StuphMUD

Stuph was started in the mid-90s and is continuously developed. While not incredibly feature-rich, it has seen several thousand players over the past two decades and has a very stable and balanced game engine with a focus on good, clean playing experience. It has a consistent and attractive look and feel, and a feeling of perpetuity that you might return to the world many have come to love.

Most distinguishing characteristics are part of its fictionalized, interactive world, which is vast and almost completely unique. It is an immersion into the craft and lore of master builders and writers, a setting of lengthy adventure, immanent villainy, and feel-good fantasy. Much of the Stuph experience comes from its compelling world, offset with time-tested mudding features, and a unique expression and appearance of mechanical content.

* Extended race selection * Extended class selection * Unique skill-and-spell set * Player-run clans * Lots of custom special procedures and functionality * Autoquest facilities * Two vast continents over 250 zones * 105 mortal levels * Remortalization system for Avatar+ * Player houses * PK available

A long-running MUD that has suffered downtime and loss of player- base because of it, Stuph now has a permanent home on commodity hardware and a stable and controlled development/release cycle that has proved itself. As a topic of research, the head coder seeks to blend evolutionary programming (smarter npcs, an environment of intricately instrumented live-action, a more deeply interactive world, complete web-service buildout from the core) on top of an existing MMO paradigm. The challenge is to deliver new and exciting systems of play beyond the console, accomodate live-coding and also authoritative control over world dynamics in a real-time setting while maintaining uptime, game balance, and levels of conventionalism players expect.

* Integrated web-based XMLRPC player interface * Web-based OLC * Sandboxed scripting and virtual machine environment * Enhanced database management, in-game server management * Scalable programming architecture, top-level C++ redesign * Python Runtime library. * Content-syndication framework (for web publishing) * Telnet-based out-of-band binary interface

We're open to new and old players, builders and coders.