Welcome to my recently redone Lego® page. I've discarded a lot of my old stuff, and have kept some parts. What's new is the beginnings of some pages which will, hopefully, show my progress in building a large castle complex. Still here is my page of possible modelling subjects.
Sometime in 1990 I started writing a MUD (Multi User Dungeon) system for my Amiga computer. That's a set of programs that lets several people play an adventure-type game in the same world at the same time. One of the current round of commercial MUDS is Ultima Online. I got the basics of the world working and was adding a quest (puzzle) down in the depths of my tunnels, and decided to add a 3-D maze of stone. I started by drawing it out on paper, but found it quite difficult to visualize. Well, you guessed it - someone suggested I build it out of Lego bricks to see how it worked out. So, I bought my first Lego (I never had any as a child - mostly Meccano and Kenner building sets). It was a pair of #1879 blue buckets.
Another aspect developed from similar roots. At work, I needed to learn all about sockets (the software thing used to communicate over the internet, and between computers on local networks). I needed a simple test program to do that. So, I wrote the server-end of socket testing as a small MUD server. That worked out well, and I got the work stuff working too. However, I got interested in seeing how little code was needed to make a usable MUD server. So, in spare time I worked more on that little MUD server, adding an on-disk database and an internal programming language. With that, it was fairly complete, and still weighed in at only about 3500 lines of ANSI C code (most MUD servers are several tens of thousands of lines). Well, of course I needed to build a little world to test that MUD server (now called ToyMUD). So, in other spare time, I sketched out a bit of castle and started building it using the ToyMUD server's database format. Eventually, it grew and grew, until it was a quite large 100-room castle on 3 levels plus a tower. So, after I had started with a bit of Lego, including some castle sets, I decided I should try to actually build that castle out of Lego. I've done the whole thing twice, but not yet in full mini-fig scale, and not yet with lots of decorations. My interest is in structural realism - I don't want just a shell. Both versions have had all the floors, doorways, staircases, supports, etc. What has been missing is things like furniture, inhabitants, and all of the contents that make for a really good looking castle.