Sorry for nitpicking, but it's kind of a side issue I have. The word
MOB is just short for mobile. That's it. The term came about during the days of old when people used to play MUDs. This stands for Multi-User Dungeon. It was the pre-cursor days to current MMOGs (Massive Multiplayer Online Game). Your typical MUD was ran off someone's home computer, which back in the day wasn't very fast and 99.99% of people were using dial-up. Usually SLOW dial-up. I'm talking 26K or even slower speeds. Not even 56K.
Back then MUDs were text adventure games. You typically connected to them through a Telnet or Gopher client, but there were some more specialized games that wrote their own interface for you to download. Later, that became a past time to write nicer interfaces for MUDs so you can setup hotkeys and macro's that a Telnet client would not allow.
Anyhow, games were written with C code and sometimes C++. I used to do some coding and had a mudserver running on my system. I was using a Diku derivative for a long time and then switched over to Circle 3. These names were prepackaged MUDs that anyone could download and then re-write and compile to their liking. They were generic versions and it was very nice back in the day to learn how to program by downloading a game like this and tinkering. It's how I learned before I went to college and got my BS CS degree.
Well, I'm digressing. The reason MOB came about was because to create a mud after you compiled the code was to use a "builder" interface. This allowed you to expand and add more to your MUD without having to always rewrite code and compile. You could add to your MUD on the fly and even "hire" people to expand your game even if they didn't know how to program code. All they needed to know was a few simple commands. One such command was "/oload <number>". Oload was short for object-load. You then used a number to load a specific object in the database of already created objects. You could also create objects. MUDs are built with 3 generic things. Rooms, which have a description and contain objects, Players, and Objects, which is everything else in the game. An Object has attributes and flags when created. Attributes are typically easy things to recognize like the name of an object. Such as a dresser-drawer, or the Sword of Doom, or A Raging Titan. Flags are what are used on an object to tell it how to behave. The
MOBILE flag was just that, a flag that allows an object to move on it's own. You could then assign a script to the mobile object to move in a certain pattern or only around so many rooms or whatever. Typically, the monsters and NPCS (Non Player Characters) were only assigned the mobile flag. However, nothing was to stop a programmer/builder from assigning the mobile flag to lamppost and have that lampost wander around like anything else.
The term mob over the years became a catch-all term for monsters within a game. Why? Because sometimes what you fight within a game like this isn't exactly a monster. Also, NPC is typically assigned as a term to Mobs within the game that you do NOT attack such as shop vendors. However, if a NPC doesn't move about then technically it's not a mob. Nor is any monster that doesn't move.
Sorry for the history lesson. If you have any other specific questions on what something means exactly within these games or why it came about I can clue you in some. I've been doing this for a very long time for playing games online with lots of people. I'm talking decades here.
