Howdy Y'all.

I been playing mud games for several years now, though never thought of creating one myself. I went more of the way to making 2D games. Though Ive always wanted to create my own mud. Use to fiddle around with this program called Ultimud a few years back, but guessing it died cause I cant seem to find it. Anywho I was looking for some suggestions of a good codebase/engine to start me off. There are so many around but cant seem to find the right one, I have checked out Coffeemud but IDK there something about that one, maybe cause it dont seem to active.

I plan on making a Post-Apocolypitc MUD game.

I wanna be able to have a few things in the game like ASCII Maps, Town capturing (Factions/Clans/Dietys can capture towns to run/defend etc), Classless system(Instead of choicing classes the player must train in differet combat, support skills to fully customize his character) Support for PHP clients/Java clients. So can be played through the website.

Hopefully I can get a few tips n pointers from you all. Thanks for your time.

What did you like about Ultimud?

Besides the Ease, how it was simple to add different functions, map things, how combat worked, that nice ascii maps, commands. hmm some thing i didnt like is I couldnt put it alot of stuff wanted cause it was a hard coded engine. LIke Cars, Citys take over, Random Monster raids etc etc

It's relatively unlikely that you will find a codebase that already includes all the features you're looking for with the level of customization you want. You will almost invariably need to write code. What kind of experience do you have with 2D games? Whatever programming language you know will probably affect the codebase choice you make.

I know the Basics. Dark Basic, Visual Basic etc Havnt really gotten into the C family of programming, I do know a little bit about ruby laug but i never like it much.

To the best of my knowledge, there are no openly available MUD codebases written in any form of Basic. The vast majority are written in C/C++, with a few others in Java, Ruby or Python.

Didnt think so, Looks like i gotta face the music and finally learn a diff lang. Blah haha

There's a few servers written in basic here:
ftp://sourcery.dyndns.org/archive/servers/othe...

AFAIK There's been no active development or support for a few years on the sourceforge pages.

I don't know if this will help you at all but I am taking C++ this semester and we are using Visual Studio with the Dark GDK to make 2D and 3D objects. I think we are making a simple game for a final project.

Here is the book: http://www.amazon.com/Starting-Out-Games...

It is a C++ book but it has you using dark basic commands within C++ functions to make some of the visual things. It might be a easier slide into C++ where you already understand dark basic.

It is not what you are looking for but if you decide to learn C++ this might be a good transition book for you. So far I love it.

Ill take a looksy thanks. So about a good starting code base for my game genre any suggestions?

cprogramming.com is an excellent way to start learning the basics of C. As far as heavily supported codebases I'd start with ROM or more efficiently QuickMUD as it has a bunch of stuff already implemented for you (color, blah blah). Again rom/quickmud has lots of support as far as snippets and feedback go. Also smaug has a good support base and is a well kept codebase.

To be clear, you should be using SmaugFUSS, not standard SMAUG, which hasn't had as much attention as the FUSS version.

Ill take a look at smaug, there much support for newbies like me here at mudbyte? Seems to be the only really active MUD design forums i have seen.

David is correct, SmaugFUSS is the one you should look into if going down the Smaug path. Also to answer your question, yes, I got started here a few months ago after lurking for a few months before that. Since then I've gotten QUITE a bit of help.

Im looking through the Code Repository im guessing that were i can find all the code bases, but under smaug there is no smaugfuss is it the same thing?

Never mind found it. Now seeing how Smaug is under the merc tree would merc snippets work with smaug? Also does it work with sql?

No, SmaugFUSS is not the same thing, and it's not available here due to disagreements with the Administration. If you're looking for SmaugFUSS you'll want to look at the SmaugMuds site where the FUSS Project, LoP, and AFKMud are housed and kept up to date. (Well, AFKMud only gets updates for major things, development was halted.) You'll also find support for issues directly related to those specific bases, and an up-to-date list of bugs that have been fixed in all the bases stored there.

ok cool thanks for all your help :D

Seems I have come across another problem, hehe I dont use linux and dont plan on useing any linux emulator, I got the Microsoft Visual C++ installed but it is not quite like VB with a simple way to compile and run and all the tuts I have found for SmaugFUSS are for linux, is there a simple step by step for messing around with smaug for noobs like me?

Look into getting cygwin here. It's a linux shell emulator for Windows.

there a way to do it without using it?