[MUD-Dev] Re: Unix is a mud (Re: Ugh, IS Diablo a mud?)

[J C Lawrence]

On Mon, 28 Sep 1998 11:41:39 -0700 (PDT) 
Adam Wiggins<adam at angel.com> wrote:

> On Sat, 26 Sep 1998, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
>> Anyway, I would say that Unix has more MUD aspects to it than
>> MUD-Dev, even than some MUDs according to some of the criterions
>> I have seen on this list.  Unix is multi-user, has a wholist,
>> buildingcapabilities, chatting, talk, etc etc. Different
>> character (user) classes. Fightingcapabilities (freewheeling
>> forks, diskspace usage, printer queues, hacking). It is also a
>> persistent and changing world (filesystem). There is plenty to
>> explore for the players.  :-P Unix also provides user
>> descriptions (.plan) and stats.

> Although I know that this example was chosen largely from
> silliness, it's actually a pretty good point to discuss.  Most
> people wouldn't consider UNIX a mud; yet it has most of the
> mechanics we would associate with one.  So, why not?  Putting
> aside lists of features for a second, as a player I know straight
> away what's "wrong" with UNIXmud:

Going back about 10 years there was a project to do a shell script
(csh!) based adventure game under *nix where rooms were directories,
exits were symlinks between directories, objects were files, room
descriptions and the like were .desc files in each directory,
special features in rooms and objects were local shell scripts with
standardised names, and all the basic movement commands were
suitably aliased to `cd`.  The world was inherently persistant with
no explicit save semantics (of course), and starting a new game
meant un tarballing the tree into a new directory.  No, I don't know
how far it got other than the fact that they got something of a game
established.  Yes, it did work.

> 3. My token/character/avatar is difficult to customize.  I get two
> things, really: .plan and .sig.  Of course, both of these are
> quite popular for this exact reason.

set `id`
host=`echo $HOSTNAME | cut -d. -f 1`
export PROMPT_COMMAND='echo -ne "\033]1;${USER}@${host}: ${PWD}\007\033]2;${USER}@${host}: ${PWD}\007"'
export PS1=`\echo "[[\u@\h"'::\w]]
-=\$ '`

Admittedly its only locally visible.

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
(Contractor)                               Internet: coder at ibm.net
---------(*)                     Internet: claw at under.engr.sgi.com
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...