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[TempAcc]

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EDIT: I still haven't got the character I request on InfernoMOO. Seems like its more broken then I imagined.

[Cles]

Weird. I joined Inferno just recently, and brought a friend too. There were complaints about new players arriving on chatnet.

[Astral]

Likely a vocal minority, but stuff like that is why these games die out. No new blood means fewer interactions that aren't predictable.

[Kruniac]

Last I checked, HellMOO went full carebear with no apartment break ins and no PvP outside of certain zones or some other such crap.

Then there was a spinoff with no orphan rape, which defeats the point of HellMOO.

Also, the admins on the one I played most recently were pretty lame in general. I heard a rumor concerning some drama or another and mentioned it (vaguely) in chat. I was teleported before an admin and questioned about my "trouble making". Really uncalled for, especially since I barely understood what was going on.

In short, I think the good old days of Hellmoo are long gone.

Also, whatshisname got shot IRL during a bank robbery (Or so I was told). RIP whatsyourname.

[zombat]

Who was this whatshisname?

And did they get killed whilst robbing a bank or whilst someone was robbing a bank?

[TempAcc]

I haven't heard anything of the sort.
It seems all the non boring hellmoo variants are dead and gone. The only suriving one is the original core that got corrupted into carebearMOO and is held tightly in gilmore's/mada's grip, both being unhealthly obsessed about making sure hellmoo never goes open source, in some weird plan to monetize it, somehow.

[anubite]

Hi,

Sorry to bump a long dead thread. But I come bearing gifts. Or something like that.

I'm a semi-veteran, totally retired (for like a year now) player of both HellMoo, InfernoMoo and... gosh, what was that third one? Anyway, great game, really great - like, I can't play MUDs anymore. This game has the best little minimap feature, and its exploration, crafting, vehicle and character-building crap is top notch. If only it weren't such a horrible mess of ancient code and bad coding practices... I compare all MUDs and even most online games to this one and always find them coming up short for me.

It's a great game that has ALWAYS been plagued by bad moderation and a few bad apples ruining the fun for everyone. I don't play it anymore just because of that. I know I would if there were a better community maintaining it.

I'm posting the source code that was leaked last year to this thread. It contains InfernoMOO and 2010-Hellmoo database files for people to start with. Let's be honest though - don't even try to host this game unless you're Unix guru and comfortable in learning a super weird scripting language that dates aaaaal the way back to the start of the internet (this basically means very few people can actually host this game successfully, so I dunno why the source code has to be kept under lock and key). Super cool little game engine, super hard to maintain and run. Nevermind --expand-- upon. There are only a few tutorials to get you started and not much else. It's pretty tough just getting started.

If there's anybody out there interested in building off the amazing gameplay this game provides, please take up the torch. The original creators did such a bangup job. I wish more MUDs or just games in general would use this style of gameplay (especially the deep-but-minimalist combat, amazingly detailed minimap, extensive screen reader support, vehicles, open-ended character-advancement system, and crafting system).

As a note, you may need to fix the YACC includes in order to build the original engine. It isn't too hard if you're familiar with C. You don't need to know that much about YACC to fix it. You should not need to do this unless you're changing the underlying framework ... highly recommended not doing this, btw.

The HellMoo 2010 database is really old but very fleshed out starting point. It will not have any of the bugfixes that were pushed between 2010 and now. It's had its user data scrubbed too, so it can't be mined for personal information. If you need help with something, your best bet is to ask on one of the programming discussion channels on HellMoo. People tend to answer basic questions there. Again, don't even bother trying this though unless you're a competent programmer already. This isn't friendly C# or Javascript that you're going to be working with here.

https://mega.nz/#!CB1UEKYC!qRG6q2pJ317e5eYvB9w_vabJG-xJogdzxX9N8emOlnI

I would host this myself. Maybe someday I will. But it's too much of a hassle for me right now.

[beorn080]

It's fine, though you got my hopes up that someone was heading back into one. I tried to log into InfernoMoo and evidently there was a wipe or something, and I could no longer access my account or make a new one. The help email that was on the front page was decommissioned, and I gave up trying.Though the source code seems fascinating.

[anubite]

As far as I know, HellMoo is built off LambdaMoo, which was basically the first of its kind. It has a built-in syntax parser for a unique game-definition language that's C-like but runs more like Javascript (interpreted). Considering this was written sometime in 1990, this stuff was way, way ahead of its time. You're looking at a neat relic when you look at the source.

The challenges of running and maintaining the game lie in its Database. Hellmoo writes to a flatfile - stuff is stored at addresses in the file in a manner I am not experienced enough in to understand. Basically, a game object is broken apart into pieces and stored all over the place. Hellmoo would be geatly improved by having its database shit rewritten from scratch I think, but good luck with that one! A lot of the problems for maintaining the game lie in managing that giant save file (IO is very expensive, even with a SSD on your server). Everything from game-object code to player passwords are stored in that file.

InfernoMoo was kinda dead even before I quit anyway, I don't think it's coming back. At its peak we had what, 10 concurrent players? Some bad decisions killed it hard after there had been just a bit of growth.

I really wish we could bring the game into something more approaching the mainstream, it's got a lot of broad appeal with lots of ways to play.

[beorn080]

Yeah. I can't get a new account at all on infernomoo. If you could have an Admin PM here about it, if they are still interested in players, that would be awesome.

[anubite]

It is likely they've closed the Moo for now. Possibly they're going to revamp stuff and reopen it. You might be able to get "beta" access? I'm just speculating though, based on how things were previously handled.

[Kruniac]

Who was this whatshisname?

And did they get killed whilst robbing a bank or whilst someone was robbing a bank?

Wow. I don't even remember posting that.

Whatshisname was a higher-end player. I don't recall his name, nor can I find any random pastebins of him. He ran GRU, IIRC, and was really nice to me. Stabz, maybe?

The story I got after I came back to the game (after a long break) was that he was shot trying to intervene in a bank robbery. Then again, HellMOO players are on par with /b/tards with regard to talking smack, so who knows if it's true.

Dude showed me the ropes and pawned people with a 14mm Hammer, so I respected him.

Anyway, my statement stands. HellMOO went carebear when they disallowed apartment burglary, made PvP situational/zone based, and got rid of raping orphans. It was a legendary game in the sense that it was absolutely unique and random douchebags ruined it.

[zombat]

Yeah... they did say Genmac died a coke overdose for years, then what do you know? Genmac pops up with a new Moo.

[anubite]

The main problem with apartment burglary was it was too easy. The ONLY way you could actually play after a certain point in wealth was to log on, do a WHO, make sure all your enemies weren't on, then you could maybe go exploring and farming so long as you did a cautionary who every so often and had a quick means to return home in-case a bunch of douchebags came online.

You could invest in all the diamond locks you want. You could invest in all the security you want. Somebody could still break into your apartment and rip you off - by themselves - AND get away - in the time it would take for you to get home.

Then combine this with the fact there were very few good apartment places, that you had a boat map to let people find any adrift vessels to loot (and that boats had no policing besides shit drones, not that cops could do anything to prevent quick burglaries)... It juts made stealing too easy. And then you had shitty mechanics you could abuse, like who telling your corpmates where you're at exactly (allowing for the worst sort of backstabbery cheese), or apartment plaques telling people where people lived...

I loved apartment burglary, I participated a lot and was robbed a lot. It was fun. It also got old fast. There needed to be more security options, more interplay between robber and rob-ee, more options to hide your stuff or secure it...

And more mechanics to prevent people from picking on new players. Seriously, too many new players were griefed into leaving. Some people were never going to handle the robbery mechanic well, but they didn't need to be subject to additional misery on top of it.

Carebears should be allowed to play too, you can't have a MOO survive if you populate it with just assholes.

Ideally, it's a great mechanic that because of its existence forces people to band together and the game then becomes about that balance of power between corporations. Too often it got to be toxic; the burglars were honestly too successful - low risk, high reward. Even if you killed a burglar in your apartment, you'd get their shit - but so what? They'd just try again soon enough, not like lockpicks were that hard to make. All they'd lose is whatever crap they had on them and in many cases they'd just try to rob you half-naked. Only way you could even try to retaliate was to break into their apartment - which you couldn't do if you didn't have the right friends or weren't brainy yourself, which you still couldn't do if you hadn't exactly pinpointed where they kept their stuff, which you might not if you yourself weren't an asshole too... The worst thing a burglar would lose on a failed attempt was a little playtime and a lockpick. You could lose a lot more time if they took some rare, hard-earned thing from you. It was really disproportionate. Lockpicking ought to have been more challenging.

Not saying where HellMOO went was eventually better for the game, but where it was certainly wasn't ideal, either.

[beorn080]

You can survive with just assholes. Hellmoo at various times did. The problem is this. There is no incentive for the assholes to be assholes towards each other. They aren't doing it for loot, but just to piss off people. So you get a small band of highly,skilled, and generally supported by the admins, group of assholes, who just constantly antagonize everyone else and ruin their enjoyment. Honeatly, the loot fountains and other new player assists most likely just make it worse, as the skilled players get the same advantage from scrapwoods, and can rob anyone who uses it. Then comes the locking down of certain areas, trees/ants being the general one, such that players have a difficult time transitioning out of the mid early game once they finish the lampreys off.