Lots of features could stand out to people, most likely the codebase specific commands. Class and race have 'nothing' to do with a codebase anyway, those have to do with a specific game and not the stock codebase that it was created using as very few MUDs which can be considered decent have untouched stock classes and races. As for whether players care about codebases, they do. That's not an opinion, it's not even really up for discussion, most MUD players do have a preferred codebase or a few preferred codebases, period. There is a 'feel' to the majority of games in a specific codebase that doesn't exist in MMO's than run on a specific engine which is why MMO players likely do not make the same distinction. The fact is though that MUD players do.

Players don't care about the codebase: they care about the feel. You said yourself that it's the feel that players care about; you're just putting too much emphasis on the underlying code.

Entirely possible AFKMud could handle the load. It's just never been tested that way because most of the major dev work got done after most of my staff lost interest and there were only a few of us left. So none of it has ever been properly tested against large numbers of people.

As far as what codebase to use? Really, who cares? If it works, use it. If using stock RoM or Smaug leaves one paranoid of seeing people socialing and casting spells and fiddling with equipment, disable those commands. Don't want people visiting areas that are part of some stock game world? Delete them before launch.

And The_Fury, your codebase topic would be a perfectly valid thing to cover at a Con. If we ever do get around to organizing another one I'd encourage you to go forward with that.

If people are seriously thinking the reason one hasn't been done is because there's no place to host it, I'd say nobody's paying attention to the 900 pound server gorilla in the room this site is already running on. Or failing that, my own servers which hosted 4 Cons already. I mean hell, we can provide the facilities if someone else wants to organize another event. I've got no problem with that at all.

Even better that it be run on TinyMush like FidoCon, just to contrast it to the poor communication systems on stock Dikus.

I think that is the problem, hosting is nothing now days, most of us here have servers or access to servers that it can be hosted on and we could have it up and running in a matter of minutes, the real issue here is that it takes a hell of a lot of work and dedication to put something like this together and very few people have the skills to pull it off and make it happen, let alone make it a success. I would be more than happy to run a lecture topic like the one i outlines above, im sure i could write a few thousand words on the subject and make it more than interesting enough for most people, to sit though me cutting and pasting it into a client :).

What's the point of a copy/pasted lecture? Seems better to just post the thing as an article and have Q&A live.

because i cannot use powerpoints and talk, also because i am not a fast typist,

If command familiarity is a problem, why not just incorporate hardcoded aliases for common codebase commands such as channels and movement? That would allow people to use the commands they'd expect to use to achieve whatever result. I'm sure there are some necessary things that this approach wouldn't work for, but since the majority of the event is moving and talking, I'd think that it would be pretty beneficial, especially with regard to initial interaction with the server.

Not sure I follow. If you're going to copy/paste something into a MUD client, just post whatever you would copy/paste as a full article. You'd have to deal with Q&A live anyhow, and separating them means you won't get a bunch of stuff mixed in with whatever you're copy/pasting. It also means that people listening won't have to filter out whatever other stuff is going on, and they can read the article at their pace before the event begins.

Actually, I agree with Tyche on this one. Use the right tool for the right job. It's been many years since I looked at the MUSH branch, but they were always centered around building and communication as opposed to combat. I'm going to guess that someone out there has probably coded a couple of nifty conference rooms in mushcode, which would be very handy for lecture-style meetings. I remember one in LPC from TMI (I think?) that allowed one to walk into the room and take the floor, and then pass it to others. Whomever had the floor could open it for comments, or lock it down so they could speak without interruption. There were visitor rooms that mirrored the procedings, and it was probably logged as well. :)

Yeah now that is starting to sound like something that would be useful for this sort of thing.

My old friend Google helped me find this MUX snippet.

http://www.mushcode.com/Files/Softcode/c...

Does anyone out there who uses TinyMUSH/MUX/etc have a source formatter so we can read that without our eyes bleeding and sliding down our cheeks due to the lack of indentation?

Also, the LPC version I was thinking of was in the TMI-2 distribution. If you poke around lpmuds.net, you'll find it in /lib/d/Conf/

I'd definitely prefer that. I remember reading the log of a previous MudCon and finding it hard to follow, because other people kept interrupting, or getting sidetracked with conversations related to an earlier part of the lecture.

Often when articles are posted online, the public are invited to submit comments. If the articles were posted a few days before the MudCon, readers could be invited to visit the MudCon to share their comments in real time. After the MudCon, the articles could be linked to the logs, and further comments could then be submitted directly.

Then you just need to make sure people are interested enough in the articles that they're willing to log on and share their views - and that means the more contraversial the articles are, the better. I'd therefore like to nominate the following article subjects:

"MUD licences: If you don't sue me, I can do whatever I like"

"Diku vs LP: Which sucks the most?"

"Stick with Stock: If it ain't broke, don't fix it"

"Room descriptions: Nobody reads them, so use an ASCII map instead"

"RPI: The real meaning, and why it's the future of roleplaying"

"The worthlessness of help files: If it was difficult to code, it should be difficult to use"

"Generated descriptions, and why human builders are now redundant"

"Free muds and hidden costs"

Of course then you'd probably need a combat system as well ;)

Obviously I'm only kidding about the subject titles. But I do think the articles need to be things which people will want to comment on - if they read the article and think "Yeah, that makes sense", then they won't really have any incentive to discuss it further.

FWIW, when we were experimenting with the TMI-2 mudlib, and I was using the conference room setup I mentioned earlier, I DID accidentally coded a two-handed dwarven battle axe that was set under the conference room table. I swear, it was an accident…. :)

An axe under the table is pretty useless, now a crossbow, then you could truly emasculate anybody else at the table with a twitch of the finger.

Well, grabbing the axe (if you knew it was there, or had looked under the table) had the result of wresting the floor from whomever was speaking… and it also caused you to scream and spray spittle over everyone around you. :)

Interesting "accidental" feature.

Yeh, feels like you're on an animatronic ride, not
in a discussion.



Yeah, it's in Dead Souls 2 as well. The conference rooms
have cambots available, if you want to record the meetings, and
one of them has an optional privacy shield, so that once your
intended audience is there, you can block anyone else from
coming in. And, like TMI-2, the moderator decides who can talk
at any given time…or let everyone talk.

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net

Really though that'd be just as easily doable on any type of MU*, I can create that exact system in less than an hour from inside a tbaMUD (ie. without editing the C code) which would do the same thing as the MUSH coded version.

…So far, only by you. I mean, I could be wrong, but the system was designed to be pretty simple. It was specifically designed to handle a multi-person multi-discussion environment. I do, personally think it handled that pretty well.


Has a functioning pastebin that you can dump any buckets of text into. You did it via a website interface. The server also had code in-game to access the paste-bin. It was used several times throughout the night… doesn't seem like I managed to save those… *ponder*. All this is included in the release Kiasyn mentioned earlier. It was also super light weight so you could handle a lot of people on small servers.



Kiasyn eluded to this earlier… the codebase for MudConV did pretty much that. And had some things you didn't even mention there :P. The logs were linked to earlier in this thread. You can also check out the codebase. Comes with a helpfile to describe most of the stuff.