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

[Adam Wiggins]

On Mon, 28 Sep 1998, J C Lawrence wrote:
> Adam Wiggins<adam at angel.com> wrote:
> > 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.

Not sure if this is the same thing, but there is the "Adventure Shell"
which a buddy of mine fooled with for a while in college.  As you say, you
could do a "look" (ls), "get" and "drop" files (similar to MS Windows' cut
and paste), movement between directories, etc.  It worked pretty well; I'm
not sure if it put a temporary file into your current directory named
"<username> is standing here." or not, but if it did this would certainly
take it one step closer to being UNIXmud.

> > 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.

My point exactly.

Adam