Member Discussions

I've had some free time lately from the myriad of MU*'s I'm working on (including a renaissance political MUX, a survival horror zombie-apocalypse MUD, and several others) and I've started to make a standard ROM-based MUD that will work on Windows right out of the box.

This package does several things so far:

1. It compiles out-of-the-box in MSVC++, all you need to do is add the winsock dll.
2. Comes with an autobooter exe and .bat combination (that I wrote in Visual Basic actually) that runs in the background. It checks every 5 minutes to see if your MUD has updated and if it hasn't it means it's crashed or locked up, and boots a new copy. You can put it in your startup menu to boot the MUD as soon as your PC boots.
3. Full bugfixes and much, much more comments in the stock ROM code.
4. OLC, mobprogs, Lope's color code, much better crash handling (no more null-value crashes).
5. Wiped every stock area except Midgaard and Limbo, wiped all spells and gave, instead, an example of each type (maladict, benedict, damage spell)
6. Completely rewrote the stock aggr_update function so it uses a lot less overhead.
7. Added several new bits of code, such as "mob sleep" mobcommand to add a delay in mobprog command scripts.
8. Overhauled the channel code and consolidated every channel into a single function. New channels can actually be added or removed in-game.
9. Added code to save certain item types that are on the floor after crash/reboots (such as quest items that are disarmed or left on the floor). Similarly, mobs that are less than full HP on a crash/reboot will respawn with the same hp.
10. Wrote a long, detailed guide on how to get it set up and running easily on your home desktop PC in Windows. Yes yes, I know Windows sucks for MUD hosting, but this way -anyone- can download and install and get a MUD running in 5-10 minutes. Included in the guide is how to get it running if you have a firewall or router.
11. Wrote a guide on how to add/change new races/classes/skills, what the most basic ROM functions do, and so on. I also considered changing the way the horrible sorted linked lists work in ROM (and converting them to text files) but meh. I'm lazy.


Anything else that seems necessary? I'm essentially making this for ease-of-use and readability by people who otherwise don't know where to start. Would anyone even download this if it was available? There's still a few bugs I need to work out but otherwise a lot of the work is actually done.

Having never done Windows development, is MSVC++ free?

If not, then this isn't quite available to the masses. If you were to provide a guide on installing, bulding, and running under cygwin, then you would have something.

I applaud the effort though, but wonder if improving access will result in a greater selection of quality MUDs or more crap.

-Gromble

Having never done Windows development, is MSVC++ free?

No it's not free, but there are a number of programs that would do the job just as well that are free and available for windows.

If you were to provide a guide on installing, bulding, and running under cygwin

There are already a number of those floating around the web not to mention on the ROM mailing list archive that allow you to use most flavors of ROM with just a few tweaks, I believe the point of doing something like this would be to run a MUD on a windows machine without the bulky overhead of running in essence an entire OS.

but wonder if improving access will result in a greater selection of quality MUDs or more crap.

I think the same can be said about anything that makes it easier to set up a mud, like the QuickMUD, 1stMUD type packages. But hopefully it will reach someone who might not have made a MUD otherwise which results in something with quality, only time will tell.


Attitron:
Sounds great, and I'd probably download if anything just to play with it. The only thing I would say would be to put in OBJ and Room progs maybe, and an unlimited bits system would be good.

I think that you will find it to be a very popular item if you release it as you have it. There is always the argument that any codebase can add to crap muds, but those are harmless in that they die out quickly for lack of popularity.

It sounds like you've done an impressive amount of work already. I would definately have a look if posted, but in my case I would just be enjoying your work as a painter enjoys another's artwork :)

I guess it's fairly popular as people have been downloading it for many years. http://www.gammon.com.au/downloads/dlrom.htm

(Comment added by Tyche on Tue Dec 5 17:41:27 2006)

I've ported several muds to run "compatibly" under both windows and unixes using GCC, Cygwin gcc, Borland, Microsoft, Logiteque, or Digital Mars compilers.

Hmmm.. Diku, Merc, TinyMud, PernMush, Unter, LPMud, TinyMuck, CoolMud.

You can find them on both the MudMagic and the MubBytes sites.