Mud Toys

I started playing with muds when I was a summer student at Argonne National Laboratory. I decided I needed to learn to create mud objects the second summer I was there, and I ended up creating a number of fun toys. Eventually I moved on to the Forest where I could create whatever I wanted. Here are some of the bits of code I've created.

MudSpeak

Download: mudspeak.pl.txt

When I got a Mac laptop in the fall of 2002, I started to learn about the weird hidden-away command-line tools it had. One of the fun ones is osascript, a command-line gateway into MacOS's Applescript language. This lets you get to the speech engine, making it fairly trivial to write up a mud "client" that speaks what happens in a room. So that's what I did.

The script itself is written in Perl, and it just connects to a mud port using normal Perl networking bits. It uses its own character, so you'll need a spare character to actually interact with other people while listening to them. At the top is a voices hash that can be changed to match characters with voices on your particular mud and a substitutions hash that can be used to "fix" words (especially names) that the speech engine doesn't know how to pronounce correctly. You'll also have to change the character/password variables at the top and the mud connection string in the middle to connect to your particular mud. Once you do that, it's a piece of cake!

Neil

Download: neilcode.moo

After writing various instances of my Neil chatterbot, I decided it was time to write one for the mud. I wanted the mud-based Neil to be a first-class citizen of his world, so he needed a number of "features" that the IM-Neil didn't need. One of these is the ability to emote, which also serves the purpose of preventing Neil from always having the last word in a conversation. Our mud had a long list of antisocial verbs already defined, so I just gave Neil the ability to perform some of them.

Neil also needed to act like other people on the mud. When characters unidle, other people like to wave to them; when people ask a question like "Who did that?", other people like to null-emote as if to raise their hand; etc. The mud-Neil got these same abilities added so that he too can look like a real boy.