[Szarta]

Hi - I know it has been a while since you posted and maybe you have found a solution by now, but I thought I would chime in for other people who might be interested in building their MUD on something other than their mud server, especially if their home PC is relatively beefy.

You have 3 things you want to do:

1. Edit the code
2. Compile the code
3. Execute the corresponding program - preferably in the same way you would on the server

I recommend doing this using a virtual machine that is running Linux. The virtual machine runs within Windows. For beginners I really recommend something like Ubuntu or XUbuntu as a Linux distro. CentOS is more of a server distro and does not come with all the GUI stuff you will need when you are first learning. For the actual virtual machine program, I recommend either Oracle's VirtualBox or VMWare. All of this software is free and there are guides online describing how to set them up.

VM software usually provides the ability for you to set up something called a shared folder, which is a folder that both your Linux OS and your Windows OS can see. If you kept your code in this shared folder, you could edit it within Windows and then compile it from Linux and run it when needed. HOWEVER...

You said you are using notepad to edit. Notepad is great for some things, but horrible for editing code. For one-off edits here and there, okay, but you really want an editor designed for programming. A lot of linux editors can be scary initially (emacs and vi/vim) - mostly because their purpose is to run from the console and a lot of times mouseless. There are plenty of other good graphical editors, however, again all free. If you are interested in code development, I recommend GVim (graphical/gnome vim) to ease your way into VIM. It has a GUI that explains the commands. There is also Kate, gEdit (for your notepad/like needs), and you mentioned Eclipse.

Eclipse is different than just a code editor - it is an IDE (integrated development environment). It is a good IDE that is cross platform (you can run it from Windows no problem). You could use Eclipse to just edit code and that would be enough - at the very least you'll get syntax highlighting. For most muds, though, you can also build from Eclipse by creating a Makefile project - because most codebases come with a Makefile. If you are interested I could try to walk you through how to set up your mud project to build out of Eclipse.

In the beginning there is a lot to learn but getting proficient with editing and understanding how to build code will go a long way if this is something you are really interested in.