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 Klottu and is about 21 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is.
In today's show Klottu drags us through the mud with his somewhat belated discovery.
My name is Klottu and in this episode you're about to find out about Mud.
So what is Mud?
Well Mud's plural really I guess are multi-user dungeons, that's what they are.
They're old school text-based MMO RPGs basically.
So if you've ever heard of a little game, maybe called a 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 paid
a play model and all this other good stuff that they have developed for World of Warcraft
and other such games, they had Mud's 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 Mud 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, 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.
Now I'm kidding, of course, they're text, remember I said that.
You know, the virtual reality that is a multi-user dungeon can actually be accessed via
Telnet of all 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 like 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 dot 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.
And 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, it was good clean fun, you go and you build your
character.
You know, 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 range or a mage, whatever you choose, the warrior,
whatever.
I think you get to choose your race and there's certain race and class benefits and things
like that.
So you kind of 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 know, 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, you know, you, I think you're, you begin with maybe a staff possibly or maybe
not even that and just, you know, the clothes on your back and you go into the city
and meet people, then you can go into like the woods and start killing little animals
and it's really hilarious because you're sitting there fighting things like a blue
jay or actually blue jay is getting pretty big, like a little swallow or something or
a little wood rat, you know, I mean, there's a tiny little things and you're fighting
them and you're like running away because you're almost, you're your characters almost
dead.
It's not permanent death, you know, you can be resurrected so you don't, it's not too
serious, but it's, it's, it's a lot of fun and it's really cool to be playing to be playing
this game in text, you know, 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, you
know, it's kind of, it's almost like the difference between reading one of those books versus
watching a movie, you know, 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, it's a great little imagination exercise if you're, 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, to the camp and buy a better staff or a better
knife or something. So yeah, it's, 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, the modern sort of online, you know,
Minecraft or whatever people are playing online right now in an sort of an MMORPG kind of setting.
Can't do that at work and get away with it, whereas, well, 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, or, or I don't
feel like 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, in a mud, you know, just for a little bit
of downtime. So the terminal experience, the telnet experience was working, but it wasn't,
you know, the moment you start doing anything on Linux, I think, you're always kind of
looking because 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, it gets spit right
back out into, on your telnet prompt. So the, the output is just like, right there on the same
line is 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 me and fur. So maybe
you're saying that, but the minute you, you say carve carve, and then I don't know, a 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,
and, and that, that interrupts your command. So that gets really annoying really fast,
but especially if a lot of people are online, and by a lot, I think I mean probably 20, maybe
it's the most I've seen. But I mean, that's pretty respectable. I, I guess, I don't really know,
there might be a lot more than that on a modern graphical game, but I don't, you know,
I mean 20s, that's, 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, 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 a 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 GTK one 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 will compile
pretty much on anything, which I believe, because it's just, when you launch it, it's an
internal kind of program, and it really reminds me a lot of IRS aside. So if you've ever used IRS
aside, which is another one of those brilliantly modern conventions of interaction online. So IRS
aside, I see, believe me, I come really late into these technologies. I see 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 in gone. Anyway, it's got this like lying 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 1010tiin.sourceforge.net. Very easy to compile. You just download it and save it somewhere to your
hard drive and then tar-xf1010-2.00.8.tard.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 untarge itself as 1010. It
untars itself as TT. Just TT. That's the director's name. I hate when things do that to me.
They untarge themselves to something completely different. So it starts out as 1010
dash 2.0 to your.8.tard.gz. You untarget 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 Slack where it just has everything. So I guess if you are on some other distribution,
you'll need some kind of build environment obviously like binutils 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 GTC, AutoMake,
things like that, then you should be fine. So after you've configured it, type in make 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, start a 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 beginning of TT where you see like copying and credits and fack 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 your little gaming environment.
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
for 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 scanning 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
aliase all those things to one 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 just 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 dot anguish dot org colon or rather sorry space 2222 because it's on port 2222. So
no colon's just spaces. So 2222 and then semi colon and then, well, eventually the name of your
character and then semi colon 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 it. So that was hash SES space
some name space, the server name space, the port, semi colon character name, semi colon 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 10, 10 plus plus. So the command for that would be TT plus
plus and then simply the location of that script file. So I called mine run dot 10. So when I start
10, 10 plus plus, I simply do from from my games directory in my home. I do TT plus plus and then
dot slash run dot 10 and that starts TT plus plus with the session being this ancient anguish
session and it 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 I still took me a little while to get
used to the 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 hard core mud players would actually build their own maps on graph paper and
things like that build it up and sell truly explore everything blindly and that's fine for them.
I'm not hard core. 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 majors 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 26 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 down or you really kind of have to manage
your 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
but it's it's a cool thing it's um it's gaming from a while ago but it's still fun now and it's
tax 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
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