Game
The world exists to be played, with rules, mechanics, challenges, or progression.
Engine principles
Principles
JVMud models persistent, temporal, multiplayer text worlds inhabited by players who perceive those worlds from within them.
Purpose
JVMud is specifically an engine for creating and operating persistent, multiplayer, text-based game worlds in the tradition of LP MUDs. It is not intended to become a general-purpose simulation framework, chat server, collaboration platform, or generic game engine.
Eight Core Concepts
Text
Text is the primary medium through which the world is perceived and manipulated.
Interactive
Players can affect the world, and the world can affect players.
Multiplayer
Multiple players inhabit the same shared world simultaneously.
World
The game takes place in a concrete virtual domain of linked places, entities, and movement.
Persistence
The world and its state endure independently of any individual player's session.
Temporality
The world can change through time: events occur, state evolves, and actions have consequences.
Presence
A player experiences the game from within the world through a located persona.
Engine And Mudlib
The engine provides the fundamental structure of virtual reality. The mudlib provides the fiction. Concepts that appear repeatedly across LP-style text worlds belong in the engine; concepts that vary substantially between worlds belong in the mudlib.
World Model
A world is composed of places and the links between them. Places hold entities. Links connect places. Together, they create connected containment: an explorable spatial model rather than a set of isolated rooms.
Every entity has exactly one immediate location, either a place or another entity. This single-containment rule supports inventories, containers, vehicles, nested containment, location resolution, and movement propagation.
Capabilities
JVMud distinguishes existence from capability. An entity may be perceptive, actor-capable, both, or neither. The engine asks whether an entity can receive information about the world and whether it can initiate change, without making assumptions about consciousness, awareness, intelligence, or sentience.
Architectural Principles
- Clarity over cleverness.
- Simplicity over abstraction.
- Readability over novelty.
- Maintainability over optimization.
- Descriptive names over concise names.
- Explicit behavior over implicit behavior.
- Composition over unnecessary hierarchy.
- Capabilities over deep inheritance trees.