Comment by npunt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by npunt | Hacker News Reader

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Old-school MUDs are alright, but I'd love to see a modern reinterpretation of them that rethinks the interfaces and offers more democratized tools.

For instance, I'd love rooms that could be populated with sounds, images, environmental effects, day/night cycles, and text effects. This would be purely ornamental and could be done in a way to support backward compatibility with text-only views, as I'd want to keep this fully accessible to the blind.

I'd also love better tooling for designers and writers to easily make quests, objects, and NPCs. Ideally a library of templates and then the writer/designer can fill in the details. Think no-code or low code tools like Hypercard/Airtable/etc that empower artists, writers, and designers, not just engineers.

Finally I'd love to see interfaces that support mobile/touch devices, not just keyboard. Short quests in narrative games like MUDs are a great match for mobile devices, but this requires breaking out of the CLI/terminal mindset that originally bore these games. Of course chat can still be keyboard based, but typing in commands on a mobile device is a dead-end.

If there's serious interest in this I'd be happy to offer some further design guidance

I've actually been thinking about this and working on prototypes for years. The scope always spirals out of control. It started out as mobile-only game, migrated to web tech, current iteration is for VR...

In MUD the text interface gives impression that anything is possible. Even if you are using same 10 verbs for 99% of interaction, there's still illusion of so many actions and verbs to be discovered. Any idea how to capture this magic on mobile interface?

I've done just that a few times with some side projects, but never anything I released. One in C#. One in Node. One in Racket (I liked that one the best). It's definitely fun, and I found it helped push the application architecture into a good direction for being decoupled and maintainable.

i am interested in creating an audio-only MUD. (like what an audio-book is to books). keep the text, but get a narrator with a dramatic voice. add sound effects, different NPC voices, voice input.

There are a few audio games like this on Amazon’s Alexa platform. When I was looking at it a couple of years ago, there was a level a framework for building them with such narration. I don’t know how you’d work in the multi user angle though.

the framework would need to be designed for that. i'd separate audio handling from actual game logic, so that you can plug in any game logic you like.

you have voice input that gets parsed and interpreted (and also shared with other players, like any voice chat) and you have audio output, that can be called up like any text messages in a MUD: play this narration. play this sound, etc...

code wise i'd call narration and speech like language translation: say("hello traveller") would call up the audio file that contains "hello traveller". then have the audio team go through all text bits like a translation team does.

I only just learned that MUDs exist from this article, but I've wanted to create some kind of collaborative RPG thing since forever.

I'd love to collaborate on something if you're interested

I always wanted to make a graphical mud type engine where users could upload their own character models and the focus would be on role play instead of combat. I thinking with three.js it’s a real possibility to realize.

This is Minecraft with MCMMO

http://defend.avalon.today/

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