The Discworld mudlib is an LPC framework, or mudlib

Mudlib

A mudlib, short for mud library, is a library of code forming part of the technical infrastructure of a MUD. Though different varieties of MUD may be considered to have mudlibs, the term is most often used with LPMuds. In an LPMud, the mudlib consists of interpreted code written in the LPC...

, originally written for the Discworld MUD

Discworld MUD

Discworld MUD is a popular MUD, a text-based online role-playing game, set in the Discworld as depicted in the Discworld series of books by Terry Pratchett.-History:...

.

It has been regarded as one of the more advanced mudlibs around: according to Lauren Burka's MUD timeline, written in 1995, the Discworld mudlib was only the second widely available mudlib. At the time of its release it had the most advanced command parser

Parsing

In computer science and linguistics, parsing, or, more formally, syntactic analysis, is the process of analyzing a text, made of a sequence of tokens , to determine its grammatical structure with respect to a given formal grammar...

 and user interface

User interface

The user interface, in the industrial design field of human–machine interaction, is the space where interaction between humans and machines occurs. The goal of interaction between a human and a machine at the user interface is effective operation and control of the machine, and feedback from the...

 available in a mudlib. It has been described as having "many concepts you will not see in other mudlibs for any server", as well as "too many frogs and wombles", possibly in reference to its frequent use of eccentric variable names such as "frog" and "womble

The Wombles

The Wombles are fictional pointy-nosed, furry creatures that live in burrows, where they help the environment by collecting and recycling rubbish in useful and ingenious ways. Wombles were created by author Elisabeth Beresford, originally appearing in a series of children's novels from 1968...

".

Some design elements in the mudlib have become popular in other MUD libraries - for example, the library's player commands that express emotion

Emotion

Emotion is a complex psychophysiological experience of an individual's state of mind as interacting with biochemical and environmental influences. In humans, emotion fundamentally involves "physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, and conscious experience." Emotion is associated with mood,...

s are named "soul commands", and the way ANSI colour is encoded (e.g. %^BLUE%^) has been named "Pinkfish colour" after David Bennett, the main author of the library, who is widely known in the MUD community by his alias of Pinkfish.

Another notable MUD that uses this mudlib is Nanvaent

Nanvaent

Nanvaent, or NANVAENT, is a MUD based in the UK. Stylistically it is Medieval or Tolkienesque. It is one of the longest-running LPMuds.-Overview:...

.

FluffOS

FluffOS is Discworld's fork of the MudOS

MudOS

MudOS is a major family of LPMud server software, implementing its own variant of the LPC programming language. It first came into being on February 18, 1992. It pioneered important technical innovations in MUDs, including the network socket support that made InterMUD communications possible and...

 driver. Features added in FluffOS that are not present in MudOS include available MXP

MXP (computing)

In computing, MXP stands for MUD eXtension Protocol. It is used in MUDs to enhance the normal text output with a markup language loosely based on HTML and XML. In order for MXP to be used it must be implemented on the server as well as on the client, and negotiated during the connection using the...

 output, UTF-8

UTF-8

UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks...

 capability, support for running on 64-bit architectures, IPv6

IPv6

Internet Protocol version 6 is a version of the Internet Protocol . It is designed to succeed the Internet Protocol version 4...

 support, and (optionally) stricter type checking of variables in LPC code. Recent versions of the Discworld mudlib only run on the FluffOS server. It is open source under the MudOS license.

The Dead Souls Mudlib

Dead Souls MUDlib

Dead Souls is a MUD library , a software infrastructure for creating a text-based virtual world. It is classed in the following versions:* Dead Souls 1.1 was the final release by its original head developer, George Reese...

 is another FluffOS mudlib. Like the Discworld mudlib, it was originally written for MudOS, but current versions require FluffOS.

Medical use

The Discworld mudlib was used in a medical computing experiment into the wearable data collection devices, in which a small MUD was created. The paper referred to several features of the mudlib, such as the program's use of coordinates

Cartesian coordinate system

A Cartesian coordinate system specifies each point uniquely in a plane by a pair of numerical coordinates, which are the signed distances from the point to two fixed perpendicular directed lines, measured in the same unit of length...

to describe room locations, its broadcaster (a mechanism for sending messages to all players within a given area), and its complex parser.

External links

• About the mudlib on the Discworld MUD site

• Mudlib release 9.99 download
• FluffOS download
• The LPMud FAQ
• The MUD Timeline
• The LPMUD Timeline
• The LPmuds.net downloads page has a driver-bundled version of Discworld that's "easy-ish" to install.
• Discworld MUD's LPC for Dummies, first edition
• Discworld MUD's LPC for Dummies, Book 1, second edition
• Discworld MUD's LPC for Dummies, Book 2, first edition
• Discworld MUD's Being A Better Creator, first edition
• Discworld MUD's Working With Others, first edition