There once was a guy who played MUDs
 But the MUDs that he played were all duds
    "I'll write one," said he.
    And he brushed off his C.
 And soon played his game with his buds.

Biography

Darklord MUD was born sometime in the mid 1990’s. It was originally hosted at an IBM PC where I was an intern at the time, running Slackware Linux. It was bone stock CircleMUD 3.0, and only ran on the LAN. Mostly some people at work was casually playing. Being an IT guy and coder, it didn’t take long before I started to make changes to the codebase, as there were certain aspects of the game that I felt needed some help. The code was pretty clean, and quite easy to modify, so I stuck with with this codebase. I originally wanted an lp codebase but I wasn’t crazy about lpc, and it was pretty sluggish at the time.

The mud didn’t live long at work so I moved it home, figuring I could get some more players from out there. This posted somewhat of a challenge, as at the time, the only connectivity available at home, was via a blazing “fast” 14.4K analog modem. This, paired with having 2 roomates, and only one phoneline, caused for a lot of unwanted disconnect (probably to any player’s, and my roomate’s frustration). Thankfully, my ISP at the time (westnet.com), offered to host the mud on a Solaris box the owner had that wasn’t really used, and Darklord got a real home. A full compile of the mud at that time, took about 20 minutes or so. All the binary savefiles also had to be converted, as Solaris used big endian system. But things ran fairly smoothly (a full compile today takes about 30 seconds). The mud ran on westnet for several years, but eventually I had to move it elsewhere, as the owner was retiring the Solaris machine, and I was nor a customer there anymore.

The mud moved to another hosting provider (genesismuds), where it ran until sometime around 2007, when I decided to shut it down. I was highly addicted to playing World of Warcraft, and just had no time, nor motivation to continue, and I had continue paying for hosting. Fast forward over a decade, and I one day get a message via (the now abandoned) Google+ platform. An old player asked if I was the admin of Darklord and wondered if I was interested in bringing it back online. At first I was a bit reluctant, but I looked around to see if I still had a backup of it. I found several versions but none of them had a working player file, and it wasn’t any of the latest code. I kept digging, and eventually found a working copy of the playerfiles, and a fairly recent codebase down in the depths of an old archive. Porting the code to a recent compiler was some work, but it worked out, and I ran the MUD on a Raspberry PI model 3, over my 350mbit home fiber connection. This ran without any problems, until I moved out of the house, and moved the game to a dedicated VPS server, where it now runs.

You can connect to the mud at darklord.no (port 5000) with your favorite mud client or plain old telnet.

Some Darkord stats:

    Born    : Est. 1993-4
    Admin   : Mogwai
    Codebase: Heavily modified Circlemud 3.0 bpl 11 (Written in C)
    Server  : VPS Running Ubuntu Linux 18.04 LTS
    Server location: London, UK

    928 registered players        
   4896 mobiles           2587 prototypes
   9333 objects           3316 prototypes
   9265 rooms              129 zones
    187 shops             100+ Autoquests

=Mogwai, Darklord Admin= darklord.no:5000