Griatch on Evennia (Making MUDs with Python)

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Summary

Griatch is an incredibly talented digital artist, professional astronomer and the maintainer of the Evennia project for creating MUDs in Python. We got the opportunity to speak with him about what MUDs are, why they’re interesting and how Evennia simplifies the process of creating and extending them. If you’re interested in building your own virtual worlds, this episode is a great place to start.

Brief Introduction

• Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great.
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• We are recording today on September 15th, 2015 and your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti
• Today we are interviewing Griatch about the Evennia project

Interview with Griatch

• Introductions
• How did you get introduced to Python?
• Can you explain what MUDs are and what that has to do with Evennia?
• What is it about MUDs that keeps them interesting long after the technical restrictions that led to their creation are no longer present, especially in light of 3D multiplayer games like WoW and EVE Online?
• Can you give us a rundown of the various parts of Evennia (MUD engine, web interface, etc.) and how they fit together?
• How does Evennia handle the fact that a MUD world is comprised of many hundreds of objects containing various properties, maintaining consistent, persistent state as players interact with them?
• What concurrency tools or paradigms does Evennia use?
• During the height of MUDs popularity, one highly sought after feature was the idea of being able to have players travel from one MUD instance to another, would it be possible to implement this in Evennia?
• Has the Evennia core team given any thought to adding features to support a richer client interface? Graphical maps or the like?
• How difficult would it be to use Evennia to interface with something like Slack or Hipchat for a company-wide MUD? Have you ever heard of someone doing something like that?
• Are there any fully fledged running MUDs built with Evennia out in the wild?

Picks

• Tobias
  • libraries.io
  • jsonapi.org
  • Marshmallow Marshalling Library



• Chris
  • The End of All Things
  • David’s Tea Steeper
  • Hello Webapp – Intermediate Concepts



• Griatch
  • F2Py
  • Designing Virtual Worlds
  • Imaginary Realities
  • Optional Realities

Keep In Touch

• Evennia Website
• Evennia Github
• Freenode IRC Channel #Evennia

Links

• roll20