Discworld mudlib

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The Discworld mudlib is an LPC framework, or mudlib, originally written for the Discworld MUD.

It has been regarded as one of the more advanced mudlibs around: according to Lauren Burka's MUD timeline, written in 1995, the Discworld mudlib was only the second widely available mudlib. According to George Reese's LPMUD timeline, written in 1996, at the time of its release it had the most advanced command parser and user interface available in a mudlib. It has been described as having "many concepts you will not see in other mudlibs for any server";^[1] the original LPMUD FAQ completes the quote by saying that the mudlib also has "too many frogs and wombles", possibly in reference to its frequent use of eccentric variable names such as "frog" and "womble".

Some design elements in the mudlib have become popular in other MUD libraries - for example, the library's player commands that express emotions are named "soul commands". Also the way ANSI colour is encoded ("%^BLUE%^") has been named "Pinkfish-style coding" after David Bennett, the main author of the library, who is widely known in the MUD community by his alias of Pinkfish.

Other notable MUDs that use this mudlib include Nanvaent.

1 FluffOS
2 Medical use
3 References
4 External links

[edit] FluffOS

FluffOS is Discworld's fork of the MudOS driver. Features added in FluffOS that are not present in MudOS include available MXP output, UTF-8 capability, support for running on 64-bit architectures, and (optionally) stricter type checking of variables in LPC code. Recent versions of the Discworld mudlib only run on the FluffOS server. It is open source under the MudOS license.

[edit] Medical use

The Discworld mudlib was used in a medical computing experiment into wearable data collection devices, in which a small MUD was created.^[2] The paper referred to several features of the mudlib, such as its use of coordinates to describe room locations, its broadcaster (a mechanism for sending messages to all players within a given area), and its complex parser.

[edit] References

^ Mulligan, Jessica; Patrovsky, Bridgette (2003). Developing Online Games. New Riders. ISBN 1-59273-000-0.
^ Cruickshank, Don; De Roure, David (2004). "A Portal for Interacting with Context-aware Ubiquitous Systems". Proceedings of First International Workshop on Advanced Context Modelling, Reasoning And Management: 96-100.