Anyone know of a good & free MUD I can run...

[DarkFame]

... on my server at school.

Thanks in advance.

[kriss]

http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=mud&s...ojects&x=0&y=0

Take a look there

Good luck

[DarkFame]

Thanks!

[gcclinux]

Sorry about my ignorance but what does MUD stands for ???

[kriss]

Multi-User Dungeon

From Jargon File (4.3.0, 30 APR 2001) :

MUD /muhd/ n. [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt. Multi-User Dimension]
1. A class of virtual reality experiments accessible via the Internet.
These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have multiple
`locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat, traps,
puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability for
characters to build more structure onto the database that represents the
existing world. 2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often
lowercased and/or verbed; thus, one may speak of `going mudding', etc.

Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
game still exist today and are sometimes generically called BartleMUDs.
There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by earlier versions
of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked to the commercial MUD
run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto: "You haven't _lived_ 'til
you've _died_ on MUD!"); however, this is false -- Richard Bartle
explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain in 1985. BT was upset at
this, as they had already printed trademark claims on some maps and
posters, which were released and created the myth.

Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the MUD
concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD). Many of
these had associated bulletin-board systems for social interaction.
Because these had an image as `research' they often survived
administrative hostility to BBSs in general. This, together with the
fact that Usenet feeds were often spotty and difficult to get in the
U.K., made the MUDs major foci of hackish social interaction there.

AberMUD and other variants crossed the Atlantic around 1988 and
quickly gained popularity in the U.S.; they became nuclei for large
hacker communities with only loose ties to traditional hackerdom (some
observers see parallels with the growth of Usenet in the early 1980s).
The second wave of MUDs (TinyMUD and variants) tended to emphasize
social interaction, puzzles, and cooperative world-building as opposed
to combat and competition (in writing, these social MUDs are sometimes
referred to as `MU*', with `MUD' implicitly reserved for the more
game-oriented ones). By 1991, over 50% of MUD sites were of a third
major variety, LPMUD, which synthesizes the combat/puzzle aspects of
AberMUD and older systems with the extensibility of TinyMud. In 1996 the
cutting edge of the technology is Pavel Curtis's MOO, even more
extensible using a built-in object-oriented language. The trend toward
greater programmability and flexibility will doubtless continue.

The state of the art in MUD design is still moving very rapidly, with
new simulation designs appearing (seemingly) every month. Around 1991
there was an unsuccessful movement to deprecate the term MUD itself,
as newer designs exhibit an exploding variety of names corresponding to
the different simulation styles being explored. It survived. See also
bonk/oif, FOD, link-dead, mudhead, talk mode.