Member Discussions

Time has come for me to choose a new mud engine.
The one I am used to has a couple of negative points which I want to avoid in my new choice, hopefully you have some good suggestions?

a) Preferably a "major" coding language, powerful but with an easy learning curve, python or something would probably be a good suggestion if such a thing exists. Don't want to learn another language that is no use elsewhere in life. Ideally there would be some other users running the codebase. If the language is *REALLY* easy it might be ok that it is useless in the rest of the world though ;)

b) Should be allowed to accept donations/payment. Don't want to suddenly find I need bigger servers and noone can pitch in.

c) Have a certain amount of stock content that I can use while getting started and also use as learning materials.

d) Shouldn't be too picky about what flavour of *nix it runs on. Reason I am leaving my presend codebase is that it will only run on very specific setup, hard to find hosts.

e) the engine itself should be fairly "open", able to change things at quite a high level

So, what engine/codebase should I pick? I am open to suggestions :) Is there anything that can hit all 5 points?

I honestly can't think of anything, at least not with the donations/payment part included. There are tons of code bases out there where you can change everything(as they just give you the straight source). The only engines I can think of off the top of my head would be Rapture and LPC that allow you to accept payment(in the sense of trying to make a profit at least). Rapture is probably the cheaper of the two, if the figures I've heard for the commercial LPC license are true... it's just an insane price.

So, what engine/codebase should I pick? I am open to suggestions :) Is there anything that can hit all 5 points?

Yes.

I'd like to clarify about LPC if I may.

The majority of LPmud drivers (the binary program
that basically "runs the LPmud") cannot be used
commercially. Historically, the LPmud community
has understood this to mean that you can accept
money as donations to run the mud, but you may not
accept money as payment for playing on the mud.

Strictly speaking, there isn't that much in the
LP license to suggest that's ok either, but it's
been a tradition as far back as I remember (1993)
on many high-profile LPmuds, and I've never
heard of Lars or subsequent maintainers
objecting to donations. Good luck trying to
find him these days, btw.

So if by "donations/payment" you really mean "I'm
ok with either", then the average LP mud will suit
you, since you can accept donations.

But if what you really mean is "I want to run a
commercial mud" then LP is mostly ruled out, with
one exception I'm aware of. You can negotiate a
commercial license with the owners of the DGD
driver. From what I hear, that license runs over
50,000 USD.

On every other one of your requirements, most
LPmud libs are a solid hit. You just need to decide
whether the commercial/donations thing is a
disqualifier.

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net

(Comment added by cratylus on Wed Sep 6 12:30:18 2006)

IANAL. Read the licenses yourself.

I honestly can't think of anything, at least not with the donations/payment part included.

Just on the commercial use issue, I know of about 50 availble mud codebases.
http://sourcery.dyndns.org/wiki.cgi?OpenSourceMuds

There is also an LPMud under GPL, SWLPC, which can be found on sourceforge.

Tyche:
If you included Muding on there, thanks!

Muding is a mud engine/framework, that is striving to hit 4 of the 5 points above. We aren't striving to include basic content, at least not right now. We definitely will have extensive docs in the future as the code releases become more stabalized.
http://muding.rubyforge.org

Just on the commercial use issue, I know of about 50 availble mud codebases.
http://sourcery.dyndns.org/wiki.cgi?OpenSourceMuds

There is also an LPMud under GPL, SWLPC, which can be found on sourceforge.

I've known of many of these, but never actually read any of their licenses to know for sure what you can and cannot do with them. Thanks for that list, a lot of them I had never heard of.

For the OP, this list from Tyche has a lot of different bases you could use, none I personally have experience with but I have looked at SocketMud and CoffeeMud in the past and they looked promising, but I didn't go too far into them. You mentioned Python, there's 2 on that list that are written in Python.

Crat: DGD was what I was referring too, I had heard it was around 100k but never verified it(just hearing 100k made me say, nope not using that).

ahmahgahz,

The driver README for SWLPC seems to state that
it is a derived work based in part on Lars code.
This would disqualify it from being used
commercially, if it is so. Whatever it is you
choose, if you plan to make money, make sure
to read the license yourself.

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net

If the SWLPC code is based on a license that limits the use of the software, doesn't that create an issue with it being open source? Or at the very least releasing it as GPL?

Sombalance

Yes. I don't understand the way their README
seems to mention both LP license and GPL and
in my mind doesn't really reconcile the two. I'm
not sure what is or isn't *really* GPL in that
code, but clearly some of it, by their own
statement, cannot be, if it is derived from
Lars code.

I'm talking specifically about the driver code.
I haven't looked at the lib code that closely yet.

-Crat
http://dead-souls.net

SWLPC is the oldest branch of the LP server, and it is my understanding that the three Australian contributors and L. Pensjo agreed to release their contributions under GPL. I examined it several years ago and had some nits with two pieces of contributed code included but not listed, and not under GPL. The thread is still here.
http://www.mudconnect.com/discuss/discuss.cgi?mode=MSG2&area=positions&page=2&message=23540#23652

(Comment added by Tyche on Wed Sep 6 19:53:15 2006)

BTW here is some early LP historical information for the curious. Some of which directly conflicts with the George Reese version of LP history which for some unknown reason backdates LP an entire year. http://sourcery.dyndns.org/wiki.cgi?LPMudTree

I'll take this opportunity to again plug my favorite up and coming codebase: NakedMud!
http://www.ualberta.ca/~hollis/nakedmud.html

point a) NakedMud is bilingual- you can code in both C and Python. The architecture is clean and ingeniously organized into modules. It really is a pleasure to code on. And it's inventor, Geoff Hollis, is constantly putting more effort into making things more coder-friendly. And the community currently developing NakedMud muds is very helpful.

point b) NakedMud was built from Brian Graversen's SocketMud by Geoff Hollis who has placed no clause in the licence about accepting any kind of monetary donation or payment, though personally I find the thought distasteful...

point c) The point of NakedMud is that there is no stock content but if your desire is for learning the codebase: there is a "proof of concept" zone that shows a good deal about what NakedMud can do and there are 3 design documents (100 pages all told) eloquently describing NakedMud's capabilities- including demo coding and scripting tutorials. And a building tutorial is reportedly on the way.

point d) NakedMud has been proven to run on RedHat, Debian, and Mac OSX, and I'm pretty sure it will run on anything with python!

point e) I'm not sure which codebases do not fit this category but NakedMuds highly modular design makes it very easy to modify just about anything.

thanks for your time and remember- Life is short, Party Naked!

Hey, that was my post. :) (My username was Delgath a long time ago...)

The SWLPC driver is maintained by "Dredd" who is online occasionally at Shattered World (telnet: shattered.org 23) should anyone have any questions for him.

Regarding the 5 points mentioned by the original poster in relation to SWLPC:

a) Uses LPC, like other LpMUDs

b) Can accept donations/payments if you believe the GPL license is valid (see the post Tyche linked to)

c) I think the stock content included is fairly small

d) I don't think it's too picky about what flavour of *nix to use, however the sourceforge file often doesn't run straight out of the box, so may require some fiddling

e) Engine is very open -- pretty much anything you'd want to change in the game is in the lib rather than the driver