WesternMUD

A simple Western-themed Multi User Dungeon (MUD) server, currently in progress:

Telnet protocol interface
ANSI colour support
An array of user commands and interesting game items
Prefab and randomly-generated areas and rooms
World persistence (with SQLite)

Installation

From source

To build the server from source you'll need to install Crystal (including its package manager Shards) and SQLite.

git clone https://github.com/lewis-weinberger/mud.git
cd mud
shards build --production --release --no-debug

This should generate bin and lib directories, with an executable bin/mud.

Download

Alternatively if you're running Linux on x86_64 you can try the latest pre-built binary in Releases.

Usage

Hosting a server

The server can be started by running the mud executable:

mud

This will read configuration from config.yml in the working directory, or otherwise use a default configuration. Use the -h switch to learn about available command-line options.

Clients can then connect using their favourite Telnet client (see below):

telnet 127.0.0.1 5000

Note if you're hosting over the internet you may need to set up port forwarding on your local network.

The amount of logging can be set via the environment variable LOG_LEVEL.

Telnet clients

Telnet clients come in all shapes and sizes, with varying support for the different protocol options. As a minimum, WesternMUD requires a client to support:

8-bit clean data transfer (the Binary Transmission option from RFC 856),
Terminal emulation capable of interpreting ANSI control codes (confirmed via the Terminal Type option from RFC 1091).

It is also worth noting that WesternMUD assumes UTF-8 encoding of text. If your client chooses otherwise (or if its font doesn't have enough glyphs) then you may experience problems.

Clients running on Unix-like operating systems should set the TERM environment variable to either xterm or ansi.