Luckyspin

So who is this Luckyspin I hear you ask? Well, maybe you didn’t, but I’m gonna tell you anyway. Luckyspin was my MUDing alter ego back in the day. Most people probably don’t even know what a MUD is, but that’s progress for you Gamers nowadays spend hours gazing at beautifully rendered 3D games, but back in the day, we had to make do with text based reality games if you wanted to be part of an online commmunity. MUDs were really the forerunners to MMORPGs in ever respect. For me, MUDing was an introduction to gaming, the internet and programming. It was a big part of why I became who I am today. For posterities sake, I’ve kept some of my writings from back then. To remind me of the fun and friends I had and made.
Below is my history of TerraFirma. You might also be interested in my philosophy that drove how I built that world, and about MUDs in general.

The History of TerraFirmA

(from Luckyspin’s perspective circa 1999)

I first started mudding in the final year of my undergraduate degree, this being 1995. I was introduced to a MUD called Terradome by a friend, Neville, and this was where I learnt what MUDs were all about. Terradome was an Aber derivative, and as luck would have it one of the most innovative around. But I didn’t know this at the time. As a runner I wasn’t that vocal, just preferring to get on with the job and try to solve those damn quests! My course was quite hard so I didn’t have that much time for mudding but finally I managed to make it to Apprentice after about six months.

It was at this point that my MUD career really took off. I got promoted to Counsel fairly quickly and was very keen to help out with Terradome and constantly pestered the admin, Boogie and Gly, who were running it at that time for a job. In the time I had to spare I proceeded to run up about 15 other wizards on the various Aber MUDs that were around and soon realised just how different Terradome actually was.

Eventually, Gly came up with the idea of an email newsletter and gave me the job of editor. I recruited a couple of people to work for me, founded the Ezine, calling it FreeWheeling, and published it on the Web. FreeWheeling went from strength to strength and I was getting more involved with the running of the game so eventually had to hand over the reins and concentrate on other tasks.

At this point we had a bit of bad luck. The server in the UK that Terradome was running on was taken down and we had to move the MUD to Denmark. Gohl and I worked very hard with the code to port it from BSD Unix to HP-UX, in fact I had to learn C from scratch!! We eventually re-opened and Terradome was back in business. I wrote and coded my first quest, Beilefeld, and started to get to grips with the beast that was the source code. From the time I was promoted to Counsel to the time Terradome reopened was about six months and in that time I had been promoted to Advisor for my hard work. It’s still the most rapid ascent into the Court today =)

I continued to write code and put in new quests whilst working on the game engine, until eventually I made the rank of Emperor. By this time I was in sole charge of Terradome and things were going well. A new addition had been made to the code team, a certain Lady by the name of Cyn. I’d watched her run as a mortal and we had become quite close friends.

The legacy I had inherited from Boogie was an innovative MUD that was really buggy. When I took over the TerraCode at version 1.5 it was clear that although the innovation was there the stability was not. A crash per hour was considered normal, but I knew this wasn’t acceptable. With the help of Cyn I began a programme to clean up the entire MUD source, one that was to take a period of two years! We began at the roots, and I had Cyn rewrite the back-end generation engine the MUD used to turn its zone files into the areas you see within TerraFirmA today. I concentrated on the in-game code and interactivity of the game, going through about 60% of the code to clean it up and remove all the crash bugs. This entailed rewriting and improving a lot of the player/mobile interaction, and most of the systems within the game such as the banks, the stores and the quests, whilst continually tracking down and eradicating crash bugs. At the same time I was busy adding new quests and features including the Toll system, degradable armour and weapons, the Morphing system, and more.

About six months into this programme we had our second setback. Somewhere in Paris the Internet backbone was having major work done to it, and this resulted in a laggy connection for all of the UK players to Terradome. It was unplayable, and since the majority of our player base at the time was from the UK I was forced to find a new site within the UK. At this point in time I decided it was time I got my own MUD and TerraFirmA was born! We opened in April 1996, and have gone from strength to strength ever since. Most of the UK players found the connection much more agreeable, but we kept Terradome open for the overseas players. For over a year I was in charge of running both TD and TF! Stress!!

Whilst the code was coming along fine, I still felt that the playing experience could be improved significantly. One of the major complaints of the players at the time was that if they lost their connection, this meant that they effectively quit the game and dropped all their equipment. It wasn’t due to the game but to the Internet and dodgy modems, but was still annoying. To solve this problem the Northern Lights LinkDeath code was put in, which allows players five minutes to reconnect before their character loses its place. This solved the connection problems – but what about those crashes? After a crash everyone was forced to start again, as if the MUD had reset with no warning. This was a painful lesson to learn but it became evident to me that we could never make the MUD 100% stable due to the very nature of its development. To solve this we put in a system that could catch the MUD when it crashed, save its current state and restart it with everyone in exactly the same place. Newer runners might not even realise when this happens now, but it was a major step forward in the development of TerraFirmA. With the addition of the LinkDeath and the Crash/Recovery code I had ensured that the players’ connections could be maintained and that even if the MUD crashed they could just continue as if nothing had happened.

With that under our belts I took time to look at the overall picture of TerraFirmA, and found a game that had lots of really cool quests and zones in it but that had been sewn together in a mess. We were running out of logical places to add new areas and everything was pretty disjointed. The solution to this problem was a mammoth task, known as the TerraForming project. This involved taking the entire world apart at the zone level and sewing it all back together in a completely different way. From inception to completion this took about nine months and lots of painstaking work from the TerraForming team, but we got the project done and TerraFirmA was much the better for it.

This too was a major step forward in the evolution of TerraFirmA. We had managed to create a world that was consistent and had depth and history, continuity and room for ample expansion. It’s also where our ’slogan’ originated from, which, it turns out, now works on several levels!

When I took over Terradome we were running version 1.3 of the TerraCode. When I set up TerraFirmA it had progressed to version 1.5. At the time of writing we are running version 3.8 and we have undergone a major upheaval in the way we develop the MUD, encompassing projects such as TerraForming, several new levelling systems, a new Majick system, new quests, features galore and plenty more! We now have a code repository with bifocal code streams, teams for coding, publicity, zone writing, Web-site development, editing, testing and more, and with about twenty people being involved in contributing to the community it’s a huge job just keeping track of everything! Work goes on apace though!

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