View Single Post
Old 08-09-2012, 02:42 PM   #29
dentin
Member
 
Join Date: Apr 2008
Home MUD: Alter Aeon
Posts: 245
dentin is on a distinguished road
Re: MUD Creation/Coding Help

Lorei,

The fundamental problem here is that you don't appear to know, what you don't know. I suspect you're trying to extend your writing experience into the software field. This will not work; the fields are not sufficiently related.

In the writing world, things are pretty straight forward - you have your favorite word processor and you can slam something together quickly and easily. You must be asking, "Why can't I just do the same thing with an RPI? What is wrong with these people?"

The simple answer is that word processors do not work when building RPIs, because RPIs are not word documents. They are software packages, running custom programming languages, in a programming environment. You cannot simply construct one the way you would a novel.

The basic pieces needed for a functioning RPI are:

1) Host machine. This is the server box where you'll run your code. For now, I'd recommend you install linux on one of the machines in your house and use that as your host. Think of this as the "web server" where you will eventually "publish" your RPI.

2) MUD/RPI server. This is the foundation upon which you build everything else. The server defines how people connect, and it may limit or restrict your ability to do certain things. There are many, many types of these. There is no particular one that is best. You can choose one that you think does what you want, or you can write your own. Be aware that writing your own will take literally years.

3) Your fantasy world built on top of the MUD/RPI server, probably using a custom RPI programming language. This is where most of the creativity will come in.

Think of this process as similar to posting an article on a Wordpress or Blogspot blogging side: just as you write articles to post into Wordpress which will then be published to the external world by the web server, you write a fantasy world into the RPI server which will be published to the world by the host machine.

The reason you're having trouble is that you want to jump immediately to step 3, because step 3 is where the creativity comes in. But without step 1 and 2, it's like trying to write a novel with charcoal briquettes and stone slabs. You simply lack the tools.

Quite frankly, you're just going to have to buckle down and get those two steps out of the way first in order to make progress. If you can't do that, you may as well just join an existing RPI server and contribute there.

-dentin

Alter Aeon MUD
dentin is offline   Reply With Quote