[MUD-Dev] Creative guy seeking a MUD

[Frank Crowell]

From: "Brandon J. Van Every" <vanevery at 3DProgrammer.com>

> I'm mainly interested in making bots and automatons that probably
> will annoy some people

I tried a couple of times to recruit people for a bot-dominated mud.
I even invited the AI guys over a couple of times.  But no one ever
showed any interest.

As for bots annoying people, I used to have some interesting papers
on the wars between Mud Admins and bot developers.  This same hate
relationship has carried into FPS where bots are considered evil.
Finally my Mud-Dev post of "No Bots Allowed" got one big
zzzzzzzzzz. I guess a big zzzzzzz is better than a punch to my nose.

> 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 have used Strout's python agent for a few things.  Of course a few
years ago I did a quick mod to colins to get rid of his panic
attacks whenever he entered a MOO.  But colins and all his relatives
are written in C; it's not that hard to modify colins, but I
wouldn't recommend doing it in C although there are several agent
libraries available in C++.

Other choices include Java or Perl.  Both have agents libraries for
them.

> 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.

If you are doing external bots, then the bot software is your own.
If you are doing NPCs, then the mud should have the right to use
your works although you get to keep the copyright (naturally) and
you can do whatever you want with your property.

The biggest issue that I have seen in muds is when the developer
decides to leave the mud and take his stuff with him.  Mud Admins
must have the right to continue to use the property but they may not
have the right to modify it.

> 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?

It's going to be hard.  External bots are the outlaws of the mud
world except for MUSH/MUX where puppetry is part of their role
playing. MOOs/Cold are also interesting if you have programmer
permission because you can create and destroy objects so you have a
lot of room to play around.  LPmuds and Dikus are closed systems;
only NPC bots are allowed.

I would run a bot-dominated server -- either a text Cold or a 3D
server -- but I don't believe that I am allowed to run a mud server
on my service.


frank



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