~~4Multi-User Dungeons by Ben Coffer ~~2--------------------------------- What are MUDS? Aha, a MUD is a certain type of adventure game. An adventure game being one where the player moves around from location to location, usually in the form of a text-based room description and keyboard input format, picking up objects such as food, weapons and other items that may become useful in a future situation, such as a key needed to open a door, etc. Also, other characters can sometimes be encountered, but as these are controlled by the computer they are normally very random in their movements. In a multi-user dungeon, however, the player is not alone. There are other players about, and these ones are real human people, normally playing from all over the country, (or the world). This presents some interesting concepts though. You can talk to someone hundreds or thousands of miles away, even convey emotions, without ever opening your mouth and uttering a sound. You can meet friendly people or hostile people, who will kill you almost straight away just for some points. But no-one is really unfriendly on the game, if someone *does* kill you, they would probably apologise afterwards. However, sometimes it can be your own fault as, being a beginner, you may enter the wrong room, such as a fighting room or arena where normally only experienced players enter to do battle. Generally, MUDs are great fun to play. But, the one downfall on all the MUDs that I, myself, have played on is that the Wizards (people who create the game), have made a 'conversation' room. Not that this is a bad thing at all, but generally you find a lot of the people on the MUD will be sitting in the conversation room chatting rather than solving adventures. I have noticed that there is a basic command interpreter (or parser) that most MUDs seem to use. I'll outline some of the usual commands found on a MUD: ~~4LOOK ~~4---- If you simply type 'look' then a description of the current room you are in is given. These can sometimes be very short and lacking of descriptive or atmospheric writing, since just about anyone can create rooms and describe them, if they pass a test and become a 'builder'. Look can also be used to look at objects, for instance, typing 'look key' would bring up the description of the object called 'key'. ~~3SAY ~~3--- An important one this, if you intend on communicating with people. Simply type 'say' and follow it with a message. If there's anyone in the room, then they will see your message and possibly reply. If I had a character called Evolution, and I typed 'say hello'. On my screen I would see, 'You say hello.' If there was someone else in the room then they would see 'Evolution says hello.' on their screen. ~~4EMOTE ~~4----- Basically, this is used to convey an emotion. An alternative to typing 'emote' is just to simply type a colon, (much faster!). So, if I typed the following: ': screams' then the sentence 'Evolution screams' would appear on everyone's screen if they were in the same room as me. ~~5PAGE ~~5---- A nice command this, but you can annoy people with it. This is how you speak to someone who is not in the same room as you. If I typed 'page 68k=hello. Me again.' then 68k's terminal would beep and the message 'hello. Me again.'would appear on his screen preceded by the name of the room that I am in, and my own name. These are some of the simple commands, there are a lot more, most of which you would see in a normal text adventure game, such as east, west, north, south, up, down, get and drop. Some advice ----------- Firstly, and most importantly, do *not* annoy the wizards. They really do have a lot of power, I should know, I was a wizard for a short period of time. If you annoy a wizard, prepare to have a lot of your points taken away, be booted from the game or even better, toaded, (which involves you becoming a toad in a nasty way and not being able to log onto that game as the same character again). If you become a builder, be careful where you build. I severely annoyed Steve once by placing an object entitled "A Smelly Sock" or something worse in one of his rooms in his house he had created. I locked it there so that only the owner (me!) could pick it up. Hee hee hee. But if a wizard sees it, it could mean trouble again. Steer clear of rooms called "Arena" or "Fighting room" or such like, unless you are an experienced player. If you aren't an experienced player then you will probably be wiped out straight away, unless the people in there are feeling in a nice mood. You may not stand a chance even if you do manage to score a hit on someone as there is a way of forcing your own character to perform tasks (such as running away) when someone else tries to attack. I.e. if you typed '@damage 68K', he might have set his character up to hit you a hundred times and then move to an entirely different room before you could even get close. Only experienced players would know how to do this. Don't create multiple characters, if a wizard or the God finds out then this could mean instant booting. The way that the fighting system works is that you gain points when you hit someone, but you only get something like a third of their points, but their's go down as well. Basically, once I set up ten characters for myself, with the names m1 to m10 and kept them in my house I had created. Every time I logged on as Evolution (my real character) I would kill each one of these characters and gain the points. Unfortunately one time, I was quietly sitting in my house and along came a wizard. I was too late to try and hide the characters in the cupboard. She asked what I was doing with all these characters in my house, I innocently said What characters? and instantly got booted. Anyway, that's about all you need to know really. Except to say that there is a mud based in Manchester called Uglymug. It is the most popular MUD around, as far as I know, with nearly 60+ users on almost every day. If you can get on it, then do. You will need either telnet or PAD. Unfortunately I only know the pad address and this is man.cs.r1k That's it for now! Except in the true spirit of unprofessionalism, I'll just give a shout out to my particular friends on Uglymug! Hi to: miss_informed (Karen) Sapphire (Fleur) The_Wibbler (Simon) and all the Silly Room people. Bye!