MUD programming

I found MUD games to be kind of interesting. Anyone know a good tutorial on MUD programming in the C language?

I may very well be completely ignorant of these things but Google may be of more practical help.

I bought the book MUD Game Programming by Ron Penton and its a good book and it shows you how WinSock makes you type a lot more than sockets for Linux.

i thought GameTutorials had some good MUD stuff. if not, check out winsocks, u might need to, depending on whther or not you use a library.

Besides, it's good you know how to use socks anyway :D

thanks guys. I'm gonne check out the game tutorials thing right now.

I found http://www.gamedev.net/reference/art...rticle1766.asp on gamedev.net . . . the sourcecode for a MUD, called "AberMUD"

Hi there,

I first wanted to write muds about 6 months ago and found it pretty hard going as my network programming was limited to say the least and all the resources I could find were over complex for my skill level.

Ive heard alot of people who say they learn by looking at old mud codebases and hacking their way through them however some are so complex its was more of a hinderance than a help to me.

What I decided to do was break it down into its simplest format which was pretty much a chat server. When I first started I just concentrated on the server and used the Gmud Client for the player to connect with. I followed Beej Socket Programming tutorials and built a server based on the example select system which he demonstrated. It was pretty poor but it worked, then I started adding linked lists to keep track of my connections, rooms, etc.

Sooner or later it started to become a monster and I was fed up having to type /north or /pickup axe etc so I decided to re-write it and write my own client in windows so I could have buttons, lists of all the players in the room, etc on the clients. It was alot more work but it all really stemed from that simple chat server on Beej's tutorial.

Others may disagree but I found nothing at Game Tutorials or any of the other game code sites which I knew of which helped me out. I have that book by Ron Penton about Mud Programming but have never read it because its all in C++ and Python and I was firmly into C at the time.

Anyway what im trying to say is that if you want to write a mud, learn some unix socket coding and develop a basic chat server first off then start thinking about things like events, combat, databases, etc. When you are done with the server then maybe consider writing your own client however this is when it develops into mmorpg land but it is the next progressive step when writing muds in my opinion.

So anyway no links from me im afraid just google Beej Network Programming and follow that tutorial to get your started and remember to just keep it simple at first.

Good Luck.

Stan