There's also a fourth option - speak to the admin the various existing RPI muds, see if your ideas are compatible with theirs, and if so join their staff. If you later decide you'd like to create your own mud after all, the experience you've gained will provide you with a big advantage.

Well, as a long-time fan of RPI MUDs and a player of Harshlands, Shadows of Isildur, and Armageddon, I know that each has its strengths and weaknesses. I'm curious, though, what it is you're specifically looking for which is missing and the absence of would inspire you to give up MUDding altogether?

In other words, what is it that makes a MUD perfect in your eyes?

If you're intent on creating your own, has just been released and makes an excellent base to start from.

Take care,

Jason

I'm working on an RPI mud called Darksun: Clash of Sorcerer-Kings. It's really just in the works, and my codebase is all original, mainly coming from an old Arm-player Rob Peckham. I got it here.

He called it SwordQuest, and it was pretty unstable but I got it up and running on my linux and I went ahead and got a shell account with genesismuds and so it sits online right now, maybe this will be the place for you once I'm done with it.

-Del

It sounds to me like you are looking for an ideal more than what any one place out there can provide. It's tough to find exactly what you want. I'm firmly convinced that there's no MUD out there yet which has close to what I want. And...well to that extent I have a couple words of not quite wisdom to probably just bolster what's already in your heart.

Don't give up MUDding. You've put too much time, effort, money (most people at least pay for the internet connection), creativity, soul, etc into it (if you've been RPing anyway) to give up now.

I would preface the next with a question: How much administration experience do you have on MUDs? If you are thinking of running your own, that's something to consider. It's tough, ask anyone who's done it.

Getting a position at a place you like to play at can be a great way to
a) make that game into more of what you want as a player
b) give you valuable experience for when the time comes to start your own little haven in the midst of this vast internet.

Because I think that if you feel strongly about it, you should grasp that and make it a reality. Find yourself a couple good coders who you can sway over to your vision. Get them excited about what you are trying to build.

Trying to tackle the running of a whole MUD, from administration, to building, to coding, to quest running, to... all alone is near impossible, it's what I have to do on the MUD I'm at most of the time.

So really, go get some people, make sure to sell them real well on your vision, and start your own place. Just make sure to be aware that it probably won't be exactly your vision in the end (it's hard to control what type of pbase you end up with for example). And above all, good luck no matter what you go with.

Atleast to my credit I can say that I got a version of Linux to run on one of my old, rather crappy computers, all by myself *proud*. I'm going to continue looking into different codebases and working on my programming until I can hopefully figure out what to do next.

Maybe make a dinky website explaining the type of ideas I have. If I can't present any code to anyone, I can atleast present that. It may get people interested. Who knows?

Delerek:
Thanks for the link. I'm going to go look at the site as soon as I finish posting this.

It's a great start if you like Arm's codebase. Peckham started with scratch diku I believe and he put about 4 year's of coding into it, so it has potential to the right coder...

-Del