Lyanic runs a mud with a really neat crafting system on it and it has a strong storyline which would allow for good rp. It's called the 7th Plane. The addy is www.7thplane.net:8888. Pretty fun mud. Has a bit of a learning curve but it's well worth it.
You're likely to run into problems with trying to compile any older codebase with newer versions of gcc. Almost every minor (major.minor.revision) version update of gcc either deprecates functionality or applies stricter standards (warnings become errors). That's why it's always a good idea to fix warnings (I have my code compiling on gcc 4.6.x with no warnings now). You could probably fix the errors you're getting on EmpireMUD to make it compile on a newer version of gcc relatively easily. Most instances are easy to fix and a solution can be found with a quick google search of the compiler error message. Of course, if there are thousands of errors, it might be a tedious process.
15 Dec, 2012, quixadhal wrote in the 13th comment:
Votes: 0
The current version of gcc in 4.7.x
Starting around gcc 4.2 they started actually implementing some of the stricter error checking that had been allowed previously, mostly because the checks for it were quite expensive and made compilation take forever on your 386/33.
You'll likely find the vast majority are due to const casting of strings (where you pass a const char * into a function that tries to treat it as a plain char *).
Not sure what made me think about these two but if you have enough programming experience, I remember KaVir released a wilderness snippet many moons ago which if I remember had some basic features that could be expanded on to have one hell of a crafting system(I think I was doing such a thing years ago).
Not sure what happened to his site but I have a copy I can email you if you're interested.
Trying to find one to use as an example so I can add crafting to my own mud.
Thanks!