Nameless MUCK...has a strange sound to it. Why is it nameless?

The original plan was for Yet Another MUCK to be created, but technically, we wanted certain things. Among these things was tremendous player flexibility and minimal management interference. We are not unaware that management is more often a hindrance than a help to the MUCK community.

So, we technical types started creating a whole suite of software, and the tools to load the software. This software is featured on this website, as well the documentation and c++ loading tools.

Our software gives players the power to build and manage their own sub-sections (regions) in the game. They can grant or deny permission for players to use their regions. If they are bothered, they can eject a player and keep them out. The region builders also take responsiblity for what goes on, and can choose to allow or deny building under their areas.

So, we are Nameless because each player who connects sees something different, some will see a science fiction system, others will see furry fantasy, and some will see historical or naturalistic/zoomorphic.

Who runs the game?

This question is tricky because the answer is everyone. Management of course has final say, but they are technicians. They don't have much patience or tolerance for discourteous troublemakers, liars, and general nuisances, but as for role playing, or saying what is or isn't fair and reasonable ICly that isn't managements decision or concern.

All players are free to create as many regions as they like. They will need to either have permission from someone to build under an existing region, or they will build under the general region. Within their region, they are answerable only to those whose regions they build under, or management, who as noted above pretty much focus on software development.

The real goal is for a few players to get friends and become Genre Masters. These people would be over-all the closest equivalent to staff that most games would think of. They are the veritable gods of their own regions. They are staff-like because their regions are flagged as being a consistent genre. They define what is legal/not-legal in their group of sub-regions

What is so special about the software (Nameless MUCK Code, or NMC)?

The software used on Nameless MUCK is designed for maximal player control and freedom. In many MUCK systems, it takes management permission for common areas, and for links into places. There's often a central area that everyone expects to link to and from in order to be "nearby" places. We don't like that.

Our software is region based. Thus, our view has it that within a set of rooms, each player has their chance to stamp the world in their eyes, and they can easily let friends connect.

Also, to support concurrent genres, we support region-protection. This prevents the science fiction ship from landing in the medieval world. Mind you, if both genre owners decided to do this, we can support it, but by default, a genre stays distinct.

This also means that characers who belong to more than one genre must adapt to different requirements for things like descriptions, short descriptions, statuses, and so on.

The tools embedded in our server strive to make these onerous tasks trivial and transparent.

We also added a lot of support for large-scale shared building projects. So we have ways of registering rooms built on shared objects or rooms, so that many people can use the same registration names without having a central shared builder character. Our commands can be aware of when something already exists so that re-running a creation script results in updates, not a copy of what was done before. Thus, a 200 room castle built by nine people can have a set of scripts that any of the nine can run at any time to refresh the castle's descriptions and links, without fear of duplicating rooms or having multiple doors to the same destination.

Genre isolation and large-scale building make it feasible for us to allow many simultaneous genres. This means we can serve groups as small as three or four players with ease, because we don't incur the overhead implicit in starting a dedicated server, but rather we let one server handle many groups. Furry MUCK shows that the FuzzBall server software can handle up to at least 350 concurrent players, and we've got the space and hardware for the load (and the bandwidth is increasing as well). So, instead of having 40 small MUCKs, we can have a single busy one, with many small or large genres.

~by Otter