Based on the success of Role-Playing Games such as Dungeons and Dragons, some people decided that it would be cool to be able to play games such as this via the Internet. There are many different factions as to which type of MUD (Diku-MUD, MERC, ROM, LP-MUD, MUSH, MOO, MUSE...) is the best.

The latest edition to the list of factions is the newly arisen RPI (Role Play Intensive). Pioneered by muds such as Armageddon, Harshlands, and The Four Lands.

For more information on MUD's (specifically MUSHes) check out The Mudinfo Home Page .

Some Questions and Answers

> Can you offer some guidance as to how to set up a MUD?

First and foremost, before you even begin, come up with a concept, or theme you want your MUD to use. Ideas and worlds abound, and I'd urge you to be as original as you can. Use ideas from other pencil and paper roleplaying games, movies, books or tv. One note of caution though, I've found that worlds based on books, are difficult to do, beyond even copyright infringement issues, creating the world can often be an arduous task.

Once you have a theme, then you need to look to what type of game you want to run. There are three major types of MU* (as I look at it currently). These are:

H&S (Hack and Slach MUD):

• This type of MU* concentrates mainly on killing mobiles in the game to achieve higher ranking, be it levels or skills. In this the reason why you kill something comes down to either experience points or equipment. Realism is very often sacrificed in this kind of game. I tend to view it as a multi-player arcade game.

  This type of MU* has been around for A LONG time, and their are lots of them out there. Usually the code base for this type MU* is Diku, Merc, Envy, ROM, Circle, Silly, or LP.

• This is a type of MU* that is dedicated to providing a realistic environment for the purpose of allowing the players to participate through role-play in an ongoing story. I tend to view this type of MU* as a challenger to standard pencil and paper role-playing games.

  This type of mud is the newest of the bunch. Currently I know of four RP-MUDs ( Armageddon, Harshlands, The Four Lands, and Dark Horizon). Dark Horizon is based off of Merc v2.0 code. Armageddon was based off straight DIKU code, Isles was based off Merc v2.1 code. (I'm unsure of the base code for Harshlands and The Four Lands). As you will notice all the codes I just mentioned are also mentioned under the H&S section. I'm still uncertain why people have started with basically DIKU code for doing RP MU*s (Merc and Circle are both derivatives of DIKU), except that maybe the implementors were familiar with the DIKU environment when they started (as was my case), or perhaps they thought the already planned out game system would aid them in writing a realistic MU*. To be honest if I had it all to do again, I'd write the whole thing from scratch. As I have changed so much by this point, the code base I choose is barely discernible anymore.

• This type of MU* is much like a bbs in that people connect to it merely to chat a bit. Under this section though, I'd also throw in the so-called 'Pure' Role-Play MU*s. These MU*s concentrate even more so on the story than realism and allow the players to actively participate in developing the world by building rooms for themselves and such. Honestly, this type of MU* has no draw on me because I am very fond of having a set of physical rules which exist and are held out by the computer (as in H&S and RP-MUDs).

  This type of MU* has been around about as long as H&S MUDs. They are generally based off MOO, MUSH, or MUSE (there are others but I am not very familiar with this genre of MU*)

As I said, the best place to begin is to look around at the existing types of MU*s and decide which best suits what you hope to achieve in your MUD.

I'm not sure if the following ftp sites are correct, but they are reported to have source code available on them:

• ftp://grind.isca.uiowa.edu/unix/mud
• ftp://ftp.math.okstate.edu:/pub/muds/servers

• The official CircleMUD site:
• ftp://cambot.res.jhu.edu/pub/CircleMUD/

As far as other resources go, the newsgroup rec.games.mud.admin generally has some discussion which is of pretty high level, but if you have a question about administrating a MUD, they would be likely to give a good answer.

> Also what language did you write your MUD in?

It was based originally in C, and I continued it in C. If I were to write from scratch, I'd use C++ as it better suits the whole concept, but C is the language to know for this.

>I'm currently learning pascal (or other non-C language) what should I do next?

Good, that's a great first step (I started with PASCAL in High School). I would suggest you try and find some references on C and learn a bit before even scratching the surface of any of the source codes. A good rule of thumb from one af the Administrators of Armageddon follows:

A good rule, if you cannot get your stock diku to even compile, maybe you are not ready to set up and run a dikumud yet.