[MUD-Dev] Creative guy seeking a MUD

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Hello, I've met some of you in person at GDC 2002 and have posted on
the list a few times.  So hopefully you guys can answer some
questions without screaming at me.  :-)

Currently I'm slogging away at nuclear explosions for my own non-MUD
game project.  At times things bog down and it gets dull.  Lotta
programming, not a lot of creative reward or instant gratification
happening.  I have other things to do in Real Life to keep me
balanced, but some nights there's just nothing to do.  I snapped my
Morrowind CD the other day because I'd done too much of that.  So,
I'm looking for yet-another-hobby to keep my brain cells alive and
interested:

  - I'd like to code content for MUDs with the greatest of ease!

I'm mainly interested in making bots and automatons that probably
will annoy some people.  For instance, many years ago I made a
Mimic.  It had a default form, but would assume the form of whomever
looked at it.  It would memorize a few sentences of whatever the
copied person said and replay it later, plus an occasional random
expletive.  After a time lapse, or after another person came by to
look at it, the Mimic would revert to its default form.  It was
pretty easy to figure out that the Mimic was not a real person, the
illusion didn't last very long.  I thought it was a fairly harmless,
clever use of MUSE coding, but it drove the sysadmins bonkers.  They
thought I was the Devil!  Our MUD marriage didn't end well, and I
daresay it's kept me away from MUDs for a decade.  This really hit
home for me the difference between "social" and "gamer" types on
MUDs.  I'm the latter.  I'm looking for a MUD where the admins are
into the possibilities of powergaming, aren't terribly
authoritarian, and like clever things that players have coded up.

I'd love any excuse to program in Python.  Maybe nobody uses Python
as the user scripting language, I dunno.  If it isn't Python, I'd
like the scripting language to be pretty painless.

I've also run my own freeform PBEM RPG games quite a number of
times.  I consider myself to have skill at writing,
characterization, plot, improvisational online performance, etc.
Ergo, a MUD that encourages roleplaying would be nice.  But if not,
no biggie, so long as it's filled with powergamers.  I don't want a
MUD where roleplaying is enforced.  That would get in the way of my
bot coding.

I'd like fairly painless tools for uploading user content.  I figure
I'll be doing a lot of that.  Also, I'm much more interested in MUDs
that don't try to make me sign away the copyright on my work.  If
you want to own what I write, I'll write very little and leave soon.

So, in the words of the immortal Cyndi Lauper, "Geeks just wanna
have fun!"  You guys know of a MUD out there where I can do this
stuff and not get a bunch of pointless moralisms thrown at me?

Finally, I would comment that http://www.mudconnector.com/ is quite
a slog.  Its search engine does not pull up the criteria I'm looking
for.  I figure you guys are pretty smart and also more commercially
relevant as a group, should my hobby turn into something else.


Cheers,                         www.3DProgrammer.com
Brandon Van Every               Seattle, WA

20% of the world is real.
80% is gobbledygook we make up inside our own heads.

_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev