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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to A MUD-server using lua coroutines

I recently finished a round of tweaks on my barebones mud-server and thought HN might be interested. https://github.com/endgame/MudCore It sits somewhere between socketmud and a full mud like tbamud in that it handles all the socket work and telnet negotiation, but it makes no assumptions about anything else. The other interesting thing is that it can talk to other services using ZeroMQ. I'm interested in reactions, particularly in terms of coding style, documentation quality and so on. It's my main "presentation piece" so far, in that it's some of the first code I actually feel proud to…

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. A MUD-server using lua coroutines launched in 2012; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1

    I wasn't quite sure if this qualified as "Show HN" given you can't really download it and try it out. However, dang said[0]: > If it's hardware or something that's not so easy to try out over the internet, find a different way to show how it actually works—a video, for example, or a detailed post with photos. Hopefully I did that? Additionally, I've put code and a detailed guide for the netboot computer management setup on GitHub: https://github.com/kentonv/lanparty Anyway, if this shouldn't have been Show HN, I apologize! [0]…

    2024 · lanparty.house · its alternatives →

  2. 2SA

    Hello all :) I made this BBS for fun and thought you all would enjoy it. It's not perfect, but it's been a fun exercise! see it: https://asciinema.org/a/Emg6SWrXMV6cehfQxrw1GRu75 try it: ssh -p 2223 shhhbb.com host it: https://github.com/donuts-are-good/shhhbb/releases/latest why? Every year I challenge myself in some new way, this year it is to push one project per week. You might recognize my static site generator [0] or my releaser for go [1] from previous posts as one of these weekly projects. If you want to join me in doing this, it's…

    2023 · donuts-are-good.github.io · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    I've been building a modern Ultima Online server emulator from scratch. It's not feature-complete (no combat, no skills yet), but the foundation is solid and I wanted to share it early. What it does today: - Full packet layer for the classic UO client (login, movement, items, mobiles) - Lua scripting for item behaviors (double-click a potion, open a door — all defined in Lua, no C# recompile) - Spatial world partitioned into sectors with delta sync (only sends packets for new sectors when crossing boundaries) - Snapshot-based persistence with MessagePack - Source generators for automatic DI…

    Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Hey folks — here’s a small experiment I hacked together over the weekend: https://cleoselene.com/ In short, it’s a way to build multiplayer games with no client-side game logic. Everything is rendered on the server, and the game itself is written as simple Lua scripts. I built this to explore a few gamedev ideas I’ve been thinking about while working on Abstra: - Writing multiplayer games as if they were single-player (no client/server complexity) - Streaming game primitives instead of pixels, which should be much lighter - Server-side rendering makes cheating basically…

    Jan 2026 · cleoselene.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    I got my start on the Internet in the very early 90s playing with, authoring in, and programming on LambdaMOO (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LambdaMOO) and similar systems. Shared virtual social spaces, with a persistent object oriented authoring / scripting language. They can be classified as MUDs (depending on who you talk to) but the focus is social, creative / authoring, and shared programming not RPG gaming. I've always wanted to see this kind of thing modernized and further developed. Over the last 25 years or so I've worked on similar but novel & improved…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Slack as old-school MUD client

    2015 · textcraft.co · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    I love making small 2D pixel art games, especially using tools that have some constraints. Things like Pico-8 and the Playdate SDK are simple, fun, and allow for focusing on the game idea rather than the technical minutia. Years ago I prototyped an idea for this little game engine, Usagi, but used Rhai instead of Lua. The idea for this little game engine never went away, so I decided to finally dig in and build it. Today I released v1.0.0 of Usagi Engine after making a bunch of small games, getting feedback from developers, and stabilizing the API. It's simple, has a great developer…

    May 2026 · usagiengine.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8
    wsgrok▲7

    I built it for myself because ngrok didn't let me add one more domain unless I paid $12 more. I probably should've looked for alternatives before building my own, but my grudge got in the way . Once I started, I wanted to make it better than the other options. Silly, I know. No one probably cares. I plan to open source it sometime next year because I’ve got other projects to finish first. It's free until I deplete my cloud credits, then it will switch to a tier-based model with a free option.

    Jan 2026 · wsgrok.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9WM

    Hi Hacker News! My friend and I [1] would like to share with you something we did this week-end. We really like the idea of game jams like the Ludum Dare, and we’d like to participate, but it’s often complicated for us, as we are often limited by the rules inherent to this kind of competition: we have to be available at specific dates, and the rules doesn’t always work for us. For example: if you want to participate as a team in a Ludum Dare compo, you have 72h instead of 48h, and you are not required to publish your code. We realized that what we really like is: - To work together. - The…

    2014 · its alternatives →

  10. 10RS

    Hey HN - Today we launched a new globally available Serverless platform that thinks about simplicity and DX first and foremost. Let us know what you think - try it now for free. Traditional serverless functions are islands. Each function handles a request, does its work, and forgets everything. Need one function to talk to another? You’ll be making HTTP calls over the public internet, managing authentication between your own services, and dealing with unnecessary network latency for simple internal operations. This architectural limitation has held back serverless adoption for complex…

    2025 · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Over the past few months, as we scaled our internal AI Agents, we hit a dead end: Running LLM-generated arbitrary code in Docker is basically running naked on security due to container escape risks. But using full traditional VMs takes minutes to boot and eats too much memory to support high-density concurrency. We loved the developer experience of SaaS sandboxes on the market, but they are closed-source, expensive, and have too high a barrier to entry for self-hosting. So, our team decided to build our own. After months of grinding, using RustVMM and KVM, we built a blazing-fast,…

    Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Dev's offline page is fun and we did implement it with Rust and WebAssembly. Go is simple. Can we d... Tagged with go, webassembly, showdev.

    2019 · dev.to · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    This is a two man team and we're in full-on development of a new platform to assist in multiplayer games. We're looking to launch in about a month or two with an OpenID server accessible to customers (or they can use provider like Facebook/Twitter) and a couple cool multiplayer features. After we launch development will continue until we have a well-rounded API. We're primarily targeting HTML5+JS developers but the system will work with any language that can make RESTful API calls. We know there's some stiff competition out there but we're looking for feedback and what features may make…

    2014 · playpi.net · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Hi HN, I’m one of the devs behind StarDesk, a P2P-first remote desktop we’ve been building for ~1 year. We started this partly out of frustration: some popular RDP tools haven’t seen meaningful updates in a long time, and long-standing issues are often left unaddressed. As devs, we really dislike software that stagnates once it “works well enough”. StarDesk is our attempt to do it differently. What we focus on: -P2P by default (relay as fallback) -Low RTT + low jitter > chasing max bitrate -Encoder / input path tuned for real-time interaction -Modern E2EE (TLS/DTLS) UX-wise, setup…

    Jan 2026 · stardesk.net · its alternatives →

  15. 15BA

    This is a little side project I've been working on for the last few months. It's a service hosting Lua scripts behind static HTTP endpoints in a fully sandboxed environment. It's something I've built to scratch my own itch and now I'm launching a free public beta to see if it's something that anyone else also finds useful. My first professional job was for a company building an industrial IoT platform who's most unique feature was their Lua-based scripting platform. I ended up loving Lua so much that at my next job, at SmartThings, I ended up being the main instigator who made the Lua-based…

    Nov 2025 · bodge.app · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Hi HN, I've been working with LLMs in production for a while both as a solo dev building apps for clients and working at an AI startup. The one thing that always was a pain was to pay OpenAI/Gemini/Anthropic a few dollars a month just for me to say "test" or have a CI runner validate some UI code. So I built this server called ChunkBack, that mocks the popular llm provider's functionality but allows you to type in a deterministic language: `SAY "cheese"` or `TOOLCALL "tool_name" {} "tool response"` I've had to work in some test environments and give good results for experimenting…

    Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    A compiler and IDE for the Luon programming language - a liaison beween Lua and Oberon+ - targeting LuaJIT - Luon/testcases/Smalltalk80 at master · rochus-keller/Luon

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Hi All, I felt like I was re-inventing the wheel by bolting similar channel architectures onto different Go structs repeatedly so I decided to extract some common types into into one library so that they would be easier to re-use: - oneshot - spsc - spmc - mpsc - mpmc - broadcast - watch The types are inspired by Rust channels so if you're coming from Rust they should feel familiar. So far I'm really enjoying using them but it'd be great to get some external feedback if you have time! https://github.com/amorey/gochan Andres

    May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Hi, I’ve been working on Artifacts for the past 2 years, and it’s now ready to try. It’s a sandbox MMORPG where every action is done through a REST API. Instead of clicking to move, fight, gather, craft, or trade, you write code to control your characters. If you have any questions, comments, or feedback, I’d be happy to hear them.

    Jun 2026 · artifactsmmo.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    I was reading through the comments on this HN post last night[1] which inspired me to share this project here today. I've been working on Satounki since I got laid off last month. It's the culmination of a lot of experience building similar ad-hoc internal tooling at various places throughout my professional career. Satounki already includes: * AWS support * GCP support * Cloudflare support * Auto-generated Terraform providers from the Rust API * Auto-generated Typescript client wrapper from the Rust API * Slack bot for request notifications, approvals and rejections * CLI for requests,…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    [deprecated] a dead simple build server. Contribute to MediaMath/grim development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2015 · github.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Hi, over the past few months I've been working on this project: Numax is a small Rust runtime that does three things: it runs WebAssembly modules in a sandbox, has a built-in local key-value store, and syncs everything across nodes with CRDTs and gossip. Basically, you write a wasm module, run it on two machines, and they converge (I hope !). It's a decentralized system... I hope someone finds it interesting! There's a whitepaper I've put a lot into, and I think the code isn't bad either! I believe there's still room in this world for software that's fun and well made, and while building…

    Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    an opinionated blueprint for deploying Forgejo in an OrbStack VM with Ubuntu, PostgreSQL and the tsbridge reverse proxy - highpost/forgejo-appliance

    Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    I spent the past few weeks making an open source cloud code editing environment with an AI copilot and multiplayer collaboration! It's fully self-hostable in 5-10 minutes. There's a lot of minor improvements to be made, and some are already listed in the Github issues. Let me know what you think and feel free to try it out.

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →