Early History of ArmageddonMUD

[mansa]

Every once in a while, people get curious.

So, as to that note:

Jhalavar:

Azroen writes:

>First, the person who created/started Armageddon was Dan
>Brumleve, aka. Jhalavar. Not Kelvik.

Hi Azroen. =)

>I don't have an exact start up date, but I know that Arm
>was running with a full head of steam in '91,

1991 sounds about right. I was 13 when I started it, and my memory is pretty foggy and has probably been partially rewritten...

DikuMUD had been around for some time before then. I'd been playing DikuMUDs for about a year already (since 1990?). There were dozens of Diku clones running even back then.

I was the only coder until I quit in late 1993 (early 1994?). After that I kind of lost track of it.

Here's how I remember it, in roughly chronological order...

1991 -- mid 1992:

Armageddon started on a Sun3 named iboga.stat.uiuc.edu with stock DikuMUD code. The first thing I added was an online creation system -- DikuMUD rooms/objects/mobiles(NPCs) had traditionally been stored in a cryptic text file format. When this got underway people showed up to help build the world. Some time later we had a skeleton of a world built (centering around the first version of Allanak which I made, not at all the same as the current one.).

It started attracting players around this time (1992?). It was pretty advanced (compared to other DikuMUDs) even then, but it was disappointing to see people take little interest in role-playing. My initial goal had been realism, and I was somewhat disillusioned when people figured out the limitations of the game. I spent a lot of time on the code, removing loopholes, adding features, and fixing bugs. There were frequent crashes and reboots. This is around the time that I overlorded Nessalin. (Until then it had been just me and Yxya.)

In the middle of all this we had to move machines a few times. The code was ported to a Sun4 (gauss.stat.uiuc.edu). When the statisticians kept complaining, somebody (who?) let us use an Apollo machine (an unusual and interesting Unix). This was a hellish port.

mid 1992 -- early 1993:

Now there were some really creative people working with full force. I trashed the old Allanak and made a completely new one (which still stands, but with many improvements I'm sure). Ur created Tuluk and everything around it and was overlorded. Everything that had existed in 1991 had been replaced.

Armageddon was looking less and less like a DikuMUD, both internally and externally. Many of its recognizable features were now in place: the magick system, skill trees, the guilds, the races, riding animals, wagons, spices, bartering, the front page menu, the character application process, permanent death, etc. But it was mostly all the little things that added to the game's complexity and realism.

I wrote a simple language (to replace hardcoded extensions) called ASML (Armageddon's Shitty MUD Language) which I later replaced with the less-shitty DMPL (Dan's MUD Programming Language). (Is this still around?)

People were starting to role-play a little bit, but not enough to make it convincing.

1993 -- 1994:

At this point the model was powerful enough to support role-playing without having to frequently contradict your PC's self-interest. The concept of clans was established -- this was a very player-driven phenomenon. The staff had been primarily focused on administration and creation, but now began to include quests (interference in mortal affairs) as one of its major functions.

A few other happenings in this era... We moved machines again; this time to thrash.isca.uiowa.edu (I can't remember the architecture -- maybe thrash was Apollo and studsys.mscs.mu.edu was AIX or some other hideous thing...). thrash turned into a longer-term home. Azroen was overlorded.

This is when (in my mind) the game started to become a success. It was due to a combination of encouragement and enforcement. Quests made the game mechanics effectively unknowable (more like real life), and clans encouraged players to interact more. And backing all of it up was brutal enforcement of the role-playing standards, which turned out to be a necessity in an imperfect simulation.

1994 -- now:

From reading some of the docs on this site, it looks like Armageddon has come a long way in the last 6 years. I'm really proud to have been a part of it.

I'd log on and say hi, but I forgot my password again. =(

Jhalavar

http://www.armageddon.org/HyperNews/get/general-archive2000/846.html

Perhaps this should be put on the website somewhere, and ammended to it when Azroen left for Real Life.  And also mark how many times Halaster has left and came back and left and came back and left and came back and left and came back.

[WarriorPoet]

Neat. I remember the question being asked before, but that's the first time I've ever seen that.

I wonder, does this mystery Jhalavar still stop in to play with us? Or would that be like an old-school dealer getting cleaned up off of smack but 'still taking the occasional hit'?

-WP

[Xygax]

I met him last year sometime, yeah.

[X-D]

I'm betting his PC is that certain boulder..

There were certain funny things from back in the day though, when Ness, Jhal and Yxya were the only overlords. Myself, I started very shortly after Ness was overlorded.

I tell you though, I certainly miss NONE of those machines

EVIL LAGGY PORTS!!!
You could actually tell when another player logged in by the lag.
who
There are 2 visible players other then yourself.

east
5 seconds
east
5 seconds
east
16 seconds
who
there are 3 visible players other then yourself.

crap.

And that was peak.

[Olafson]

I didn't start until it was on thrash, must have been in 1994 or late 93.  But, I can remember having the queue to get logged into the game.  There was a player limit of about 30?  35?  Yikes.  I don't miss those days.

[X-D]

Ooohh, I had almost forgotten that...cringe.

[marko]

I didn't start until it was on thrash, must have been in 1994 or late 93.  But, I can remember having the queue to get logged into the game.  There was a player limit of about 30?  35?  Yikes.  I don't miss those days.

Oh, how I remember that limit.

Trying to get in all the time.

[Malifaxis]

God I hated that limit.  I remember some huge meeting in allanak and we were at limit.  A fight broke out, about four people died, and then the mud crashed.

And I couldn't log back in because of that damn limit.

[Xygax]

I believe in '92, the player limit was 29, and this was because the OS permitted only a total of 32 file descriptors per process, and we lost one for stdin, one for stdout, and one for stderr.

I played back when the game was hosted on iboga, and I remember the "hellish port"...  the worst downtime evar.

-- X

[mansa]

I found more to post on this very important thread:

Jhalavar

Armageddon first appeared on Scott Goehring's mudlist in February, 1993 (see http://ftp.ccs.neu.edu/pub/mud/docs/mudlists/vol5/mudlist.v5n5), and it's listed as running on iboga.stat.uiuc.edu 4444. This must have been a grand opening of sorts.

Now I seem to remember that it was on the Sun4 (gauss.stat.uiuc.edu) before we had to move onto iboga. Before gauss, it was on a different Sun3 in the same network (it's original home), but I can't remember its name.

It's listed as down between September and November 1993, when it reappears on studsys.mscs.mu.edu. This was the hellish port I remember. It's still there in January 1994, when Goehring's last mudlist was published.

I found a different mudlist at http://sensemedia.net/sprawl/11286 that puts it at thrash.isca.uiowa.edu in May 1995, but I'm pretty sure it moved to thrash well a long time before then.

Jhalavar
http://www.armageddon.org/HyperNews/get/general-archive2000/846/1.html

[V1agraKank]

I absolutely love stories about the old days.  Even if it's just a silly story about Flint's or something, it holds a certain magical quality to me, as a newer player.  

I've been playing for about four years.

[Halaster]

Jhalavar[/url]"]

It's listed as down between September and November 1993, when it reappears on studsys.mscs.mu.edu. This was the hellish port I remember. It's still there in January 1994, when Goehring's last mudlist was published.

Jhalavar

Hah, I remember that because I started playing in late 1992.  I guess it was September when this happened according to the above, but I remember when it went down that time.  We were playing and a system message said something about "going down for a few minutes to fix a bug".  An hour later, they had a banner that said "Down until after the Christmas Holidays".  Were were, of course, highly annoyed about that.

It came back up a little early, which I guess was November according to the above.  And then I applied for staff that December.