WolfMUD: World of Living Fantasy

Year was 1995. I was a 15 year old kid who discovered Diku muds. CircleMUD to be specific. My life revolved around building MUDs and PC gaming. My family bought a Pentium 133, it cost my family a fortune and we were not well off. I got good at C and Linux, went off to work in 1999 after almost not graduating high school. The rest is history. I owe so much to MUDs, which lit my brain on fire and led me to a life I never could have dreamed of. MUDs still exist, you can still build them and they are as much fun now as they ever were. Give it a shot :)

It would be really interesting to see what&#x27;s possible taking one of the more advanced&#x2F;featureful MUD engines and combining them somehow with LLM text generation (especially text-davinci-003 from OpenAI since its so human-like).<p>I guess AI Dungeon is attempting something a bit like that. But what I am thinking is keeping the core as the MUD, which will ensure that game state and things stay consistent. Then having the AI generate things based on this core state fed as part of each prompt, to add a bit of variety to descriptions, or allow NPCs to have conversations. But always anchored by the world state tracked by the MUD. Except maybe for some random encounters inserted here and there.<p>That&#x27;s the biggest issue with AI Dungeon is that it tends to not quite track whats going on properly from one sentence&#x2F;paragraph to the next. Although they have improved it recently.

I was born in 1995. I love reading stories like this about the early days of software. My heart yearns for that time. Wish I was there, but accounts like these are the next best thing.

MUDs (specifically Achaea) got me from hunt-and-peck to competent typist. Not even Mario Teaches Typing could manage that.

I have been playing a MUD sporadically for almost 25 years. It&#x27;s desolate now which is sad. However, someone occassionaly logs on from years ago and it&#x27;s great fun.<p>MUDs were my first exposure to a C-like language (LPC) and are where I learned to program to a reasonable standard. I still remember a CS major helping me learn recursion when I was still in high school.

Is it possible to play it on-line? I downloaded the sever and it works fine and I can telnet it locally but looks like I can&#x27;t telnet to wolfmud.org (tried the default port).

I love these class of games, especially the MUSHes. It&#x27;s weird how there&#x27;s not really an equivalent to &#x27;shared world that&#x27;s user-scriptable by its players&#x27; in the modern gaming ecosystem. Closest would probably be something like Roblox but even that&#x27;s really just a pale echo of what a lot of these text games would let you do as a player-creator.

This is great, I discovered MUDs around 1995 and even tried to write my own in Perl. The real-time interaction with other characters that we take for granted now seemed revolutionary back then.

Am I the only one that thought this was going to be about a Wolfenstein 3D MUD?<p>Anyway, I loved playing the Dune MUD in 1997-1998 in my first years at university.

It&#x27;s crazy to think I&#x27;ve been (fairly consistently) playing MUDs for 29 years now...

Man I miss MUDs. Anyone here ever play RockyMUD? I had literally over a <i>year</i> of actual pay time in that one. My accrued hours of play surpassed a year. That is with like a decade of playing though. But still lol