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Foreword

Welcome to the manual for mooR.

First, credit where credit is due: The documentation provided here is a product of the hard work of many authors over multiple decades, beginning with the original LambdaMOO manual from the early 90s, through to the documentation written by Brendan ("aka Slither") for ToastStunt, in 2022. We've made the earnest effort to credit those authors throughout, but we'll state up front now that if there's a place where that has been missed, we urge you to let us know, and we'll make sure to provide it.

Secondly, some basic background and definitions. I'll be brief here because the introduction section gets into more detail, but:

mooR -- which stands for "moo-reconstructed" or "moo - rewrite" or "moo [in] Rust" or "moo [by] Ryan" -- is an authoring system for multiuser / multiplayer online communities. It is both a fully compatible rewrite of LambdaMOO -- a pioneering super-flexible object-oriented "MUD" server from the 1990s -- and a modernized and flexible platform on which to build dynamic, fun, multiuser/multipler connected communities and games.

Thirdly, motivations and reasons.

This is a project I began on a "it can't be that hard" whim in the fall of 2022, with the intent of trying to revive the ideas behind MOO but with a more "21st century" technological foundation that would make it easier to maintain and scale such applications going forward.

mooR is a technology layer to provide a foundation for a new kind of social media; a kind of social media that brings back to the forefront the promise of the earlier internet, a type of interaction that is meaningful in a way the earlier era Internet was, but designed to take advantage of the power of modern hardware and support the strengths of social media as we know it today.

But I felt that to make that happen I couldn't just start with a fork of the original LambdaMOO (as e.g. ToastStunt had done), but with a brand new implementation which fulfilled the following requirements:

  • Modern user experience: Built from day 1 to meet today's expectations for rich content (images, styled text, video), user accessibility, and web-based interfaces that don't require custom clients. The platform and core database are designed with web browsers as the primary connection method.
  • Modern computing architecture: Built to take advantage of multiple execution threads, multiple cores, and potentially distributed deployment across multiple servers in a datacenter environment.
  • Technological extensibility: Built in a modular fashion to easily support new behaviors, new builtin functions, new protocols for connecting, new integrations to outside services, and even new languages (beyond "MOOcode") for writing verbs.

But why did I start from LambdaMOO -- instead of building something new from scratch? The meaningful user experience that LambdaMOO delivered for both end-users and user-developers is core to the goal of mooR, so LambdaMOO as the first support target serves as a good "benchmark" that preserves the foundation of that user experience while keeping the development effort grounded and focused on concrete progress. When the system could bring in and successfully run an existing LambdaMOO core database -- and support development of further features beyond that -- then it would be ready for release.

The choice of Rust as the implementation language for mooR was driven by many reasons, which I need not go into here. But I feel that it is has overall served the project well, and allowed me to develop with confidence.

It is now the winter of 2025, and the project that I began over two years ago is circling around to its first major, public, 1.0 release. Many hundreds of hours have gone into development -- not just by myself, but by others who have put immense effort into developing and testing and suggesting. Thanks goes not just to them, but to the original authors and users of LambdaMOO, Stunt, ToastStunt, and to the adjacent projects and communities I (and others) was a part of over the years, in particular Stephen White's CoolMUD and Greg Hudson's ColdMUD -- ideas from those systems have made their way into mooR as well.

I hope you, the reader, enjoy the system we've put together. Even more so I welcome your contributions and suggestions.

Ryan Daum (written on an airplane flying over the Canadian prairies, Feb 5, 2025)