LPMud (sometimes shortened to simply "LP") is a MUD variant developed in 1989 by Lars Pensjö (hence the LP in LPMud) that separates the MUD environment functionality between a virtual machine (known as the driver) and world-building components in the LPC programming language (known as the mudlib).

Motivation[edit | edit source]

Pensjö had been an avid player of TinyMUD and AberMUD. He wanted to create a world with the flexibility of TinyMUD and the power of AberMUD. Furthermore, he did not want to have sole responsibility for creating and maintaining the game world. He once said, "I didn't think I would be able to design a good adventure. By allowing wizards coding rights, I thought others could help me with this."[1] The result was the creation of a new, C-based, object-oriented programming language, LPC that made it simple for people with minimal programming skills to add elements like rooms, weapons, and monsters to a gaming world.

To accomplish his goal, Lennart Augustsson convinced Lars to write what today would be called a virtual machine, the LPMud driver. The driver managed the interpretation of LPC code as well as providing basic operating system services to the LPC code. By virtue of this design, Lars made it more difficult for common programming errors like infinite loops and memory leaks made by game builders to harm the overall stability of the game. His choice of an object-oriented approach made it easy for new programmers to concentrate on the task of "building a room" rather than programming logic.

By the end of 1989, there were two major muds built on top of the LPMud engine:

Evolution of LPMuds[edit | edit source]

Lars's interest in LPMuds eventually waned. By the time it did, in the early 1990s, LPMud had become one of the most popular forms of MUD.[2] His work has been extended or reverse engineered in the following drivers:

The LPMud approach also enabled the development of gaming frameworks built in LPC that game builders could use as the foundation for their worlds. The original mudlib was the Genesis Mudlib that came with LPMud drivers up to LPMud 2.4.5. As LPMud matured, the separation between driver and mudlib grew to the point that the developers of MudOS and DGD did not ship their drivers with fully functional mudlibs. Popular LPMud mudlibs include:

LPMud talkers[edit | edit source]

While the first talker was invented in 1984, until 1990 they were only available on small intranet services. LPMud was used as the basis for the first Internet talker, Cat Chat, which opened in 1990, and also for the second Internet talker Cheeseplants house, which opened in 1991, and historically formed the basis of most other talkers, creating the ew-too code that was the most popular talker code base until 1996.

References[edit | edit source]

  1. George Reese (1995). "LPMud timeline". "Having fun playing Tinymud and Abermud, Lars Pensjö decides to write a server to combine the extensibility of Tinymud with the adventures of Abermud."
  2. William Stewart (2002). "MUD History". "The original LPMUD was written by Lars Pensjl and others, and became one of the most popular MUD's by the early 1990's."

See also[edit | edit source]

External links[edit | edit source]
