LPMud


LPMud, abbreviated LP, is a family of MUD server software. Its first instance, the original LPMud game driver, was developed in 1989 by Lars Pensjö. LPMud was innovative in its separation of the MUD infrastructure into a virtual machine and a development framework written in the LPC programming language.

Motivation

Pensjö had been an avid player of TinyMUD and AberMUD. He wanted to create a world with the flexibility of TinyMUD and the style 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, LPC, that made it simple for people with minimal programming skills to add elements like rooms, weapons, and monsters to a virtual world.
To accomplish his goal, Lennart Augustsson convinced Pensjö 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, Pensjö made it more difficult for common programming errors like infinite loops and infinite recursion made by content builders to harm the overall stability of the server. 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.

Evolution of LPMuds

Pensjö's interest in LPMuds eventually waned in the early 1990s, but by that time LPMud had become one of the most popular forms of MUD. His work has been extended or reverse engineered in a number of projects:
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:
Though an LPMud server can be used to implement nearly any style of game, LPMuds are often thought of as having certain common characteristics as a genre, such as a mixture of hack and slash with role-playing, quests as an element of advancement, and "guilds" as an alternative to character classes.
Notable early LPMud games still in operation as of 2010 include Pensjö's original Genesis LPMud as well as 3Kingdoms, Ancient Anguish, BatMUD, Darker Realms, DartMUD, Genocide, Lost Souls, NannyMUD, Nanvaent, ZombieMUD, Shattered World and Xyllomer.

LPMud talkers

LPMud was used as the basis for the first Internet talker, Cat Chat, which opened in 1990.

TMI Mudlib

The TMI Mudlib from The Mud Institute was an attempt to create a framework driven mudlib for the MudOS LPMud driver. It consisted of many contributors to MudOS as well as people who became influential in the LPMud community. When TMI began work in 1992, a mudlib was generally packaged with both an LPMud driver and a complete world built on top of the mudlib. As a framework-driven mudlib, the goal of the TMI mudlib was to provide only examples for world objects and place the burden of building a working world on the game developers using TMI.
TMI implemented the first InterMUD communications network, when MudOS added network socket support in 1992.
TMI never realized its vision and shut down. It was quickly followed, however, by TMI-2. Unlike TMI, TMI-2 was somewhat independent of the driver team. It leveraged elements of the original TMI mudlib and eventually released a somewhat workable product. Though it never achieved the success of its sibling the Nightmare Mudlib, it did influence many developers, and the lessons learned with TMI-2 led to the successes of the Lima Mudlib.
In 1992, MIRE, a multi-user information system producing customised newspapers was built based on a modified TMI driver.
In 1993, the TMI-2 mudlib was used to create PangaeaMud, an academic research project designed as an interactive geologic database tool.
Though Lima took lessons from TMI-2, Lima is a completely independent codebase.
TMI-2 is still available, and often used as a learning tool, but not typically used today for new LPMud development.
Notable MUDs based on TMI-derived mudlibs include The Two Towers set in Tolkien’s universe and Threshold.