[MightyK]

Hello everyone.

I'm looking to design a MUD of my own. I have nearly the entire thing mapped out, from classes to combat to leveling to spells to races to the map itself...

But I'm no coder. I don't know if I can ever become good enough to be a coder.

So I ask you, what is the easiest codebase to work with? Are there any codebases that are super intuitive, or very easy to change? I'm thinking of something where, the code is made, and you basically can work with templates. Anyone know something like that?

I'm currently working with CoffeeMUD and enjoying it, and have a fair amount built, but I am aware of its large memory profile and other problems. The biggest one I've found with it, actually, is a 255 character limit for descriptions which really bugs me because I want this MUD to be RP-enforced.

EDIT:

I thought I'd add that I have also tried Dead Souls and really like it and all the helpful people, it just seems a bit complex... I don't know how to begin building a Guild/Clan system for it, for instance.

Is there any system with drag and drop modules? Like a customizable library, is what I"m hoping for.

I really love the feel of Threshold and other RPI-types, for instance, BPII, NWA, other LPs etc.

[Ide]

Unfortunately I think you've already found the two common suggestions for this kind of request. Perhaps there is a DIKU-derivative with an OLC capable enough to create all of your races, classes,spells, and clans but then you'll probably be locked into its leveling/combat and other game mechanics. It seems like at this point your main options are,

* figure out how to change the description limit on CM, or get someone to do it for you
* find another codebase you can code on 'good enough' (perhaps a Tiny such as PennMUSH or TinyMUX?)
* find a coder

Does CM have its own mailing list or forum?

[Ide]

Sorry for the double post, but I've been doing some research and want to separate it from the last reply.

So you can see the 255 character limit here,

https://github.com/bozimmerman/Coffe...ption.java#L51

And here's the method,

https://github.com/bozimmerman/Coffe...MOB.java#L1629

As you can see this description might be compressed, here,

https://github.com/bozimmerman/Coffe...coder.java#L28

Pay attention to this line,

private byte[] encodeBuffer = new byte[65536]

At first glance I don't think it would be a problem to increase the limit (which you could do by modifying the 255 limit in the first link, of course you'd have to rebuild from source), since the encodeBuffer is more than big enough to handle 255 characters. However I'm not familiar enough with CoffeeMUD to say for certain. You could always try and see what happens .

edit: aha, this is interesting.

https://github.com/Kejardon/Espresso...ption.java#L33

That's from a fork of CoffeeMUD that the new developer has changed significantly. You can see they've modified the character limit. However they did make many other changes, so I'm not sure if that's all they had to do.

[MightyK]

Thank you for your help! I don't know how to change it yet, but I think it's given me some insights.