasing quantities . In 1984-85 articles about MUD appeared in almost all specialized magazines about computer games throughout the UK. The process has begun.
Unfortunately, the MUD engine also had its limitations. He could support no more than 36 players per raz5. With a large number of players, one more game should be started, which would replace the first one. In addition, the engine could only work on the DEC-10 processor. Although copies of the program were sent to other educational institutions in the United Kingdom, Sweden and Norway, nevertheless, only two of them could provide external access - a technical college at Dundee and the University of Oslo.
5 DEC-10 supported the 36-bit encryption of the game world. Roy has registered 1 bit per player for internal reference.
At the same time, as Roy was developing the second version of the MUD, another student at the University of Essex, Stephen Murrell, wrote his own VM from the basics, using a different method of communication between players - using designated devices. His game, PIGG, was also written on MACRO-10 and eventually faced the same exploitation problems as the MUD. Nevertheless, a precedent arose and many external users of the MUD, who were disappointed in it, or, on the contrary, inspired by them, had an idea to write their own games.
And the first such VMs were the Shades of Neil Newell, Gods Ben Laurie, and AMP6. Behind them appeared the active Mirror World of Pipa Kordri and Co. And since all these games are descended from MPM (MUD), they were called so. True, sometimes they were also called MUG (MPI - multiplayer game).
Now the original MUD was dubbed MUD1 (although at that time it already existed in the third version) in order to distinguish it from the rest of the MPM class. This was the beginning of the Second Age of the VM.
6 Unfortunately, I only once came across a married couple who stood behind the creation of AMP, and no longer remember their names. I do not think that I was also interested in them, which means abbreviation AMP.
The opportunity to make money on such games grew, so that MUD1 began to function both on CompuServe, the main Internet service of the United States of that time, and on a similar service of the United Kingdom, CompuNet. One of the CompuNet programmers, Alan Lenton, even moved to write his own VM, Federation II, whose difference was that he was the first MMM with a sci-fi setting.
MUD1, Federation II, Shades (in the Prestel Micronet teletext system) and Gods (in German translation) continued to gain commercial success. Other MMM, written by the Big Four players, were successful in the United Kingdom. It was a time of great research, both in the field of creating game worlds, and in the field of engine development. Moreover, the main work in this direction was carried out by the Mirror World Group company on the IOWA system 7 (Input / Output World of Adventure - the world of adventures as a data exchange system).
7 This study period can be compared with the early stage of the creation of computer games, although they happened at different times.
At about the same time, the decision came to rewrite MUD1 as MUD2 (in fact, it was version 4). By that time, the original architecture and the DEC-10 MUD1 platform proved its limitations, and the MUDDL language (which borrowed a lot from the database definition scheme used by ADVENT) was not powerful enough to work with advanced ideas. Therefore, specifically for writing MMM, a new language was developed from the very foundations, - MUDDLE (Multi-User Dungeon Definition LanguagE - a language of definitions of multiplayer strategy). It turned out to be expressive enough to withstand the test of time, and thus the MPM (MUD) was then completely rewritten for the last time.
In fact, almost all the main issues of creating virtual worlds were solved in the first and second eras. For example, by 1987, all protocols and in-game tools for resolving problems encountered by players were already fairly and systematized. All this was made possible through the efforts of pioneers such as Mark Longley (MUD1), Michael Laurie (MIST), and Pip Cordy (Mirror World). Unfortunately, this language has not reached us in its original form.
Developers of later games, as a rule, knew what should be, but they did not always have an idea why it should be so and not otherwise. As a result, after several generations, a number of fundamental principles were lost.
Therefore, game developers who were running 10 years later had to re-discover everything from their own experience.
Most of the MMMs written in the Second Age were designed by individual enthusiasts at home8. At the same time (though not for long), multiplayer text adventure games have become a very important part of the computer games market, so there are plenty of people who understand the basic principles of game design. But since few scientific institutions in the United Kingdom were as liberal in relation to their computer capabilities as the University of Essex, IYL, written by the lonely local people, were able to achieve only limited recognition.
8 A full and comprehensive study on this topic can be found here: www.mud.co.uk/richard/imucg.htm
The exception to this rule was the AberMPM (AberMUD), so named because it was written at the University of Wales (Aberystwyth). The developer of this game, Alan Cox, wrote it in 1987 in the language “B” (another predecessor of the “C”) for the Honeywell L66 computer, under the GCOS3 operating system with support for TSS multitasking. A year later, AberMPM was translated into the language "C", which was a turning point in the history of the VM. Although the game was not particularly advanced technologically or in terms of content (it was focused mainly on battles), but it was a great pleasure. Moreover, being rewritten in the “C” language, the game was a huge step forward: now AberMPM worked in the Unix program.
AberMUD has spread to computer science departments like a virus. His copies appeared on thousands of computers running on Unix. One after another followed by four versions of AberMUD, simultaneously creating several imitators. The most significant were three: TinyMUD, LPMUD, and DikuMUD.
The game TinyMUD, authored by Jim Asines of Carnegie Mellon University, was released in 1989. Its main predecessors were AberMUD and “Monster” (for VAX computers with VMS support), released a year earlier. “Monster” (created by Rich Scrant from Northwestern University) is unusual in that this game was written independently of the main standard MUD1. Her main innovation was the ability to create elements of the virtual world from within him. However, when moving from the second version to the third, this ability was removed from MUD1.
Initially, TinyMUD was a trimmed version of “Monster”. It was a virtual world, but, in fact, non-fictional. Players were able to create new locations and objects (with limited functionality) almost seamlessly. And while MUD1 and AberMUD boasted only 400-500 autonomous locations, the popular 1990 TinyMUD copy called “Islandia” contained more than 14,000 locations in the few months of its existence.
The absence of a game action in TinyMUD meant that the players were mainly engaged in the creation of various items and talking about the created. And although it was not the best predominantly “social” VM (the more fascinating “Void” world 9 of Clive Lindus went around it in a few months), TinyMUD became the VM from which, in fact, all subsequent similar worlds came. TinyMUD was designed precisely to get away from the hack-and-slash style that prevailed in AberMud. In addition, it was believed that the letter “D” in the title means, rather, “dimension” (English “dimension”) or “Domain” (English “domain”), rather than “Dungeon” (English “dungeon, tower” ), which was the main reason for the future differences between the MUD and MU * a few years later.
9 Over the years, its name was “Void”, “The Void”, “Vortex”, but the essence remained the same. “Void”, by its nature, is more intended for an adult audience, and the first such VM - The Zone served as a prototype for it.
LPMUD was named after its author, Lars Pensjo, of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Having played enough in both AberMUD and TinyMUD, he decided to create his own game that would contain elements of the adventures of the first world and at the same time enhanced user capabilities of the second. While most developers were arrogantly convinced that players were unable to create such worlds as they create, Lars was convinced of the opposite - that players can construct virtual worlds better than himself. To this end, he developed an in-game programming language (Linear Predictive Coding - Linear Prediction Coding), which allowed players with the necessary experience to add in the course of action not only individual objects, but also powerful functionality of the game itself.
This was an important achievement that introduced many people to the world of programming, in contrast to traditional academic courses that simply blew up the brain. The LPC language has been developed so carefully that it is still used.
DikuMUD was designed in the computer science department at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and was released in 1990. It was sponsored by a group of friends: Katya Nyboe, Tom Madsen, Hans Henrik Sterfeldt, Michael Seifert and Sebastian Hammer. This VM was only intended as an improved version of AberMUD, and it had nothing to do with either TinyMud or LPMUD. And while the last two games in their development came to the ability to allow to make operational changes in the VM, the DikuMUD developers went the exact opposite way and rigidly programmed everything that was possible.
Nevertheless, they turned out to be very good programmers: DikuMUD was already launched “ready-made” and was well organized inside. An experienced C programmer could easily rewrite the original DikuMud code and create his own new world, or replace the existing databases and create as if another world. Many have done so.
As a result, several basic code bases (excluding the MUD software package) were created based on the original DikuMUD sample. Among them, the first MPM were Circle, Silly and Merc. Merc, among other things, spawned ROM (Rivers of MUD) and Envy, who, in turn, had their offspring. All the abovementioned - and continues to be - a dizzying number of sub-versions.
LPMUD, by contrast, did not contribute to the emergence of such a number of descendants, because the LPC language was versatile enough to allow people to write their own games without forcing them to rewrite the game engine. And although many LPMUDs are focused on the martial arts, strictly speaking, they are not obliged to be such (as opposed to DikuMUDs) 10.
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Start here .
Despite the fact that there may be (and there are) more fundamental definitions of this concept, however, Virtual Worlds (VM) always adhere to certain conditions that distinguish them from other related virtual spaces. The most basic will be the following:- The basis of the VM are the basic automated rules that encourage players to make changes in it (however, they cannot change the rules themselves, which give them the opportunity). These are the physical basics of VM.
- Players play their characters "inside" the world. They may have partial or full influence on the army, team or group of people, but in this world there is only one game essence, with which they are represented and with which they are firmly connected - this is their character. Therefore, all interactions with the world and other players are mediated by this character.
- Interaction with the world is carried out in real time. Accordingly, when you do something in it, you can expect an immediate response.
- This world is multiplayer.
- This world is stable (at least to some extent).
Game chat is not VM, because it does not have the specified physical parameters. A wargame strategy does not project a player onto the character he plays. E-mail game does not occur in real time. Playing with a single player is not multiplayer. The world of first-person shooter is unstable.
In some examples, the arguments are not so unambiguous. For example, are desktop RIs virtual worlds? No, because they are not automated, but not far from that. Can an educational MMM of two players be called virtual? Maybe. Will it be the world of the game for 500 players, a world so big that some players may never meet each other? Yes, but this is a controversial issue.
In actual fact, determining whether the world is virtual or not is quite easy - it is enough to verify its origin. If its device is largely written off from the device of an existing VM, it is almost certain to be a VM; if not, then it is almost certainly not him.
The first era - 1978-1985
')
Virtual worlds are often called MPM (MUD), because MPM was the first VM that was a success. Although earlier worlds were textual and could be defined as VMs, nevertheless, their seeds fell on barren soil. MMM, on the contrary, developed to spawn their seed.
The first MPM was developed in the MACRO-10 assembler program on the DecSystem-10 computer in the fall of 1978 at the University of Essex, England. Its author was a talented graduate of the Faculty of Computational Sciences Roy Trabshaw. The first version was just a test program designed to find out the basic principles on which a multiplayer world can be built. When she earned, Roy immediately took up version II, which was the text VM. To this day, this program remains a model of VM. The second version was also created in the assembler MACRO-10, but this decision led to the fact that as more and more new characteristics appeared, the program became more cumbersome. Therefore, in the fall of 1979, Roy decided to begin work on the third version of the game, which this time he divided into two parts. The game engine was written in BCPL (the predecessor of the C language). And the world of the game itself was written in the language of his own invention - MUDDL (definition language for multiplayer strategy). The idea was that multiplayer worlds could be created in MUDDL, but they would work on one constant engine (which was actually an interpreter program).
By April 1980, Roy already had a basic work program, but this was only a small part of what he planned to do. That year was a graduation year, and he realized that he did not have enough time to complete the project. Needed someone else.
From the very beginning, Roy was always open to suggestions from his friends on how to expand and improve the MUD. Many of these ideas came from his fellow students Richard Bartle (that is, me) and Nigel Roberts. Unlike Nigel, I was younger than Roy and I did not need to graduate from university the following year (in fact, I had to stay there until 1989, first as a graduate student and then as a lecturer). Fortunately, among other things, I was also a first-class programmer and had serious experience in game modeling. Therefore, Roy shifted the creation of MPM (MUD) to my shoulders, and I subsequently wrote the rest of the engine and almost the entire world, so that the result could be what became the paradigm of the whole genre. On this, to your relief, dear readers, I stop bragging and continue.
Roy had two reasons for inventing a MMM (MUD). Firstly, he liked single-player storyline games such as ADVENT Krauter and Woods, ZORK Anderson, Blanca, Daniels and Lebling, HAUNT Laird, and he decided to create a multiplayer game of their type. Secondly, he was seriously engaged in writing programs - parsers and interpreters. And he combined these two programs into one when he discovered the way to share DEC-10 recording memory areas and thought about the possibilities of using them.
In the acronym MUD “D” means “Dungeon” (eng. - “tower, dungeon, dungeon”). Contrary to popular belief, this term has nothing to do with the role-playing game D & D, and does not mean that the game world must have a DnD setting2. On the contrary, the word “Dungeon” appeared in the abbreviation due to the fact that the version of ZORK, which Roy played, was programmed in Fortran and was called DUNGEN3. Roy wanted to create something similar to multiplayer DUNGE (o) N, and he immediately thought of calling the game MUD (MPM).
2 But this does not mean that it may not be.
3 In DEC-10, six-digit file names were used, written in capital letters. Therefore, old admins like me call Dungeon - DUNGEN, and Adventure - ADVENT.
The University of Essex is only 45 minutes walk along a country road from the main research center of British Telecom (before there was a post office) in Martelshem Hif, near Ipswich. This circumstance was the reason that the university was chosen to test a new, experimental electronic packet-switched data transmission system, abbreviated as EPSS (electronic packet-switching service). Among other things, with the help of EPSS it was possible to exchange data with the ARPA network (Advanced Research Project Agency - an agency for promising research projects) located in the United States. Thus, Roy was able to talk about MUM (MUD) with his colleagues from America, and some of them even came to England to try4 this program. As for the ARPA network, over time it has become what we call the Internet today.
4 This fact put an end to not one fake patent application.
However, during its formative years, MUD (MPM) continued to be a phenomenon, mainly of the University of Essex, existing mainly due to the generosity of the Computer Services team and their manager, Charles Bowman. In the intervals between complaints about the wasted funds spent on them, members of the University Computer Society were allowed to spend their free time on scientific research by doing what they wanted. Many chose to play MPM (MUD).
However, some were inspired by the idea to write their games in MUDDL using the MUD engine, and quite a lot of them appeared. The most outstanding games were ROCK (based on the Fraggle Rock puppet show), MIST (original and masterful); BLUD (original and bloody); and UNI (Faculty of Computer Science in the virtual world of Might and Magic).
In addition to EPSS connections, the University of Essex also had several dial-up modems. MUD news reached the ears of a small BBS user community (bulletin board system) from the United Kingdom, and they obtained permission to play MUD through a direct connection. At times they flirted to such an extent that any normal person at this time would have had a tenth dream. And the demand for the game was so great that those who wanted to play had to unite and pick up university for more modems so that you could cope with such a load!
Network coverage has increased and gradually all universities in the United Kingdom have united into a system called JANet (Joint Academic Network). The EPSS from the experimental connection became publicly available PSS (packet switch service - packet switched data transmission system), allowing people who had access to PSS accounts either at work or simply had sufficient money to connect to the university’s computer systems in ever increasing quantities . In 1984-85 articles about MUD appeared in almost all specialized magazines about computer games throughout the UK. The process has begun.
Unfortunately, the MUD engine also had its limitations. He could support no more than 36 players per raz5. With a large number of players, one more game should be started, which would replace the first one. In addition, the engine could only work on the DEC-10 processor. Although copies of the program were sent to other educational institutions in the United Kingdom, Sweden and Norway, nevertheless, only two of them could provide external access - a technical college at Dundee and the University of Oslo.
5 DEC-10 supported the 36-bit encryption of the game world. Roy has registered 1 bit per player for internal reference.
At the same time, as Roy was developing the second version of the MUD, another student at the University of Essex, Stephen Murrell, wrote his own VM from the basics, using a different method of communication between players - using designated devices. His game, PIGG, was also written on MACRO-10 and eventually faced the same exploitation problems as the MUD. Nevertheless, a precedent arose and many external users of the MUD, who were disappointed in it, or, on the contrary, inspired by them, had an idea to write their own games.
II Second Age (1985-1989)
And the first such VMs were the Shades of Neil Newell, Gods Ben Laurie, and AMP6. Behind them appeared the active Mirror World of Pipa Kordri and Co. And since all these games are descended from MPM (MUD), they were called so. True, sometimes they were also called MUG (MPI - multiplayer game).
Now the original MUD was dubbed MUD1 (although at that time it already existed in the third version) in order to distinguish it from the rest of the MPM class. This was the beginning of the Second Age of the VM.
6 Unfortunately, I only once came across a married couple who stood behind the creation of AMP, and no longer remember their names. I do not think that I was also interested in them, which means abbreviation AMP.
The opportunity to make money on such games grew, so that MUD1 began to function both on CompuServe, the main Internet service of the United States of that time, and on a similar service of the United Kingdom, CompuNet. One of the CompuNet programmers, Alan Lenton, even moved to write his own VM, Federation II, whose difference was that he was the first MMM with a sci-fi setting.
MUD1, Federation II, Shades (in the Prestel Micronet teletext system) and Gods (in German translation) continued to gain commercial success. Other MMM, written by the Big Four players, were successful in the United Kingdom. It was a time of great research, both in the field of creating game worlds, and in the field of engine development. Moreover, the main work in this direction was carried out by the Mirror World Group company on the IOWA system 7 (Input / Output World of Adventure - the world of adventures as a data exchange system).
7 This study period can be compared with the early stage of the creation of computer games, although they happened at different times.
At about the same time, the decision came to rewrite MUD1 as MUD2 (in fact, it was version 4). By that time, the original architecture and the DEC-10 MUD1 platform proved its limitations, and the MUDDL language (which borrowed a lot from the database definition scheme used by ADVENT) was not powerful enough to work with advanced ideas. Therefore, specifically for writing MMM, a new language was developed from the very foundations, - MUDDLE (Multi-User Dungeon Definition LanguagE - a language of definitions of multiplayer strategy). It turned out to be expressive enough to withstand the test of time, and thus the MPM (MUD) was then completely rewritten for the last time.
In fact, almost all the main issues of creating virtual worlds were solved in the first and second eras. For example, by 1987, all protocols and in-game tools for resolving problems encountered by players were already fairly and systematized. All this was made possible through the efforts of pioneers such as Mark Longley (MUD1), Michael Laurie (MIST), and Pip Cordy (Mirror World). Unfortunately, this language has not reached us in its original form.
Developers of later games, as a rule, knew what should be, but they did not always have an idea why it should be so and not otherwise. As a result, after several generations, a number of fundamental principles were lost.
Therefore, game developers who were running 10 years later had to re-discover everything from their own experience.
Most of the MMMs written in the Second Age were designed by individual enthusiasts at home8. At the same time (though not for long), multiplayer text adventure games have become a very important part of the computer games market, so there are plenty of people who understand the basic principles of game design. But since few scientific institutions in the United Kingdom were as liberal in relation to their computer capabilities as the University of Essex, IYL, written by the lonely local people, were able to achieve only limited recognition.
8 A full and comprehensive study on this topic can be found here: www.mud.co.uk/richard/imucg.htm
The exception to this rule was the AberMPM (AberMUD), so named because it was written at the University of Wales (Aberystwyth). The developer of this game, Alan Cox, wrote it in 1987 in the language “B” (another predecessor of the “C”) for the Honeywell L66 computer, under the GCOS3 operating system with support for TSS multitasking. A year later, AberMPM was translated into the language "C", which was a turning point in the history of the VM. Although the game was not particularly advanced technologically or in terms of content (it was focused mainly on battles), but it was a great pleasure. Moreover, being rewritten in the “C” language, the game was a huge step forward: now AberMPM worked in the Unix program.
Third Age: 1989-1995
AberMUD has spread to computer science departments like a virus. His copies appeared on thousands of computers running on Unix. One after another followed by four versions of AberMUD, simultaneously creating several imitators. The most significant were three: TinyMUD, LPMUD, and DikuMUD.
The game TinyMUD, authored by Jim Asines of Carnegie Mellon University, was released in 1989. Its main predecessors were AberMUD and “Monster” (for VAX computers with VMS support), released a year earlier. “Monster” (created by Rich Scrant from Northwestern University) is unusual in that this game was written independently of the main standard MUD1. Her main innovation was the ability to create elements of the virtual world from within him. However, when moving from the second version to the third, this ability was removed from MUD1.
Initially, TinyMUD was a trimmed version of “Monster”. It was a virtual world, but, in fact, non-fictional. Players were able to create new locations and objects (with limited functionality) almost seamlessly. And while MUD1 and AberMUD boasted only 400-500 autonomous locations, the popular 1990 TinyMUD copy called “Islandia” contained more than 14,000 locations in the few months of its existence.
The absence of a game action in TinyMUD meant that the players were mainly engaged in the creation of various items and talking about the created. And although it was not the best predominantly “social” VM (the more fascinating “Void” world 9 of Clive Lindus went around it in a few months), TinyMUD became the VM from which, in fact, all subsequent similar worlds came. TinyMUD was designed precisely to get away from the hack-and-slash style that prevailed in AberMud. In addition, it was believed that the letter “D” in the title means, rather, “dimension” (English “dimension”) or “Domain” (English “domain”), rather than “Dungeon” (English “dungeon, tower” ), which was the main reason for the future differences between the MUD and MU * a few years later.
9 Over the years, its name was “Void”, “The Void”, “Vortex”, but the essence remained the same. “Void”, by its nature, is more intended for an adult audience, and the first such VM - The Zone served as a prototype for it.
LPMUD was named after its author, Lars Pensjo, of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Having played enough in both AberMUD and TinyMUD, he decided to create his own game that would contain elements of the adventures of the first world and at the same time enhanced user capabilities of the second. While most developers were arrogantly convinced that players were unable to create such worlds as they create, Lars was convinced of the opposite - that players can construct virtual worlds better than himself. To this end, he developed an in-game programming language (Linear Predictive Coding - Linear Prediction Coding), which allowed players with the necessary experience to add in the course of action not only individual objects, but also powerful functionality of the game itself.
This was an important achievement that introduced many people to the world of programming, in contrast to traditional academic courses that simply blew up the brain. The LPC language has been developed so carefully that it is still used.
DikuMUD was designed in the computer science department at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and was released in 1990. It was sponsored by a group of friends: Katya Nyboe, Tom Madsen, Hans Henrik Sterfeldt, Michael Seifert and Sebastian Hammer. This VM was only intended as an improved version of AberMUD, and it had nothing to do with either TinyMud or LPMUD. And while the last two games in their development came to the ability to allow to make operational changes in the VM, the DikuMUD developers went the exact opposite way and rigidly programmed everything that was possible.
Nevertheless, they turned out to be very good programmers: DikuMUD was already launched “ready-made” and was well organized inside. An experienced C programmer could easily rewrite the original DikuMud code and create his own new world, or replace the existing databases and create as if another world. Many have done so.
As a result, several basic code bases (excluding the MUD software package) were created based on the original DikuMUD sample. Among them, the first MPM were Circle, Silly and Merc. Merc, among other things, spawned ROM (Rivers of MUD) and Envy, who, in turn, had their offspring. All the abovementioned - and continues to be - a dizzying number of sub-versions.
LPMUD, by contrast, did not contribute to the emergence of such a number of descendants, because the LPC language was versatile enough to allow people to write their own games without forcing them to rewrite the game engine. And although many LPMUDs are focused on the martial arts, strictly speaking, they are not obliged to be such (as opposed to DikuMUDs) 10.
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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/264469/
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