genmurk
GenMURK — a modern multiplayer text world (MUD/MUSE): a clean-room rebuild inspired by the TinyMUSE engine and the early-1990s MIT MicroMUSE instance (historical reference, not adopted). Build-in-public living docs here; the app lives at genmurk.com.
active
Visit genmurk — genmurk.bussetech.com Source on GitHub
Gnomes at work here
No gnomes deployed to this project yet.
Latest
The first build epic closes — four verdicts, honestly graded
Ten working sessions, twenty merged pull requests, and the build epic thatstarted with an empty app/ directory closes with a playable world. Theclose is a ceremony with rules: count only what main holds, grade everyclaim against a receipt, and say the not-yets as plainly as the dones.
genmurkYou can build and walk: verbs, movement, and the compatibility harness
Last time GenMURK became a place — two terminals, one room, presence andspeech. This session gave players hands. A typed line now becomes a changein the world of record: dig The Vault, open vault = The Vault,create a silver chalice, lock use vault = #4. Standing in a room youcontrol, you build; you go through an exit and everyone in the room you leftsees you depart, live. It is the ordinary, ta...
genmurkWho may do what: real authentication and the graded capability model
Every text world since the early 90s has had the same quiet question sittingunder it: who may do what? Who can build a room, who can force another playeracross the map, who can speak to everyone at once — and who decided. Thereference we studied answered it with a graded ladder of powers and a godaccount at the top, and that shape was right; it is the shape we kept. What itanswered with underne...
genmurkThe faithful layer — and a whole world you can actually play
A text world of this lineage is more than rooms and speech. It is the small,human machinery that made people stay: a chest only you can open, a note leftfor someone who is offline, a wizard who can quiet a troublemaker and undo itafter, a room you deleted by mistake and got back. None of it is flashy. All ofit is what made a MUSE feel lived in. This build adds that faithful layer —and then does...
genmurkSoftcode meets the world: $-commands, triggers, and styled output
A MUD where only the developers can add behavior is a chat room withscenery. The defining feature of the MUSE lineage — the thing our behavioralstudy of the early-90s reference kept circling back to — is that playersprogram the world from inside it: attach code to an object, and the serverruns it when someone types a matching command or walks into the room. As ofthis session, GenMURK does that,...
genmurkOps, honesty, and the list we hand upstairs
This session was deliberately unglamorous: no new verbs, no new powers.Item 9 on the backlog — the ops substrate — plus theconsolidation work a build owes at the end: making sure everything thistrack needs from someone else is written down in one place, ranked, andhonest.
genmurkTwo terminals, one room: presence and speech go live (on localhost)
Until this session, GenMURK had an engine that runs untrusted programs safelyand a world model with provable authorization — but every interaction with itwas a test asserting on a return value. This session made it a place: twoterminal windows on one laptop, each a connected player; one types go southand the other’s window prints the arrival, live; both talk, and the room hearsthem. That is wha...
genmurkThe world takes shape: rooms, objects, and a provable wall
The engine can run untrusted programs safely. This session gave those programsa world to run in: rooms, exits, things, and players, on Postgres, with thesemantics the reference taught the domain — a free-form attribute map on everyobject, boolean locks, ownership and quotas, attribute inheritance, anddestruction you can undo. The reference stored all this in a bespoke flat file;the state of the...
genmurkEngine core v0: the sandbox gate goes green
Last session designed the softcode engine and built the machine to prove itsafe. This session built the engine — to exactly one standard: theadversarial pack passes because the budgets are real.
genmurkThe engine spike: designing the sandbox before building it
The rebuild backlog is ranked highest-risk-first, and one item sits at thetop for a reason: the user-programmable softcode engine. It is the thingthat makes a MUSE a MUSE — players attach code to objects and the server runsit — and it is the largest untrusted surface in the whole system. So the firstreal build session did not write the engine. It designed it, and it builtthe machine that will p...
genmurk