Mucking

It was a grey and stormy evening, 4 years ago. The wind let out a stereotypical howl, as the lightning couldn't just 'strike' but naturally had to dance across the heavens to the chorus of roaring thunder bearing down upon the world below. Somewhere on this world, a computer screen, ever in keeping with the dark aura present that fateful evening, turned from the safe warm familiarity some call a Windows Desktop to an altogether more sinister shade of black. The white text against that signified my leap into the great adventures of the world of online Mucking. Back in the good old days of 2004, at the time on the famous FurryMuck, a little known character called Entrahbunny was born... or at least created on a persistent storage medium. Yes, I know that was the silliest overdrawn mess of an opening filled with more forced clichés than you can shake a stick at, but it should warm you up nicely for what we're about to talk about, namely mucks! For those who don't know what mucks are, which might be a large number of the 'new generation' so to speak, the world of mucking is a simple text based world. Long before the days of fancy 3D MMoRPGs, people had to use their imagination to create worlds, so everything seen around you in a muck exists as a series of objects, rooms or characters with a description. Actions and words are guaged not by your ability to wiggle your wiimote stupidly fast, but by your ability to type out long and rich pieces of text to one another.

Or that's the theory of mucks anyway. Naturally when you mix theory with furries, long and rich pieces of text quite often just means posing that yiff scene that's the same as the previous hrair just in a slightly different way. Still, if you dig deep enough, there's a lot of interesting things that can be done, worlds to be explored and admired, people to meet and talk to, and communities to feel part of.

Sadly most of the people I used to know well in muckworld have since moved on, so I tend to be pretty scarce myself these days (EnteirahB is still around occasionally on FM if you're lucky). However in the years I was an active part of the scene, I accumulated quite a lot of useful knowledge on the muck language MPI. Describing objects and rooms is all well and good, but with the use of an often underestimated (and nightmare to read) scripting language, so much more is possible. As the people for whom these things were originally designed are generally no longer around, I thought I'd share some of this code, so if you are one of those still using the mucks, you can recreate some random little bits and pieces and maybe learn some things along the way.

Oh, and if there's anything you want to know about things on here, or just ideas for info to do with mucking that you'd find useful, then just give me a shout and I'll see what I can do!

~ FM, EnteirahB

 


 

~ Available Snippets ~

Holodeck - A small project to create a holodeck. The basic principle is that it's a room which the description can be changed for by calling out to the computer. In addition, new programs can be added by anyone, allowing a gallery of scenes to be built up collaboratively.

Ship Com system (Coming Soon) - Originally developed as a comm system for a spaceship, this basically allowed a com to be set with a collection of channels broadcasting to various roomsup to broadcast to a series of rooms. Then by sending a message on a designated channel everyone in that set of rooms would hear the message.

The Christmas Tree (Coming Soon) - A relatively simple script. People could hang their items on the tree in the run up to christmas, building up a festive bit of cheer for all to see in the holiday season.

The Dating Service (Coming Soon) - A pretty indepth script, designed to sit on an object known only as 'The Computer'. Furries would enter basic info, and it would generate a matchlist for them based upon other people on the system. I hope to pop this online eventually, I'm just not sure how complete it actually was in its final form (I still have it listed as a beta).



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