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If you don't care about the graphics, you can role-play in a Middle-earth sort of environment at MUME (telnet link). Level-related stuff happens there too, but at least it's free-as-in-beer to play.

A proof that God does not exist:
http://www.pvv.org/~kim/Bevis.html

So there, now you know that God does not exist,
and therefore cannot have created life.
And Darwin was right.

Kim0

One of the old MUD's (MUME: http://mume.pvv.org/mume.php) works a bit along those lines. Well the Personality line at least ;)

In the last version I played, you didnot really pick a character type so much as learn various abilities which in turn made learning other abilities in that school easier. So, as a caster type I could lear n healing spells and offensive spells, but if I did not specialise in healing or offense, I would not be very good at either.

But I hear what you are saying, though it would be a terrible challenge to create a world that had persistence and maintained permanency, allowed personality and psychology but avoided chaos.

This layout I also find interesting, and they seem to have considered programming during the design.

I've been using a keyboard for over 24 years, and have never learned to type properly. Recently slashdot had an article about Das Keyboard where the keycaps were all blank.

I think the keyboard is way overpriced, but it gave me the idea of cutting up some labels and putting them over a couple of keys to force myself not to look at the keys. After a couple of days I ended up blanking all the keys on my keyboard. What surprised me was I hit the same keys with different fingers depending what words I'm typing. My accuracy tanked immediately, but after spending a short time with a typing tutor my typing is back up to speed, and a lot more comfortable.

I wonder now if my brain can learn more than one layout? The most interesting read I've seen about typing is this guy who developed the Arensito layout, as well as his article on Optimal Keyboard Layout. Maybe it's possible to know a layout for typing text fast (eg. DVORAK), a layout for most computers (eg. QWERTY), and a layout for programming (eg. ARENSITO or MYOWN:-) )

I've been using a keyboard for over 24 years, and have never learned to type properly. Recently slashdot had an article about Das Keyboard where the keycaps were all blank.

I think the keyboard is way overpriced, but it gave me the idea of cutting up some labels and putting them over a couple of keys to force myself not to look at the keys. After a couple of days I ended up blanking all the keys on my keyboard. What surprised me was I hit the same keys with different fingers depending what words I'm typing. My accuracy tanked immediately, but after spending a short time with a typing tutor my typing is back up to speed, and a lot more comfortable.

I wonder now if my brain can learn more than one layout? The most interesting read I've seen about typing is this guy who developed the Arensito layout, as well as his article on Optimal Keyboard Layout. Maybe it's possible to know a layout for typing text fast (eg. DVORAK), a layout for most computers (eg. QWERTY), and a layout for programming (eg. ARENSITO or MYOWN:-) )

This comparison is as close as you're going to get. It shows the various distances travelled by your fingers when typing on the Dvorak, Qwerty and Arensito layouts.

Dvorak (and Arensito) are layouts designed to minimize finger movement. At the end of the day, my hands and wrists are not tired since I use a modifed Dvorak layout. The layouts here are more convienient for programmers and are the ones I use.

Personally, I learnt typing at school partly out of being a computer geek at that time and it was one of the best things I did as it means I have a fairly decent typing speed and I'm reasonably accurate. My accuracy is also a lot better as I can watch what I type rather than looking at the keyboard all the time...

Don''t forget Cherry Poptart. (NSFW)

The selling of virtual objects is a good reason that all MMO* should have some mechanism, in game, for the unwilling transfer of equipment and unwilling permanent destruction of equipment.

Take MUME as an example, in it you can be pickpocketed, have your corpse looted, fall into a death trap where there is no reasonable way to recover any of your equipment, just plain break things from over use, hide things pretty much anywhere that persist... as long as no one else looks for them, give equipment to powerfull NPCs.

In an environment like that, things can have great value, but with no guarentee that you will have something tomorrow, would you ever buy anything with out of game money? Would you ever expect to see something ou had loaned to someone ever again?

For those who don't care about the MM of ORPGs, why not try out MUME? It's been around for years, and just keeps getting better.

<a href="http://mume.pvv.org/">MUME</a>

I play Mume. The extra Tolkien touch just adds to the geekiness.

• Very global community since _The Lord of the Rings_ has been translated into so many languages.
• Huuuge world due to the contributions of so many people over the years.
• Great variety of play types, you can play characters in safer areas fighting traditional computer controlled 'mobs', or you can join the ongoing war between the forces of light and dark.
• You can play on either the good(human,elf,dwarf,hobbit) side or the evil(orc,troll,evil human). I personally found the war aspect one of the best, since it is very exciting and challenging to play against other humans(I was a genocide player too, ;).
• many types of quests(I'll never forget my solo quest sneaking into Moria and the sound of those orc drums!),
• a unique 'travel point' system which meant you had to travel to gain levels,
• a herblore system that you could use hard to find plants to make neat potions,
• the world is quite detailed, even down to a language system that worked by distorting the words of someone speaking based on how well your character knew the language they used.
• and probably a bunch of other things I am forgetting, but anyway, it is the best one, ;)

I strongly recommend powwow (powtty is its windows cousin). No frills, and hands down still the best *nix client out there. Made originally for MUD MUME (Multi-Users in Middle Earth), powwow, a UNIX client based on cancan, is available from: this page. powtty is available from this page. All these clients are free and open source.

I strongly recommend powwow (powtty is its windows cousin). No frills, and hands down still the best *nix client out there. Made originally for MUD MUME (Multi-Users in Middle Earth), powwow, a UNIX client based on cancan, is available from: this page. powtty is available from this page. All these clients are free and open source.

I strongly recommend powwow (powtty is its windows cousin). No frills, and hands down still the best *nix client out there. Made originally for MUD MUME (Multi-Users in Middle Earth), powwow, a UNIX client based on cancan, is available from: this page. powtty is available from this page. All these clients are free and open source.

MUME, for those who don't know, is a MUD based on Middle Earth. My question is, are they in danger of a lawsuit from the sue-happy Entertainment Industry? In the past, I could see how something like that could slide, as there are relatively few players on the MUD (several hundred--a lot for a mud, not a lot when compared to the number of people who have computers, for example), but now there's going to be a MMORPG, and MUME is sucking potential money away from it.

MUME: Multi Users in Middle Earth. The MUD based on Tolkien's work solved this problem by having an ongoing war between the good races(human,dwarf,elf,hobbit) and the evil races(orc,troll,black numenorean). You could choose to play on either side of the war. It makes for a much more challenging game when your opponents are humans.
For the less combative folks, MUME also had things such as herblore skills where you needed to find rare herbs to use and quests to find rare items and you could even fish! 8^) In addition to the typical experience points for defeating monsters, MUME also had a unique system of 'travel points' that you could obtain by exploring far off lands where people hadn't been.
I was one of those that loved the excitement of penetrating deep into lands held by the evil races and participating in the war by hunting down , or being hunted by, members of the evil races. One of the most frightening and fun experiences I also had was sneaking into Moria on a solo quest
MUME was also really awesome because LotR was translated into 30 something languages and so it was a very large international MUD with contributions from many people and so the world itself was very large.(and 10 years ago the net was more predominately we physics and compsci students and not so many AOLers ;)
Ahh, nice trip down memory lane there, ;) I played for 3 or 4 years religiously, then sporadically for a few more, my primary character being an elf named 'Vosh'.

I've never been a fan of graphical MUDs. The problem is that the graphics are awful. With a text-based game, you're left to your own imagination, whereas with Everquest you get the cheapo cartoon graphics forced down your throat.

Secondly, without a strong player-killing element I don't see how interest can be sustained. Pre-programmed quests can only go so far, and AI is no match for fighting against real opponents.

I recommend that the next Everquest has an ongoing war, with two opposing sides. There would be no restrictions on killing the other side, and would ensure the game is much more exciting and constantly fresh. This is what it's like in the MUD I play (MUME), and the game has several extra dimensions because of it. In fact, the game technically revolves around it.

The game is constantly dangerous and exciting, you can never let your guard down, because you never know when you might come accross *a Dreadful Orc* who is ready to knife you in the back.

Everquest has already ripped off many things from MUDs, so why don't they rip off the best parts?

CD-quality sound can produce frequencies at 44kHz and the inverse of the length of the sound. Clearly, the data filtered out is not tiny.

CD sound, if the anti-aliasing and playback filters are perfect brick walls (which is impossible) would produce an maximum frequency of 22.05kHz. The Nyquist sampling theorem states that to store a given frequency in a sampled medium, the sampling rate must be at least twice as high or you get aliasing. In practice, though, the sampling rate is increased a bit more to compensate for non-ideal filter rolloffs. This response is helped somewhat by the use of oversampling and neat DSP techniques during playback, but the frequency response generally follows that of a sinc function (sin(x)/x).

Sampling theory is pretty fascinating stuff! HammerSound has a decent explanation of basic audio recording theory, and there are plenty of other sources if you are interested.

What is shorten (.shn)?

Still ticking. I just logged on and there were a 100 or so folks. With the LotR movies coming out it will probably gain even more popularity.
MUME
--

Here, any unallocated monies are donated to the Red Cross (probably because the founders are primarily Swiss :) ) and equipment (I believe they use SPARC's) is to be donated to the FSF on dissolution. Contributing members (who donate the money) have a say in how it is spent.

This may be worth a look to see how others have approached the problem.

As background, MUME used to run at epfl.ch, until one day, the server crashed and they asked the sysadmin to start it up again. The sysadmin went "what MUD?", looked at the bandwidth stats and told them to get a new site! The force of the players wanting to keep it open was enough to get money donated and a site sorted out. It has been there for 2 years now.