mooR is a network-accessible, multi-user, programmable system for building online social environments, games, and collaborative spaces. Think of it as a virtual world where participants can not only interact with each other, but also program and modify the environment itself.
Try out our testing environment
Dragging the Future into the Past
mooR is a modern, from-scratch rewrite of LambdaMOO - a pioneering text-based virtual world platform from the 1990s. While maintaining full compatibility with existing LambdaMOO databases, mooR brings this technology into the 21st century with modern architecture and significant enhancements.
mooR stands for "moo-reconstructed" or "moo - rewrite" or "moo [in] Rust" or "moo [by] Ryan" - it's an authoring system for multiuser/multiplayer online communities that combines the flexibility and programmability of the original MOO with the power of modern hardware and web technologies.
The Vision
mooR is a technology layer to provide a foundation for a new kind of social media - a kind that brings back to the forefront the promise of the earlier internet, a type of interaction that is meaningful in a way the earlier era Internet was, but designed to take advantage of the power of modern hardware and support the strengths of social media as we know it today.
The project began in fall 2022 with the intent of reviving the ideas behind MOO with a more "21st century" technological foundation. It's built from day 1 to meet today's expectations for rich content (images, styled text, video), user accessibility, and web-based interfaces that don't require custom clients.
What Makes MOOs Special
MOOs offer a unique digital experience through:
- Collaborative storytelling where participants build a shared narrative
- Live programming - modify the world while you're in it
- Community-driven development through persistent interactions and relationships
- Rich interaction that engages users through both traditional command-line and modern web interfaces
- Complete customizability - everything from objects to commands can be programmed
In a world of throwaway apps and walled gardens, mooR is cheerfully dragging the future into the past - taking the best ideas from decades of online community building and rebuilding them with modern technology.
Key Features & Enhancements
Runtime Improvements
- Fully multithreaded architecture for modern multicore systems
- Web frontend client with rich content support
- Directory-based import/export format for version control integration
- Modular architecture for easier extension
- Fast, durable, transactional database
Language Enhancements
- UTF-8 strings, 64-bit integers, binary values
- Proper boolean values (
true/false) - Maps: associative containers (
["key" -> "value"]) - Lexically scoped variables with
begin/endblocks - List/range comprehensions (
{x * 2 for x in [1..5]}) - Lambda functions: anonymous functions with closures (
{x, y} => x + y) - UUID object identifiers (optional)
- Anonymous objects with automatic garbage collection (optional)
Project Status
mooR is approaching its 1.0 release and is currently in late alpha. It successfully runs databases imported from LambdaMOO with real-world workloads. The project is open source and available on Codeberg.
If you find value in mooR and would like to support its ongoing development, please consider sponsoring the project.