pgd@bbt.se (P.Garbha) (07/19/90)
I could not find any appropriate newsgroup for this message, although it is not a bug.. A friend of mine has ported the program MUD (Multi-User-Dungeon) by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle, from Essex university, to unix and c. It is originally written in BCPL, and only running on a DecSystem 10/20 computer. This version runs under SysV (with shared libraries). But now he has no time to finish the porting, and he thought that maybe someone on the net is interested to get the package. It's current state is playable, but it will probably crash after a while, or lock-up at some time, with multiple players. Some initialization code is also missing (to save the game between system re-boots, etc.) So it require some work to get flying properly. MUD is actually a multi-user adventure-game compiler, (and interpreter), with one game called "mud", and a smaller one called "valley". The "mud" adventure in itself (in this version) has 422 rooms and 458 objects, with quite a rich vocabulary (but a stupid parser). The input format of the mud source is not that great either. It is around 12000 lines of c-code. (requires a 32-bit c-compiler) The multi-user feature is based on shared memory, so it won't work on a network. It is probably quite tough to change that to some other sceme. (The amount of shared memory it is using is around 200k (for mud), so also forget about 16-bit cpu's) Is anyone interested? Then just send me an e-mail. PS. I was just reading the latest PC-Magazine, and there they have a small presentation of "British Legends" on CompuServe. From that article it seems like "British Legends" is just a later version (or another version) of mud. At least the screen on the bottom of page 510 is exactly like coming from mud. "You are standing in front of a ramshackle hut. Behind you is a field of gorse. Further on to the south you can see a fast flowing river. To the east you can see a range of mountains wreathed in mist and to the west is a small cottage."