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I credit the majority of my skills to the fine folks at M*U*S*H ( http://mush.pennmush.org/ ). While the test and launch site for PennMUSH, a MUD game server, it *is* a social mush, and has a large community of players connected at most of the hours I'm on, and still plenty when I'm not. PennMUSH, a MUD in that it has a virtual world, with a programming language diku derivatives could only dream of, online creation and programming that allows anything from scrabble games to a casino with fully playable crap parlors, roulette, even poker of all types. From my own experience and others, if a quick googling can't find it, then asking a question on one of the channels will. This covers not only programming and software, but anything from cooking to mathematics, from writing novels to being an administrator for large projects.

Over the past month alone: I've taught some newer coders how to do pathfinding and searching. I've written sudoku solvers, held discussions (and eventually did a solution) on writing puzzle solvers in a language based on string interpolation (MUSHcode). I've laughed, I've cried, I've learned things I never guessed I'd learn. I've seen people grow in their skills - In English, computer languages, and more. It's a text based medium where neither profanity, poor English or general meanness is tolerated. Founded and headed by a psychology professor who dabbles in CS. Staffed by computer scientists, teachers, actresses, even EMTs and book authors. Almost half European. And active daily.

When I first joined, in 1998, I thought Visual Basic was all that. They introduced me to linux. To vi, regular expressions. AI, deeper CS, ocaml, python, perl, and more. Now I know a number of programming languages and paradigms. I could go on, but this thread's just on geekery and coding. Nevermind knitting, cooking, even public speaking, project management, raising kids (I'm still single, but there's a number of parents on there.) and more.

M*U*S*H: http://mush.pennmush.org/ - Or point your favorite text mu* client (I recommend tinyfugue) at mush.pennmush.org 4201

I credit the majority of my skills to the fine folks at M*U*S*H ( http://mush.pennmush.org/ ). While the test and launch site for PennMUSH, a MUD game server, it *is* a social mush, and has a large community of players connected at most of the hours I'm on, and still plenty when I'm not. PennMUSH, a MUD in that it has a virtual world, with a programming language diku derivatives could only dream of, online creation and programming that allows anything from scrabble games to a casino with fully playable crap parlors, roulette, even poker of all types. From my own experience and others, if a quick googling can't find it, then asking a question on one of the channels will. This covers not only programming and software, but anything from cooking to mathematics, from writing novels to being an administrator for large projects.

Over the past month alone: I've taught some newer coders how to do pathfinding and searching. I've written sudoku solvers, held discussions (and eventually did a solution) on writing puzzle solvers in a language based on string interpolation (MUSHcode). I've laughed, I've cried, I've learned things I never guessed I'd learn. I've seen people grow in their skills - In English, computer languages, and more. It's a text based medium where neither profanity, poor English or general meanness is tolerated. Founded and headed by a psychology professor who dabbles in CS. Staffed by computer scientists, teachers, actresses, even EMTs and book authors. Almost half European. And active daily.

When I first joined, in 1998, I thought Visual Basic was all that. They introduced me to linux. To vi, regular expressions. AI, deeper CS, ocaml, python, perl, and more. Now I know a number of programming languages and paradigms. I could go on, but this thread's just on geekery and coding. Nevermind knitting, cooking, even public speaking, project management, raising kids (I'm still single, but there's a number of parents on there.) and more.

M*U*S*H: http://mush.pennmush.org/ - Or point your favorite text mu* client (I recommend tinyfugue) at mush.pennmush.org 4201

I've been MUSH*ing since 1995 or so,which makes me... well, not all that much of a newbie (though neither am I really a vet, compared to some others I know :). And this is my view of things, directed mostly at MU* community (text-based one). MUSHes are relatively easy to set up these days, and not terribly difficult or expensive to run- text-based games have low server requirements and free off-the-shelf systems such as PennMUSH or TinyMUSH are quite simple to configure even for newbies.

What does that mean? That means there are no real barriers for any n00b wishing to try his hand at MU* administration - if you want it, you can do it. And then, everything comes down to creativity, imagination - and lots of patience. I've seen great MU*s created by a handful of newbies - they were sufficiently down-to-earth to create a small gameworld to start with, paying attention to playability and setting. And then there were others (i.e. me) who decided they want to turn their fave P'n'P RPG into a MUSH (I tried creating Paranoia MUSH, followed by HOL. Disasters both, to boot.) However, as opposed to (semi)professional graphic MMORPG designers who frequently are not too familiar with RP concepts, most of people trying their hands at MUSHes do have at least some amount of tabletop roleplaying experience.

And I've digressed and started losing my thread. Anyway, my ponit (if only I can remember it):

Experience does not a RPer make - although it does improve one. There are people who've been MMORPGing for years, and they're still as clueless as they were in the beginning. And then there are newbies who will give you some truly great RPing experiences. Contrary to the featured article's statement, newbie-created MMORPGs don't necessarily repulse players - to the contrary, they're often refreshingly new and original, and a newbie is far more likely to accept creative input than someone who considers himself a badass old gamer. And then there is the matter of evolution - old and experienced players have, frequently, set-in-stone ideas of how setting and gamesystem should look - they had years of playing to develop their preferences. Newbies, however, are not so adamant. As a consequence of that, newbie-run MMORPG is far more likely to evolve through player input, changing into something closer to players' wishes, even if glitchy, whereas veteran-staffed MMORPG might posess a very detailed setting and glitch-free gaming system - but be a far cry from what players actually want.

--
*MUSH = Multi User Shared Hallucination (more RP-oriented offspring of MUDs)

You don't even have to do 3D graphics to get into this stuff. I wrote a space simulation engine for PennMUSH and stopped at no lengths on some things...it only updates once per second, but I want to detect collisions accurately. Calculus saved the day. I wanted to turn in a spherical configuration space (where most people doing this use a cylindrical one) - take the cross product of where you are and where you want to be, and rotate yourself the amount you want to turn around said cross product. This is probably close to 100 lines of code, just to turn a ship.

Any programming at all involves math. The better you are at math, the better a programmer you will be. If you are not good with math, you will not be a good programmer. HTML and what most people do with PHP et al. is not programming - it is markup.

My CS degree required that I take Calculus I & II, discrete math, a statistics course (I took the harder of the two accepted for this, a 400-level math), and a math elective or two. I took a graduate-level cryptology special topics class for one of the electives - it was three CS students and about 6 math graduate students. At the end of the semester, the professor wrote a list of 3-digit numbers, most of them on the range [400,599], and said "This is a list of math courses we've covered at least half of in this class. Take them if you want to know more." There were about a dozen numbers on the list. My other elective was Calculus III, which I took concurrently with Crypto, across the hall, from the same professor. That was a challenge, as he made it extra hard on me in both classes (both because I'm good but also because I'm a smartass). He threatened to encrypt my Calc final. ;-D

At the very least, a programmer should have discrete math, multi-dimensional Calculus including working with series and sequences, number theory, linear algebra, and diff-eq (I regret not finding time for the last two).

Like I said - your abilities as a programmer are directly proportional to your abilities as a mathemetician. There's not a science you can study properly without using math.

well, if you have been playing for a month and the game sucks, the game probably sucks as a whole.

Historically, this is where the most churn develops, after the initial rush of early adopters, during the two- to three-month "honeymoon" period after a game's launch. New players often don't read documentation or do online research on how to get the most out of a game, so when they enter the game for the first time, there is an element of confusion about how the interface works and what actions to perform to advance their character's skills, weaponry, money, and so forth.

As someone who spends more than a little time on MMORPGs myself, I've seen it: some players are thick as the proverbial brick, cannot be bothered to type RULES or NEWS, and want the system (and staff!) (and other players!! ) to serve entertainment up for them on a silver platter garnished with $50 bills. When they say "this game sucks," what they really mean is "You should tell me how to do everything" or "I can't be bothered to read the rules" or "You people aren't fun enough."

And no, I'm not exaggerating. I heard a horror story not long ago about someone taking up about 12 man-hours of staff time (on an understaffed MUSH which is still in Alpha) in character generation, and then publicly declaring that the "staff aren't helpful." And the staff there are volunteers -- it's not a pay-to-play system. If people were paying for the privilege of playing there, I think the problem would be ten or more times worse.

Depending on the system, and how well the documentation is organized, it may take a little more or less than a month to get into.

If you're really impatient, or you've seen enough and finally decide that you could do a better job yourself, you should download yourself a driver, order DOG:AIG, and try it.

And when you finally do fire up the finished project, lemme know and I'll log in there... for a month.

I have been involved with communities that started out of MUSHes and later evolved into off-line communities, and vice versa.

Alienation of the leaders ... yeah. I can see that happen, and have. Now, how about when the 'leaders' alienate the projects? Eric S. Raymond recently started slinging flames at the Pennmush folks, citing their lack of a GPL license as reason to threaten the developers with OSS community sanctions (which were never voted on by the OSI board, btw), because they were using the words 'open' and 'source' in their license. A definition did follow. It read "meaning that the source is freely available and you can modify it however you like". But this wasn't good enough. I don't know if the OSI folks realize what ESR did when he sent that Nastygram(tm), but I'm more than willing to point out a portion of the damage done.

Many developers decided not to support the OSI once they heard about this. I'm one of them. It's not worth our time or effort to stand behind a project that, while espousing lofty goals, stoops to such politically motiviated activities as attempting to hijack a common phrase (anyone else remember the Pilsbury vs whoever over 'bake-off' thing? I do).

Ego? Maybe. I have no idea what sort of bug got into his pants. But this was really, really WRONG. Perhaps if ESR had sent an email asking for some sort of clarification of the license, instead of threatening sanctions against the Pennmush project right from the word go, things might have gone better. But, as it stands, the OSI now has an image very similar to that of any other corporate entity that starts any correspondence with threats and bullying tactics. I'm sure this is the sort of thing Micro$oft and other corporations love to see, and expected and hoped for, you know. Open Source eating its own young, biting its own tail off, that sort of thing.

I feel I must pause to applaud. [golf clap] Way to go Mr.Raymond. Just let me know when I should start calling you Mr.Gates, OK?

By the way, I think an open apology might be in order, from the entire OSI board, since ESR wrote his threats with the big Open Source Intimidation label all over them. Take responsibility, even if you won't accept blame.

In case you're wondering, yes, this annoys me slightly. Cope.

We've only had professional game developers for at least 10+ years :)

It reminds of the Journal of MUD Research now Journal of Virtual Environments ( http://www.pennmush.org/~jomr/ )

Maybe we'll see more well written articles like the clasic Bartle's "HEARTS, CLUBS, DIAMONDS, SPADES: PLAYERS WHO SUIT MUDS" ( http://www.pennmush.org/~jomr/v1n1/bartle.html )

Of course we've had Gamasutra hosting articles by Ernest Adams.
i.e. http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20010521/adams_0 1.htm

We've only had professional game developers for at least 10+ years :)

It reminds of the Journal of MUD Research now Journal of Virtual Environments ( http://www.pennmush.org/~jomr/ )

Maybe we'll see more well written articles like the clasic Bartle's "HEARTS, CLUBS, DIAMONDS, SPADES: PLAYERS WHO SUIT MUDS" ( http://www.pennmush.org/~jomr/v1n1/bartle.html )

Of course we've had Gamasutra hosting articles by Ernest Adams.
i.e. http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20010521/adams_0 1.htm

> Richard Bartle is credited with characterizing RPG players into 4 categories: Explorer, Socializer, Achiever, and Killer.

Ah the landmark, Hearts, Clubs, Spades, Diamonds paper. The Journal of MUD Research has been renamed "Journal of Virtual Environments"
i.e.
http://www.pennmush.org/~jomr/v1n1jove.html

> Killers can go hostile and attack anyone
This is the BIGGEST problem I have with Diablo 2. I *don't* want to PvP, yet some jerk goes hostile in town, then finds me outside of town and attack me *without* my consent! WTF? Why don't *BOTH* people have to agree to a duel??!!

That and "character classes" turned me off. (Diablo 2 is a stripped down EQ, and I *can* see the fun in that) but I'd rather have a skill-based-profession style of game play.

> Enjoy D2 if that's your bag
I agree: "Play whatever floats your boat." ;-)

I'll probably pick up the expansion just to check it out, but I don't see myself spending hours and hours fighting monsters just to get that "phat l00t"