CircleMUD
From Free net encyclopedia
CircleMUD is a MUD codebase written by Jeremy Elson first released on July 16, 1993. It is a derivative of DikuMUD that was written in 1990 by Katja Nyboe, Tom Madsen, Hans Henrik Staerfeldt, Michael Seifert and Sebastian Hammer.
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Overview
CircleMUD is designed as a small and efficient MUD engine with a minimal set of gameplay features. The project's goal is to provide a stable and bug free codebase that developers can use as a blank slate for incorporating their own ideas. [1]
CircleMUD is freely available, with restrictions provided by the CircleMUD license and the DikuMUD license.
Technical information
The latest version of CircleMUD is 3.1. It was released on November 18, 2002. [2]
CircleMUD is written completely in the C programming language. CircleMUD 3.1 has 40,538 lines, including comments and blank lines.
It lacks zone building facilities or a scripting language for game events. These features are provided by third party patches.
CircleMUD 2.0 has a memory footprint of about 2MB. [3]
History
- Summary of: The History of CircleMUD by Jeremy Elson
The original CircleMUD began as a modified DikuMUD running on a DECstation at John Hopkins university in 1991. It's name was inspired by the hostname of the server, which was circle.cs.jhu.edu.
Initially, CircleMUD was being run covertly without the knowledge of the local system administrator. By 1992, the number of users online at one time was between 9 and 12. Jeremy Elson, not knowing what the fate of the MUD would be, decided to request formal permission to run CircleMUD. His request was successful, and he was given one requirement: the disk space usage must be kept below 2500K.
CircleMUD continued to grow by word of mouth, until it had an average of 30 to 40 players online at any one time. Several times the MUD hit its maximum player limit of about 58.
Jeremy Elson permanently closed down CircleMUD on August 26, 1992 as a result of conflict that surfaced among the MUD's administrators.
In May 1993, Jeremy Elson decided that a niche needed to be filled in the MUD community. He felt that there were many problems with the existing public MUD codebases, such as portability and stability. He also felt that most developers wanted to start with a clean slate; they didn't want a codebase filled with a lot of fancy features.
In the summer of 1993, Jeremy Elson began modifying the original CircleMUD codebase. He released CircleMUD 2.0 on July 16, 1993, the first public release of CircleMUD.
Since then CircleMUD has undergone many revisions. The latest release is 3.1.
Third party patches
There are several patches for the CircleMUD codebase to add additional features.
- DG scripts adds a scripting language for game events.
- Oasis OLC adds a building interface so that zones can be built within the MUD environment.
- Circle With Goodies is a compilation of patches that provides DG Scripts, Oasis OLC, Mud Client Compression Protocol, bug fixes, and more.