LPMud

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

LPMud (sometimes shortened to simply "LP") is a MUD variant developed in 1989 by Lars Pensjö (hence the LP in LPMud) that separates the mud game functionality between a virtual machine (known as the driver) and world-building components in the LPC programming language (known as the mudlib).

Lars had been an avid player of TinyMUD and AberMUD. He wanted to create a world with the flexibility of TinyMUD and the power of AberMUD, Furthermore, he did not want to have sole responsibility for creating and maintaining the game world. He once said, "I didn't think I would be able to design a good adventure. By allowing wizards coding rights, I thought others could help me with this." The result was the creation of a new, C-based, object-oriented programming language that made it simple for people with minimal programming skills to add elements like rooms, weapons, and monsters to a gaming world.

To accomplish his goal, Lennart Augustsson convinced Lars to write what today would be called a virtual machine, the LPMud driver. The driver managed the interpretation of LPC code as well as providing basic operating system services to the LPC code. By virtue of this design, Lars ensured that poor programming of infinite loops, memory leaks, and other common programmer foibles by game builders would not harm the overall stability of the game. His choice of an OO approach made it easy for new programmers to concentrate on the task of "building a room" rather than programming logic.

By the end of 1989, there were two major muds built on top of the LPMud engine:

Genesis LPMud (Lars' original LPMud)
Nanvaent

[edit] Evolution of LPMuds

Lars' interest in LPMuds eventually waned. By the time it did, however, LPMud had become one of the most popular forms of mud. His work has been extended or reverse engineered in the following drivers:

CD LPMud driver (short for Chalmers Datorförening, the computer club of the Chalmers University of Technology)
Amylaar (also known as LPMud 3.x)
MudOS
DGD (Dworkin's Generic Driver)
LDMud, a game driver based on Amylaar by Lars Düning

The LPMud approach also enabled the development of gaming frameworks built in LPC that game builders could use as the foundation for their worlds. The original mudlib was the Genesis Mudlib that came with LPMud drivers up to LPMud 2.4.5. As LPMud matured, the separation between driver and mudlib grew to the point that the developers of MudOS and DGD did not ship their drivers with fully functional mudlibs. Popular LPMud mudlibs include:

Discworld Mudlib from the Discworld MUD
CDlib from Genesis LPMud
Nightmare Mudlib from Nightmare LPMud
TMI Mudlib from The Mud Institute
Lima Mudlib from Lima Bean
Heaven7 Mudlib from Heaven7
Dead Souls Mudlib
LPUniversity Mudlib from the LPUniversity Foundation

[edit] LPMud used to create talkers

LPMud was used as the basis for the first ever Internet talker, Cat Chat, which opened in 1990, and also for the second Internet talker Cheesehouse, which opened in 1991, and historically formed the basis of most other talkers, creating the ew-too code that was the most popular talker code base until 1996.