Infinity LPMud: FAQ

Something that can help players and ArchWizards alike is a FAQ. FAQ stands for Frequently Asked Questions, and a FAQ list is.....well, it's a list of... yes. Frequently Asked Questions. What makes these questions special is that they are frequently asked. Now that we're abundantly clear on the topic, let's see why they're so important.

Some of these questions come up many times, often because they are a concern of many players. Other questions come up because visitors are curious about the nature of our game, and would like to find answers without starting a character in the game. Below, we have listed a number of the most frequently asked questions about Infinity. If you would like to see a question answered on this page, drop us a line at infinity@infinitymud.net and let us know.

  1. What hardware does Infinity run on?
  2. What kind of MUD is Infinity?
  3. What do you need to connect to Infinity?
  4. My site is locked off! What do I do?
  5. How many people can be on Infinity at one time?
  6. Does Infinity support player-killing?
  7. Why is Samuel Adams beer in the pub and tavern?
  8. Why are there no storage rooms?
Q: What hardware does Infinity run on?

A:
At the end of 1994 and the beginning of 1995, Infinity changed sites, from the College of Computer Science at Northeastern University to Syracuse University. In order to make the move, we needed to purchase our own hard drive and controller. Our users gave generously to the Infinity Administration; with these funds, we purchased a Seagate gigabyte SCSI drive, and an Adaptec 1522A SCSI controller.

In May of 1996, we moved from Syracuse University to Legacy Creative Ventures, Inc., in Seattle, Washingon. We held yet another fund drive, and ended up with our current P75 box. We now have much more room to expand, and without the generosity of our players, we couldn't have found a way to come back on the net. We thank you, and hope that you appreciate the continued existence of the game.

Infinity received a massive upgrade in December of 1999. The system that was shipped to Bigtoad was pathetic. It consisted of:

  • Asus P/I-P55TP4N Motherboard w/512K pipelined burst cache
  • Intel P75 CPU overclocked to P100
  • 32MB SDRAM
  • ISA Oak Technology OTIVGA video card
  • ISA 3Com Etherlink III (3C509-COMBO) network card
  • ISA Adaptec 1542 SCSI adapter
  • HP SureStore 1GB SCSI hard drive
  • Quantum ProDrive LPS 270MB SCSI hard drive
  • Mitsumi IDE CDROM drive
  • 1.44MB floppy drive
That box was in sorry condition in other ways. The case was poorly designed, making it necessary to remove the motherboard to add or remove hard drives. The system bus speed was set to 50MHz (correct for a P75) but the clock multiplier was set to 2, driving the CPU core at 100MHz. No serious attempt had been made to cool the overclocked CPU -- it's amazing that the system hadn't melted down. There was a CPU fan in the system, but it was much too small for a Pentium. The fan appeared to have been designed for a 486 CPU. In any case, since there was no way to attach the fan to the heat sink on the CPU, it was just dangling inside the case.

Apparently someone had lost the SCSI ID jumpers for the Quantum hard drive. They had been replaced by soldering wires onto each of the ID jumper pins, and twisting them together to set the SCSI ID.

While there was a CDROM drive in the case, there was no IDE cable, and no power was connected to the CDROM drive. The reason for this became apparent when an IDE cable was installed -- the system would not boot with the CDROM drive connected.

The system did not have a mouse, keyboard or monitor with it.

The only items that were retained from that system were the motherboard, 32MB of RAM, the floppy drive and the 1GB SCSI hard drive. Even the case was thrown out and replaced. Since Bigtoad is a bit of a hardware nut, he was offended by a system that had no PCI adapters but had all the ISA slots in use. All the adapter cards were promptly replaced.

Bigtoad rebuilt the system, and then later upgraded it to consist of:

  • Asus P/I-P55TP4N Motherboard w/512K pipelined burst cache
  • Intel P133 CPU
  • 64MB SDRAM
  • PCI Trident video card
  • PCI 3Com 10/100 3C905B network card
  • PCI Advansys 3922 SCSI-2 adapter
  • Seagate Barracuda ST15150N 4GB SCSI hard drive
  • HP SureStore 1GB SCSI hard drive
  • Toshiba XM4101B SCSI CDROM drive
  • 1.44MB floppy drive
By the standards of the day, it was still a pretty pathetic system, but it's all we needed for a MUD. This system ran Red Hat 6.1 Linux.

Later, Infinity ran as a 64 bit VM running CentOS 5.8, with 2 GB RAM and 120 GB disk space.

Today, Infinity runs on a 64 bit VM running CentOS 7.9, with 4 GB RAM and 450 GB disk space.

On disk, Infinity presently consumes approximately 1.7GB, including all player files, Wizard areas and home page support files. We use an additional 1.2GB of space for archived logs, archived driver source, scripts, etc. We actively conserve disk space by removing player files for players who have been idle for longer than one month per level. Wizards are not purged.

Q: What kind of MUD is Infinity?

A: Infinity originally started out in the beginning of 1992 as an LPMud running the 3.1.2 driver in compatibility mode, using a slightly modified 2.4.5 mudlib. Over the past several years, we have migrated to the Amylaar driver, and followed the 3.2.1 development tree to LDMud, and are now running the latest stable release of 3.4.2. Our mudlib has been heavily modified by the ArchWizards, integrating new ideas to increase the enjoyment of players, decrease the amount of work for the ArchWizards, and to provide the Wizards with a comfortable environment for them to create areas in.

Q: What do you need to connect to Infinity?

A: To connect to the game, you need only a "client" program to run on your local computer. The simplest client is "telnet", which you can run like this on most UNIX systems:

telnet infinitymud.net 4242

Be sure to include a space before the portnumber. If your local computer is a VMS system, use a command like this instead:

TELNET INFINITYMUD.NET /PORT=4242

Connecting through telnet provides a simple interface to Infinity, however it's far from being very user-friendly. Text which scrolls past quickly will be irretrievable, and commands you type are easily interrupted by events taking place in the MUD. On UNIX systems, two special keystrokes may help:

  • ^R redisplay command typed so far
  • ^U erase (undo) the partially typed command
However, telnet is not the preferred method of connecting to Infinity. Other clients exist which provide a much cleaner interface.

If you have any problems connecting to Infinity, you can feel free to send email to the administration at infinity@infinitymud.net.

Q: My site is locked off! What do I do?

A: If your site can't create new characters any more, there's probably a reason for it. In most cases, someone at your site broke enough rules for us to go through the trouble of locking out the site.

Fortunately, we have allowed for some players to be sponsored by other users at that site. To do this, you will need a sponsor who is level 10 or greater on the mud. This sponsor must send mail to infinity@infinitymud.net with the e-mail address of both the sponsor and the new character. Also, in this mail message are the real names of both people, the new character name and the new character gender. After reviewing and verifying this information, if the site has not been prevented from creating new characters completely, we will create a new character for the person and notify them under separate cover.

Keep in mind that the sponsor accepts full responsibility for this new player. If the new character acts up and generally causes problems, then BOTH the sponsor and the character will be removed. If problems persist, then this privilege will be removed and we will return to banning sites without the idea of sponsorship.

Q: How many people can be on Infinity at one time?

A: Technically speaking, there are 70 open spots for people to fill on Infinity. These 70 spots are allocated in the following ways:

  • 10 spots: Reserved for ArchWizards to log on at any time.
  • 60 spots: Everybody else.
When a player or Wizard logs in, they fill up one of the 60 spots. The ArchWizards fill up the 10 without infringing on the previous 60 spots. So it's quite possible for five archwizards to be on, and have 60 other players on. You might see 60, 65, possibly even 70 users on the game, but if the first 60 spots have been filled, you'll have a tough time getting on the game.

We keep this limit on users for two reasons. First, Infinity's memory requirements can be quite large. Second, Infinity is quite finite in terms of how many open areas and quests there are for players to explore. If we were to let too many people in at one time, it's quite possible that players would have too many people trying a quest at the same time.

One solution for this is for Wizards to create more areas, and write more quests. If you know a Wizard well who is not creating as much as he or she can, do try to urge them on. Infinity can only benefit from the extra creation.

Q: Does Infinity support player-killing?

A: Infinity supports player-killing on a very limited basis. We believe that the focus of Infinity should be on the solving of quests, and the socializing with other characters on the game. As a result, player-killing is extremely restricted, appearing only in one room, the Arena.

The Arena is located in the Town, and is the only room in which you can attack other players. There are no rules; ArchWizards will not arbitrate in any arena-related disputes, and there are no rules governing the idea of ganging up on other people, corpse-looting, or something similar. In the Arena, anything goes.

Q: Why is Samuel Adams beer in the Pub and Tavern?

A: Infinity has been fortunate to receive permission from Jim Koch, president of the Boston Beer Company, to use the name of Samuel Adams on our beers in Infinity. This probably had a lot to do with the fact that Samuel Adams is Mutara's beer of choice. Besides, when was the last time you saw a Firebreather in a liquor store?

Infinity currently offers two varieties of Samuel Adams. Samuel Adams Boston Lager is offered in the Pub in Town, and Boston Ale is offered in the Drunken Horse Tavern. We plan to rotate these beers to reflect the seasonal brews released by the Boston Beer Company shortly.

Q: Why are there no storage rooms?

A: Storage rooms, for those that do not recognize the term, are rooms where players may leave their equipment for a short while if they plan to log off. Infinity no longer allows these types of rooms.

Despite it's name, Infinity isn't _truly_ infinite. Not only do we have a finite number of players that can log in at once, we also have a finite number of weapons and armour that must be distributed among all of the players who are on the game. Were we to allow people to store things, it's quite possible that X players will store all of the equipment at the beginning of a reboot, and there will be no equipment until the next reset. This process can take up to 2 hours, and is too open for people to cause trouble with it.

Rather than spend our time monitoring the usage of these theoretical storage rooms and punishing those who have "abused" them, we have decided instead to disallow these storage rooms. In fact, at one time, we did allow storage rooms, and it didn't work out precisely for the reasons we listed above; it wasn't fair to players who hadn't yet logged in. We don't anticipate that this policy will change.

In truth, the convenience gained by having a storage room is easily matched by buying materials from the shop, or shouting if anyone has equipment to sell. While you might not get the exact item you're looking for, you can usually buy something comparable, and introduce your mace to the head of the beast that's carrying what you do want.

PLAYERS || WIZARDS || ADMINISTRATION || FAQ || GUILDS || LORE || HOME