MUD Game Programming (Premier Press Game Development)

Congratulations! You have now completed a full, albeit simple, MUD. That was a lot of work involved for a game concept that many consider "primitive." Writing stable server code is a daunting and difficult task, however.

Crashing simply is not an option for servers. You need to have these things run for days at a time, and this is much more difficult to do than a regular game.

Anyway, I hope you've learned a good deal about the basics of making a MUD. In the next part of the book, when I show you the BetterMUD, I'm not going to be nearly as "code oriented" as I was with SimpleMUD. Instead, I'm going to focus on general design issues instead of the nitty-gritty details. By this point, you should have a somewhat solid understanding of simple MUD-like server programs.

Let me go over everything you should have learned in this part of the book.

In Chapter 8, you learned how to:

• Design a handler system to act as an intermediary between the SimpleMUD and players

• Design a login system

• Design a simple alternate-state handler to handle player statistics editing

• Design a simple command parsing system

• Build simple template database classes to minimize the amount of code repetition required

• Build a simple smart-pointer class to seamlessly interact with the databases

• Design players for a simple combat-oriented MUD

• Design items and understand how they interact with players

In Chapter 9, you learned how to:

• Design a simple global map system

• Add stores and training rooms to the game

• Use simple economic interaction via stores

• Connect players, items, rooms, and stores

And in this chapter, you learned how to:

• Implement enemies

• Use a simple instance/template system for enemies

• Implement a simple game loop that takes care of timed events

• Handle player/enemy combat

• Handle player/enemy death

• Connect everything together, creating a full MUD

I would once again like to invite you to play on my version of SimpleMUD, running on telnet://dune.net:5100. It may not be too active, because most people would probably prefer playing around in BetterMUD, but if you're interested, I'll have it running.

Essentially, what you just learned how to make was a flexible-data MUD, with hard-coded physics and logic. If you ever decide to expand the codebase , you should be aware that expanding the logic for SimpleMUD (that is, controlling how enemies and items act), you might find it a difficult task. This is one of the things you will learn how to fix in the next section.

Now, off to BetterMUD!