Gameplay

Neural Net is a classless character system, and while it does have a very limited leveling system, it is not a defining factor in your character’s overall success. Progression is largely defined by a player’s ingenuity and use of their chosen skills. A character’s stats and skills determine what they are capable of within the mechanics of the game world, but what you do and how you choose to do it are what will set your character apart from the rest!

Technical

Neural Net is a Multi-user Object-Oriented environment (MOO for short), its framework was built upon years of effort to bring old-school multiplayer text games into the modern era, and we are eternally grateful to the original LambdaMOO devs, Todd Sundsted of Stunt, and all the contributors to the ToastStunt server that Neural Net has extended and is built from.

History

Neural Net itself is a core built on top of a now-ancient FooCore database, modified for ShadowCore (by way of my first cyberpunk MOO attempt in “Shadow Company” sometime decades ago), and now is its own unique identity with effectively all of the old core code stripped outside of a few lingering utils.

Originally created in 2006, Neural Net was developed for about a year as a hobby for myself and friends to play, and then dropped until 2021 when I realized MOO was a great platform to use the GPT-2/3 models to add some life to NPCs and experiment with LLMs. After about a month of effort, I realized things just weren’t where I wanted them to be yet. In 2023, ChatGPT’s API was made available, and I decided to try again with significantly better results. Not perfect, not great, but some fairly reasonable and immersive results followed!

We’re still in that imperfect state with the NPC AI, but it’s “good enough” that I started focusing once more on the mechanics of the game and building out the world of Neural Net.

And that’s where we are today! The game is still under heavy development, but is in a playable state with new features and fixes being completed regularly. We hope you enjoy yourself in our little world. 🙂