Hi,
Sorry to bump a long dead thread. But I come bearing gifts. Or something like that.
I'm a semi-veteran, totally retired (for like a year now) player of both HellMoo, InfernoMoo and... gosh, what was that third one? Anyway, great game, really great - like, I can't play MUDs anymore. This game has the best little minimap feature, and its exploration, crafting, vehicle and character-building crap is top notch. If only it weren't such a horrible mess of ancient code and bad coding practices... I compare all MUDs and even most online games to this one and always find them coming up short for me.
It's a great game that has ALWAYS been plagued by bad moderation and a few bad apples ruining the fun for everyone. I don't play it anymore just because of that. I know I would if there were a better community maintaining it.
I'm posting the source code that was leaked last year to this thread. It contains InfernoMOO and 2010-Hellmoo database files for people to start with. Let's be honest though - don't even try to host this game unless you're Unix guru and comfortable in learning a super weird scripting language that dates aaaaal the way back to the start of the internet (this basically means very few people can actually host this game successfully, so I dunno why the source code has to be kept under lock and key). Super cool little game engine, super hard to maintain and run. Nevermind --expand-- upon. There are only a few tutorials to get you started and not much else. It's pretty tough just getting started.
If there's anybody out there interested in building off the amazing gameplay this game provides, please take up the torch. The original creators did such a bangup job. I wish more MUDs or just games in general would use this style of gameplay (especially the deep-but-minimalist combat, amazingly detailed minimap, extensive screen reader support, vehicles, open-ended character-advancement system, and crafting system).
As a note, you may need to fix the YACC includes in order to build the original engine. It isn't too hard if you're familiar with C. You don't need to know that much about YACC to fix it. You should not need to do this unless you're changing the underlying framework ... highly recommended not doing this, btw.
The HellMoo 2010 database is really old but very fleshed out starting point. It will not have any of the bugfixes that were pushed between 2010 and now. It's had its user data scrubbed too, so it can't be mined for personal information. If you need help with something, your best bet is to ask on one of the programming discussion channels on HellMoo. People tend to answer basic questions there. Again, don't even bother trying this though unless you're a competent programmer already. This isn't friendly C# or Javascript that you're going to be working with here.
https://mega.nz/#!CB1UEKYC!qRG6q2pJ317e5eYvB9w_vabJG-xJogdzxX9N8emOlnII would host this myself. Maybe someday I will. But it's too much of a hassle for me right now.