I just got off the phone with a buddy who introduced me to something amazing, something I've read about but didn't think was a thing anymore, something wicked old-school and totally rad: MUDs.
Now being into creating text-based games as I am, I always loved the idea of MUDs; multi-player "on-line" text-based games sound absolutely awesome. But I thought, surely MUDs are a thing of the past - even "retro gamers" like me don't play them... or so I thought. Turns out, there are two MUDs (developed by the same guy) that are still around! One that my best bud says "has been around for like 30 years" and another that apparently just released recently! Check them out here:
# The original, a fantasy type game
telnet stellaraeon.com
# The new one, an outer space type game
telnet stellaraeon.com -r 4000
This is so cool! What was a fun bit of computer history is now running on my daily driver laptop! I'm creating an account on the fantasy one ("Alter Aeon" ) right now.
But of course, as both a writer and a coder, I just gotta ask... how exactly do they program a game like this? I've done enough research (and been to the Lunduke BBS enough times š) to get the general gist of what telnet is (a plain-text communication protocol for talking to another computer) but how does it work? I mean, are there telnet servers you have to install, or do you just open a port and somehow have your program be listening on that port? I expect that's how even modern web servers work at their lowest level (listening on i.e. port 80). But because telnet is ancient and not encrypted, I doubt there are any good tutorials on the subject (though of course I will ask the Duck shortly š).
But man, if I can figure it out..........
