Hey, remember MarMOTS, the MARvelous Multiplayer Online Telnet Server? (previous MarMOTS blog posts) I don't blame you if you don't, I haven't worked on it in almost a decade. I had this beautiful dream of a ZZT MMO; a realtime collaborative game-making tool, where we all could make cool ANSI art games together. And I managed to get to the part where we could all make cool ANSI art together!

With the various server moves over the years, MarMOTS has been up and down for a while. With the latest server move, I decided I'd dust off the ol' source code and see if I could get it running again. And... I did! MarMOTS is back up, and fully operational! It's also much easier to get running - it no longer requires Stackless Python, having now been ported to use the greenlet package instead. It also now works with a much wider variety of telnet clients than just SyncTerm - I have had reasonable success with Qodem and Netrunner, and I'm planning to see how well fTelnet does with it.

Why should you care if it's easier to get running? Well, I also took the opportunity to finally release the source code. It's now available under the AGPL, which requires anyone who makes changes to it and deploys those changes on a public server make them available from within. MarMOTS belongs to all of us, now.

I'm considering picking it back up and trying to get some simple bitsy-like interactive storytelling tools in there. We'll see how that goes. I have a half-working scripting system that I haven't looked at since 2011...