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Old 08-09-2012, 05:52 PM   #36
camlorn
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Re: MUD Creation/Coding Help

A good coding tutorial would help you a lot at this point--if it;'s a good one, it'll tell you exactly what to get to get started and how exactly to install it.

Notepad++ is a text editor and has nothing to do with a compiler. It can compile if you set it up to, but it doesn't actually do it itself; it calls a separate program that you provide. Basically, if you're familiar with the command line (I believe you are), notepad++ invisibly brings up that program, issues the command you tell it to to compile, and then closes it. If you don't understand that, don't worry; you will soon enough.

A compiler is a translator--code is readable by humans, machine language isn't, and computers can only execute machine language. The compiler takes the readable code, checks it to make sure it can be translated and tells you if it can't, and then does the translation into unreadable-but-executable machine language. Beware: just because the compiler says it works doesn't mean it does what you intended; the compiler was able to translate it, but that doesn't mean it does what you think it does, or that it even runs at all. Welcome to the world of cryptic errors about "missing _foo", "segfault", and the like. It's not that bad, you can google most of them, and find out what they mean.

Being completely honest here, for someone who's never programmed before, go get and install visual c++ express 2010, the free IDE from microsoft. Unlike notepad++, it comes with a compiler, and you're up and going as soon as the godawful long install process is done (It can take forever to download--it's really quite large, and includes pretty much everything you ever need to develop for windows if you're writing a mud, short of the documentation which used to come with it but is now all online). Any c/c++ tutorial will work with it; if you're using something else, you'll need something else.

Given that you're writing a mud, you'll eventually need to move away from it, but for getting started i-don't-know-how-to-set-up-the-compiler, you can't beat it. There's no reason you can't use it for mud development, but you'll probably find you eventually want something else--most mud codebases run on linux these days, and Microsoft products make it understandably hard to make that happen. As linux is the only reasonable host option, or so it seems to me, for a reasonable price (free to $10-$20, depending), you'll probably end up using it. You can host on windows, but that takes a lot more know-how, and there's a lot less help floating around.

I'd stop at this point and look up what a compiler is, and I wouldn't continue until I understood why a compiler doesn't come with notepad++, but that's just me--my outlook tends to be "There are no black boxes", and that's not always best.

If your tutorial says to use something specific (I'm assuming you're using a tutorial, if not please do, it'll save you a lot of headaches), then make sure you're using that specific thing: you'll probably run into cryptic errors following that tutorial with a different compiler.
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