(Note: this history page is very incomplete. Pull requests with additional information welcome!)
DGD’s language is called LPC (“Lars Pensjö C”), which is also the language of a type of highly-programmable old mass-multiplayer text games called LPMuds.
DGD was initially an LPMUD, which later added more powerful features as a programming language, and then shed the original LPMUD game features. It started out as a game scripting language, and became a more general scripting language.
You’ll see this reflected in some of DGD’s vocabulary. For instance, the “Kernellib” was often originally called the Kernel MUDLib, named after MUDs such as LPMud. Current DGD tends to use common vocabulary (users, network ports, etc.) but you’ll see holdovers such as the “wiztool” for staff/creator commands.
Perhaps due to its advanced features and limited documentation, DGD was often more popular with implementors than those who just wished to run a game. Game libraries over the years included:
DGD could also be used to run certain other LPMUD codebases with work, such as the LPMUD 2.4.5 library, and the MudOS-alike package.
Most of these packages are difficult to find — they were obscure when new, and are now ancient history.
Skotos was a company that attempted to make MUDs commercially successful by increasing their complexity and production values significantly. DGD was the basis of most of their games and a lot of shared infrastructure.
Skotos opened its first major game, Castle Marrach, in the year 2000. Over the years it created a number of other games, and adopted a few more from outside Skotos.
In 2020, Skotos ceased operations. The same year, it finished spinning off those games that could viably exist independently into their own entities, no longer dependent on Skotos.
You can find Skotos’ technology as the basis of ChatTheatre, and in spun-off games like Castle Marrach and Allegory of Empires.