Project vocabulary

Glossary

JVMud vocabulary keeps engine concepts distinct from legacy LPC/LPMud compatibility names.

Core Concepts

Game: The playable system JVMud hosts: rules, mechanics, goals, challenges, progression, or other game-like structures.
Text: The primary medium through which the world is perceived and manipulated.
Interactive: The property that players can affect the world and the world can affect players.
Multiplayer: The property that multiple players inhabit the same world at the same time.
World: The complete shared virtual domain of the game, composed of places, links, entities, locations, containment, and movement.
Persistence: The property that the world and its state endure independently of any individual session.
Temporality: The property that the world can change through time.
Presence: The requirement that a player experiences the game from within the world through a located persona.

Place: A discrete location in game space where entities may exist, be perceived, or interact.
Link: A traversable relationship between places. Links make the world navigable.
Entity: A thing in the world: a player persona, coin, sword, bag, vehicle, NPC, effect, or environmental feature.
Location: The mechanical relationship that says where an entity is. A location is either a place or another entity.
Containment: The relationship in which one entity is inside, carried by, mounted on, or otherwise immediately located in another entity.
Single Containment: The rule that every entity has exactly one immediate location.
Movement: The transition of an entity from one location to another, often through a place-to-place link.

Player: The human-facing controller endpoint associated with a session. JVMud does not make Player an account, login, or durable identity.
Session: An active connection or control context, such as a Telnet connection.
Persona: The entity currently associated with a session as that session's in-world perspective.
Player Object: Compatibility vocabulary for an LPC-authored mudlib object that may combine profile data, persona behavior, login flow, and legacy session glue.
Interaction Scope: The local command and perception context around a persona.
Command Dispatch: The engine process that routes one line of player input to mudlib behavior registered for the current interaction scope.

LPC: The language used by JVMud's sole mudlib target.
LPMud: A MUD whose game world is authored in LPC, compiled into live game objects, and reloadable while the game continues running.
Mudlib: The LPC source and content layer that defines world fiction, object behavior, commands, rules, and presentation.
Compatibility Shim: A mudlib-side object dedicated to translating legacy LPC/LPMud vocabulary into JVMud-native engine requests.
Mfun: A mudlib-global function provided by a configured mudlib object.
Efun: An engine function callable from compiled LPC code.
Lifecycle Hook: A configured engine-to-mudlib call for a JVMud lifecycle event.
Live Reload: The requirement that LPC-authored objects can be rewritten, recompiled, and reloaded while the game continues running.

Room: A legacy mudlib term for a location-like object. JVMud's engine concept is place.
Heartbeat: A legacy driver concept for recurring object callbacks. JVMud's engine concept is temporality and scheduled time.
Call Out: A legacy driver concept for delayed callbacks. JVMud treats delayed work as a mudlib request to the engine's temporality model.
Apply: A legacy driver term for driver-invoked mudlib methods. JVMud uses explicit lifecycle hooks.
Master Object: A legacy driver policy object. JVMud uses explicit boundary configuration and compatibility shims.