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[Iituem]

I've not been able to find good tutorials on the subject, and it gets a bit bewildering after a while.  My question is; does anyone have experience setting up a MUD?

[jplur]

Well I've written one: http://www.parker-portfolio.com/islands/Islands2.zip (requires Twisted; http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/)

There should be instructions and requirements for the particular code base you want to use. In general, you run the server, and forward the ports you want to use. 

[nuker w]

Sheesh, I havn't played a MUD for ages. Any good ones I should look at?

[Sowelu]

What kind of experience are you after in designing one...writing the mechanics completely from the ground up, or playing with existing ones and making minor tweaks?  Sadly there's not much middle ground, because the complicated ones with a lot of power come with truly awful 'stock' games.

It's seriously retro by now, but I'd recommend ROM2.4.  I learned C by playing with that.  It's a fun, simplistic system where things are generally pretty simple to figure out.  It's not object-oriented or anything, which honestly...makes things easier.  Most importantly, it's a complete game.  If you and your buddies aren't familiar with the system and the areas, you can have a lot of fun playing through the entire thing because it's big and well-developed and the theme is consistently inconsistent.  It's easy to tack new areas onto, because...well, you only have so much power to modify it.  So don't try big mods?  Little ones will work fine.

Eh, depends on how much experience you have.

[Iituem]

Limited experience, and in that sense playing with an existing and making minor tweaks would be preferable.  Shall check both of these out, though.

[freeformschooler]

Iituem, I've set up a few MUDs before. It's not too hard - you just have to be familiar with general computer administration (command line access, opening ports, telnet/ssh, etc). If you're looking to have an easy time adding content and such while having a "game-lite" and no-raw-coding experience, I recommend TinyMUSH (http://tinymush.sourceforge.net/) and its codebase family (MUCK, MUX, etc). You can literally set up rooms, items, descriptions and linking right after you finish reading the manual -- or just part of it.
If you're looking for a powerful but administration-heavy engine and/or base game, I recommend Mudlib and the Dead Souls base game. They never really require you to do any C-coding to mod anything, but you do have to learn its mildly complicated scripting system to create flexible objects and other things.

[Sowelu]

Dead Souls is what I used for my more-recent project.  It never got off the ground, although admittedly I was way overambitious (total rewrite of combat from the ground up).

One big problem I had with Dead Souls is that it had a lot of complicated features I didn't want, and it took a lot of work to remove them, but they might be your thing.  It's certainly a complex system while ROM is a simple one.  So, yes--download 'em, try 'em out AS A PLAYER first.  Sink, I dunno, eight hours of play into the stock MUD before you even think about customizing.

[Iituem]

Excellent!  Now I just need to figure out how to set up a UNIX server or its equivalent.  That should be an ordeal.  >_<

(I actually have a semi-competent grasp of using UNIX, but no idea how to establish it.)

[freeformschooler]

Excellent!  Now I just need to figure out how to set up a UNIX server or its equivalent.  That should be an ordeal.  >_<

(I actually have a semi-competent grasp of using UNIX, but no idea how to establish it.)

You could just use one of the wide variety of somewhat user-friendly LINUX distributions such as Ubuntu, Fedora, SUSE or Red Hat. If you need any more help on the subject of server administration PM me on here and I'll try to answer whatever questions you have.

[Sowelu]

Both ROM and DeadSouls have Windows ports.

It's a lot easier to compile stuff on a *NIX, but giving them a spin on Windows is enough for playing at least.

[Iituem]

Just installed Ubuntu.  Everything is different now!  o:

Also, drive partitions haven't work quite as well as I'd hoped.  I'll have to try and port some stuff over before I can test out tinyMUSH.

[Iituem]

Having trouble trying to connect via SSH.  How do you connect to the server on your own computer?

[Lear]

Having trouble trying to connect via SSH.  How do you connect to the server on your own computer?

Address: 127.0.0.1 or localhost. Port: 6666. Leastways, that's what it was for me.

[Fishbreath]

Having trouble trying to connect via SSH.  How do you connect to the server on your own computer?

Address: 127.0.0.1 or localhost. Port: 6666. Leastways, that's what it was for me.

You almost certainly want telnet rather than SSH, unless you've done some very fancy configuration with tinyMUSH. You also probably want a better telnet client than the default. TinyFugue (may be listed as 'tf' in Ubuntu's package manager) is a good simple command line option which has a separate input and output area, which is almost a necessity as far as I'm concerned.

I spent four or five years as an administrator at a PennMUSH game (relatively similar codebases, at least in terms of once you get them up and running), so drop me a line if you have any questions.

[Sowelu]

Do be aware that TinyMUSH includes no combat out-of-the-box.  If you want to add any, you'll be writing it from scratch (or downloading some system someone else wrote, but I don't know of many of those at all).  It won't be very efficient at all, either, so nothing large-scale...but it is kind of a fun exercise if you like the system.  Still, it's scripting, not really a solid language.  Also you'll be writing a lot of stuff like &cmd-find me=$+find *:@pemit me=[name(%0)] is in [name(loc(%0))].  Though when you think about it I guess that's not so bad for simple things.

(After BASIC, my next programming language was TinyMUSH code!)

If you want a social space, or if you want non-automated combat for roleplaying, MUSH is a great system and yes the ease of building is awesome.  I've seen reproductions of the old ZORK games in it, and it wouldn't be hard at all to do that yourself.  Many World of Darkness RPGs are built in TinyMUSH:  Download and install some character sheet utilities (for setting up + viewing characters), and write a die roller (trivial), and poof you're ready to go.

MUCK has a language that's similar to MUSH, but it also has a FORTH clone that's an actual language and pretty efficient and powerful and even compiles in-game, but is still FORTH and thus awfulfun.  I'd say that in some ways, it is more well-developed than MUSH, but it also has no combat out of the box.  Unlike MUSH though, I have seen successful automated combat systems built in MUCK!  On the other hand, MUCK has become associated with a...certain audience...which you will probably notice if you search on it a little.

Having trouble trying to connect via SSH.  How do you connect to the server on your own computer?

Address: 127.0.0.1 or localhost. Port: 6666. Leastways, that's what it was for me.

If 6666 doesn't work, give 4201 a try.  And yeah, telnet, not ssh.