Episode: 3674
Title: HPR3674: Emergency Show posted in 2012. MUD
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3674/hpr3674.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 03:23:20

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,674 for Thursday the 1st of September 2022.
Today's show is entitled Emergency Show Posted in 2012, Mud.
It is hosted by Klaatu and is about 21 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is.
In today's show Klaatu drags us through the mud with his somewhat belated discovery.
My name is Klaatu and in this episode you're about to find out about mud.
So what is mud?
Well muds, plural, I guess, are multi-user dungeons, that's what they are.
Their old school text-based MMORPGs basically.
So if you've ever heard of a little game maybe called, oh I don't know, World of Warcraft,
then you've sort of probably heard of the concept of lots of different people going online,
going into some kind of virtual world together and crafting in this case war.
So before all that stuff, before they had the fancy graphics and the annoying pay-to-play
model and all this other good stuff that they have developed for World of Warcraft and
other such games, they had muds, multi-user dungeons and these were servers that you could
I think traditionally they would be, you would use a client, mud client to log into the
server and you would type in your commands and you would explore different areas of this
virtual environment and frequently they were either dungeons or they were forests or
city, you know, medieval cities and things like that.
So and I'm sure there must have been a lot of variations on them.
Me myself, I found out about muds a long time ago, my friends used to talk about them.
I never really knew what they were talking.
I mean, I knew what they were talking about, but I didn't know what they were talking
about.
And recently one of my friends was saying how she had gone on to her old mud and she
logged into her old mud and it was still an active community and how cool that was that
people were still doing that and I kind of thought it was cool as well.
I thought that was really interesting that someone would still be doing that.
So I decided to finally, finally, finally explore that world myself.
So I looked up the server, the server where this virtual reality exists.
Now, of course, you're going to need special virtual reality goggles in order to log into
these virtual realities.
No, I'm kidding.
Of course, they're text, remember I said that.
The virtual reality that is a multi-user dungeon can actually be accessed via telnet of all
things.
You can actually log in via telnet and play this game, this text-based adventure game in
your terminal.
You can also go online and a lot of the places have in browser Java plugins that you could
use or even a flash plug in.
So there are different ways, different entry paths to this.
But I tried it initially in my terminal, so I telnet it into this place.
It's called ancient anguish, ancient.anguish.org is the site of this particular mud and I've
found out the login information via telnet, how to create a character and all that other
good stuff.
It was a lot of fun, it was like a lot of fun, really a unique experience.
Of course, I'm speaking as always as a non-gamer.
Like I'm not really big into video games, but I do like to talk about them and I like
to pretend like I play them.
So I was playing this and it was just good, clean fun.
You go and you build your character.
If you've ever played an RPG game, then you pretty much know the deal, right?
You start out as a level one, whatever, a ranger, a mage, whatever you choose, a warrior,
whatever.
I think you get to choose your race and there are certain race and class benefits and things
like that.
So you have to do a little bit of research, which if you're at all into D&D or anything
like that, then you already are on board, probably.
You get to actually design your character.
So after you do that, then you wake up in this world and you have to just kind of start
out simple.
I think you begin with maybe a staff possibly or maybe not even that and just close on
your back and you go into the city and meet people and you can go into the woods and
start killing little animals and it's really hilarious because you're sitting there fighting
things like a Blue J or actually Blue J get pretty big, like a little swallow or something
or a little wood rat, but tiny little things and you're fighting them and you're running
away because you're almost, your character's almost dead.
It's not permanent death, you can be resurrected so you don't, it's not too serious, but it's
a lot of fun and it's really cool to be playing this game in text and I guess at one point
that wasn't cool, that was just what people were doing, but now it is cool because it
requires a lot of imagination.
It's almost like the difference between reading one of those books versus watching a movie.
It's like, wow, this is really cool.
I'm reading words and I have to make up my own pictures in my head, isn't that neat?
Well, same kind of thing here, you know, you're reading all this text and the visuals can
be as, well, they can be whatever you want, so it's a great little imagination exercise
if you're feeling like you haven't been working your brain enough.
It's also really handy, you know, for me to have an open terminal to this text-based game
because to the uninitiated, walking by my computer during the day, they see a black
screen with white text scrolling across.
All they know is that, oh, you're doing code, I'm like, yeah, I'm doing code, all right?
And really, I'm fighting like a wood rat trying to boost my XP so that I can go to the
camp and buy a better staff or a better knife or something.
So yeah, it's kind of handy for that because you sure as heck can't sit there and play,
you know, whatever, wow, or whatever the modern sort of online, you know, Minecraft or
whatever people are playing online right now in an sort of an MMO RPG kind of setting.
Can't do that at work and get away with it, whereas, well, it depends on your job, I
guess, but you know, you shouldn't really do it unless you're being paid to do it, I guess.
Well, I mean, do it if you can, but I don't feel like I could do that safely or I don't
feel I could do it and I kind of, I don't know, have respect for myself.
I'd rather be working on fun computer stuff with an open terminal in a mud, you know, just
just for a little bit of downtime. So the terminal experience, the telnet experience was working,
but it wasn't, you know, the the moment you start doing anything on Linux, I think, you're
always kind of looking because you know, you know that you can have anything that you want.
So you, you know, you give yourself like maybe 10 minutes with one program and if it's not
exactly what you're looking for, you're like, yeah, there's a there's a more refined way to do
this. So in the telnet version of of a mud, you the output of of the of the things going on in
the world gets spit right back out into on your telnet prompt. So the output is just like
right there on the same line as where you're trying to put your input. So if you're saying like,
well, you wouldn't say go east, but maybe you're saying like examine or, you know, carve corpse
or something like that, like because if you've killed something, you can skin it and carve it for
meat and fur. So maybe you're saying that, but the minute you say carve and then I don't know,
troll walks buyers, well, troll walks by, you better get out of there, but let's say another
character walks by, then the computer, the server is telling you, you know, oh, this ranger has just
walked by the end, and that that interrupts your command. So that gets really annoying really fast,
especially if a lot of people are online and by a lot, I think I mean probably 20 maybe is the
most I've seen, but I mean, that's pretty respectable. I guess I don't really know. There might be
a lot more than that on on a modern graphical game, but I don't, you know, I mean 20s is this,
that's that's a group of people. So anyway, lots of activity starts to interrupt your commands,
it starts to kind of take away from the gameplay. So I started looking around for a better
client, and I found one, and that's really what made me think to do this episode actually,
because it's, there are a lot of mud clients out there for windows. I couldn't find
a whole lot of them for Linux that were still maintained. There were a couple that were,
that were kind of like historical, and then you could still obtain them, but I think they
need to be kind of brought up to the modern world, because they would, I think there was one
that possibly depended on like GTK1 or something, and it just wouldn't compile. Well, no, it actually
compiled, I think, but then it would never launch for me or something. I don't know. Point is,
I found a nice, basic, but good one called 1010 plus plus. I don't know what the story is behind
that name. I'm assuming there was a 1010 client, and then they rewrote it in C++, I don't know,
but 1010 plus plus, AKA TT plus plus, is a mud client for everything. It'll compile pretty much
on anything, which I believe. Because it's just, when you launch it, it's an interminal kind of
program, and it really reminds me a lot of IRSSI. So if you've ever used IRSSI, which is another one
of those brilliantly modern conventions of interaction online, so IRSSI, IRC, believe me, I come
really late into these technologies. IRC and mud are like really new and exciting to me,
and everyone else I tell it about tell me that that was kind of, that's been and gone. Anyway,
it's got this like line down at the bottom, like a buffer almost, and then you buffer down at
the bottom of the window where you put in your commands, and then everything on top scrolls by
interactively and tells you what's going on inside the world. So there's a separation there,
which is very, very handy. That's 1010 plus plus, you can get it from 1010 TIN, TIN dot source
forge dot net. Very easy to compile, you just download it, and save it somewhere to your hard drive,
and then tar dash xf 1010 dash 2.00 dot 8 dot tar dot gz, or whatever it is, it's pretty close to
that. And then it untars itself, here's a little thing to look out for, it doesn't untar itself as
1010, it untars itself as TT, just TT, that's the director's name, I hate it when things do that to
me, they untar themselves to something completely different, so it starts out as 1010 dash 2.00
dot 8 dot tar dot gz, you untar it, it ends up being TT, so then go into TT, and you'll see a bunch of
files and folders, you can ignore them all, just go CD into SRC, so you're in TT, and then CD to SRC,
and there you will see all the source files, at which point you do a dot slash configure, and it will
configure everything for you, make sure that you've got everything that you need to have, on on
Slackware, it just has everything, so I guess if you are on some other distribution, you'll need
some kind of build environment, obviously like Binyu Tills or something like that, but as long as you
have that, along with PCRE and ZLib, those are both dependencies, but you honestly probably have
both of those things already, although I guess to be fair, maybe you don't, I did, so anyway PCRE,
ZLib, and then everything that you need to install stuff like GCC, automake, things like that,
then you should be fine, so after you've configured it, type in make, to build, to build the thing,
and once it builds, then you can even type in make install, and that copies the TT plus plus
executable to user local bin, and you've just installed TT plus plus, so to start TT plus plus,
you simply type in TT plus plus, but that's not necessarily the best way to start it, the
better way will be to take advantages of the ability of TT plus plus to use scripts. I've not
ever tried to write a script for this, but there's a good example script, a starter script,
in the source code, so if you back out, if you're in SRC right now in the TT directory, back out,
back out one directory, back to the, the beginning of TT, where you see like copying,
and credits, and fact, and install, and read me, and sure enough scripts. So the scripts file,
if you do a less on it, you will see that it's got a bunch of handy little functions almost,
that you can use within the, within your little gaming environment, and in fact, that is one of
the things that TT plus plus allows you to do is create your own aliases that's kind of neat,
so if you've got like, well, for instance, if you're doing something, I'm not a very high level
character yet, so one of the things I'm doing very frequently, plus I'm a ranger, so even if I was
high level, I would be doing this, but one of the things that I'm doing frequently is killing
an animal, carving it for its meat, and then skinning it for its fur, so that's like a three-step
process, and then usually eating the meat. Well, eventually I'll be able to cook the meat once I
get high enough. So it's at least a three-step process, so rather than saying skin animal,
carve animal, gather food, or whatever you say, then you can just alias all those things to
one function, so really basic syntax, look at the script file and you'll see it, but that's not
really why I started talking about scripts, so the script file can also hold a kind of start
command to start a session, so the first line of your script file, if you make it hash ses
for session, except just the first three letters, so hash ses space, and then some name of that session,
so for me I put anguish, because I'm logging into ancient anguish, so call it anguish, you could call it
AA, you could call it mud, you could call it whatever you want to call it, space ancient.anguish.org,
colon, or rather, sorry, space, 2222, because it's on port 2222, so no colon's just spaces, so 2222,
and then semicolon, and then, well eventually, the name of your character, and then semicolon,
the password for your character, don't make this a super secret password that you use anywhere else,
of course, because it is still telling that, so that was hash ses space, some name, space,
the server name, space, the port, semicolon, character name, semicolon, password,
put that at the top of your little script file, and now you can use that command, or that script file,
as the thing that you start along with 1010++, so the command for that would be Tt++,
and then simply the location of that script file, so I called minerun.10, so when I start 1010++,
I simply do, from my game's directory in my home, I do Tt++, and then .slash run.10,
and that starts Tt++ with the session being this ancient anguish session, and it, you know,
logs in, and now you're in a mud, and once you build your character, then you can add, like I say,
the character in your password to that session line, and now you will actually start mud up, logged
in as your character, and you can pretty much just start playing. The playing itself is not what I
would call immediately intuitive, especially if you're new to a mud. I wasn't 100% new to the
concept of text-based adventure games, and it still took me a little while to get used to some
of the conventions and things like that that were involved, so just be prepared for a little bit
of a learning curve, but there are magnificent FAQs online, there are instructions on how to navigate.
There are maps to different dungeons that you can use to navigate your way around, I guess,
hardcore mud players would actually build their own maps on graph paper and things like that,
you know, like build it up themselves, truly explore everything blindly, and that's fine for them.
I'm not hardcore, I just used the FAQ, and I still have a hard time navigating around,
but there are a lot of really neat conventions, like I say you can create aliases,
wizards or mages or whatever they're called in the world, can create portals, so they can kind of
have like little shortcuts from one region to another region, so you don't actually have to traverse
you know 26 tile tiles of forest before you get to this camp or back to this city or whatever, so
lots of things like that, and it's just like in any other game really, I mean it's RPG,
so you've got your non-playable characters that will give you quests or you've got playable
characters that you can talk to, you can make, you can trade, you can make bargains,
you can talk, you can make friends, you can build up your character leveling up and getting
XP and stuff like that just by killing random things or exploring, all kinds of cool things,
you can get a companion, like a pet, like a wolf or a spider or something like that, you can learn
new spells, you can buy stuff, you can go to the bank, put money in there, death takes all
of your money by the way, so that's one downer, you really kind of have to manage your money and
your inventory, and I'm still not 100% clear on how you retain your inventory after you log out,
I keep losing things because I don't stash them first, so mud, it's a cool thing, it's
some, it's gaming from a while ago, but it's still fun now, and it's text-based, and it's
really unique, so you should give it a shot, and 1010 plus plus is the multi-platform client
that makes it all possible, so enjoy, I hope you have enjoyed this trip back into retro gaming,
you have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at HackerPublicRadio.org, today's show was
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