Dannic, The Prince of Cats

Posted by Dannic on August 27th, 2005 in Muds

I’ve been trying for years to come up with a Mud(Multi User Dungeon) that I could be happy with. It never seemed to fail that I could never get it done so that people could start playing.

It all started while I was playing a Mud that my brother got me into. It was quite fun. The mud was still in its begining stages of development. I was a regular contributor and enjoyed the rewards. The Role Playing was great.

After awhile, the game just didn’t hold as much fun for me. The administrator started being a jerk about minor things and I ended up being banned. No thanks at all. Just lost all my money and character that I had built up.

Sure, the admin blames it on me. But I really do know better. I was one of the elite. I was in the inner circle. I knew what was going on. I wasn’t the only one in that small time frame either. It was really because the admin didn’t like the fact I was playing another mud of similiar design for free.

After being banned, I decided to work on my own Mud. I tried out the various Mud drivers. Mud OS was what was being used on the one game I played quite a bit of and the one I had just started playing. The driver was good but hadn’t been updated in years. Bugs were abound.

Found another driver called DGD. This one is great. Much more powerful than MudOS. Extremely customizable. And, it would run in windows natively. Which was something that MudOS would not do.

Unfortunately, DGD doesn’t have any pre-built libraries that you can just drop in and run. But the good thing is that they have a very active user base and it is constantly being improved.

There are many others out there as well. Unfortunately, none of them would really allow me to do what I want to do. Take contributions legally.

No, I’m not interested in pay for play at the moment. I hope I never need to get that way. But I would like to be able to take contributions/donations to help keep it running. Those contributions are basicly what serve as motivators in improvement as well.

I’ve had Karealia now for about 3 years. Been trying to run it off of my NT Server over a DSL line. Just doesn’t quite hack it. DGD restricts the license so that you cannot recieve any monies unless you purchase a license at about $200k. Of course this is just way out of the question for a Mud.

I got to together with a few friends of mine. One of them knew quite a bit more about coding than I do. Fortunately, he is good at what he does. He has created several drivers and hopefully has found one that he can stick with. We have discussed this on several occasions and he has released the driver to the public.

What’s so nice about this driver? Well, it is written in a common web scripting language. It runs off of its own publicly available scripting engine called Python. The language is easy to learn and the license is not restrictive at all. So you can end up doing what you like with it.

If you are interested in this driver, you should visit the Runefire and download it for yourself. Support forums are not currently available but will be soon. If not on Runefire, then on my main website.

While you are out mudding around and what to watch the progress of a mud being built from the ground up, drop by and say hi. Karealia can be found at www.karealia.com port 1863. Just use your favorite Mud Client and drop in.