Does anyone know how to create a MUD.
There’s a good zine for MUD builders: “Imaginary Realities”. It has two archives, one of them is offline now: 1, 2
This zine had some good advice for starters over the years:
My friend uses Coffee Mud http://www.coffeemud.org/ You build your mud and host it online.
A slightly easier option I’ve stumbled across is WrittenRealms which might be more limited, but lets you do everything online in a browser, and the game is stored on their server. https://writtenrealms.com/home
I’ve been looking at Guncho since @HanonO recommended it. I’ve succeeded in getting a MUD client (TinyFugue) to work but was stumped due to the wiki being down. Today though, following a rush of brains to the head, I found the help wiki via the wayback machine.
It refers to an I7 extension to allow writers to compile Guncho stories offline (for writing and testing) but the link to the zipped file no longer works. Is it still available? (It was written for 5T18, so guess I’d have to try hacking it to make it work with the current version of Inform, but that seems more desirable than me blundering around on the Guncho website while I learn the ropes.)
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I’ve thought about creating a MUD before, largely because there are some things I’ve wanted to do that realistically couldn’t be done in traditional parser IF, but there is no real “jumping off” point like there is with IF, since if you start with Written Realms and decide to move to, say, LpMUD or Circle, everything will have to be coded from scratch. The same could be said with MOO, since to implement anything that isn’t in the database you need to completely understand MOO Code, which is also true of MUSH.
Both of these suffer from the duality of hardcode and softcode, and certain things can only be done in hardcode.
I don’t quite follow: how is that different from IF? If you start with Inform 7 and switch to TADS, everything will have to be re-written from scratch too.
Or are you just saying that for a MUD you generally have to learn two languages: both the scripting language and the language that the MUD engine is coded in?
As far as I’m aware, DGD is one of the many servers (or drivers, in LPMUD lingo) that makes up the LPMUD family. Much like an IF authoring system, it also needs a library (or a mudlib) in order to function properly.
LPMUD, however, requires knowledge of a C dialect known as LPC, and as soon as you get C dialects involved I feel like I’m immediately out of my league.
Writing IF in TADS is one thing, but having to learn a version of C, one of the most difficult languages for non-programmers to learn, just feels daunting.
I’m not really a fan of Inform 7, but if I were, I’d at least investigate Guncho, but it seems to be more like a multiplayer IF than a true MUD IMHO.
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Sorry to be responding so late. I cunningly managed to lock myself out of my account.
That’s why I was interested in Guncho, because it uses I7 as the jumping off point, and so of course you immediately have access to the standard inform library, with, as you point out, doors, boxes etc. already coded and ready to go.
It seemed to me a very clever idea. Later on, I spent a little time recreating the help wiki as “Guncho Helpworld” so that the documentation was available on-site.
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I have many fond childhood memories of building MUDs using a system called DGD (Dworkin’s Generic Driver at the time)
Eventually, it was licensed by iChat and no longer available to the public. Then, more recently, I hear it is available again! I’m planning to check it out some time soon.
I highly recommend it for MUD implementation, back in the day it had the flexibility of C while compiling objects and behaviors on demand and it implicitly managed memory.
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What the hell, I clicked Edit instead of reply. LOL