Merc Release 2.0 Beta Sunday 04 April 1993 Furey mec@garnet.berkeley.edu Hatchet mitchell@ocf.berkeley.edu Kahn michael@web.berkeley.edu === Introduction Merc Diku Mud is a Diku Mud with many enhancements and contributions. See our 'contrib.txt' and 'help merc' for acknowledgements. Send us a contribution, and you'll be in there too! Enjoy our mud. May your visit here be ... Mercenary. This release of Merc is beta software, and is meant for testing, not production use. See 'beta.txt' for details. The next release of Merc will be the full 2.0 production release. We will release this on or before June 1, 1993. === Copyright and License Diku Mud is copyright (C) 1990, 1991 by Sebastian Hammer, Michael Seifert, Hans Henrik St{rfeldt, Tom Madsen, and Katja Nyboe. Their license agreement is in the file 'license.doc'. Merc Diku Mud is a derivative of the original Diku Mud and is subject to their copyright and license agreement. Merc Diku Mud contains substantial enhancements to Diku Mud. These enhancements are copyright 1992, 1993 by Michael Chastain, Michael Quan, and Mitchell Tse. Our license agreement is in 'license.txt'. The license terms boil down to this: the people who wrote this mud want due credit for their work. === Contents of the Release doc Documentation log Game logs (initially empty). player Player files (initially almost empty). src All the source and area files. === How to Install First, group with your highest level Unix guru, and have him or her tank. Merc is easier to install than other muds, but every site is different. (1) Get the release Merc_20.tar.Z or Merc_20.tar.z from one of these fine ftp sites: ferkel.ucsb.edu ftp.math.okstate.edu ucbvax.berkeley.edu (2) Unpack the release. The command to use depends on whether you got a .Z or .z file: uncompress < Merc_20.tar.Z | tar xvf - or: gzip -d Merc_20.tar.z | tar xvf - (3) Go into the 'src' directory. Choose the Makefile for your operating system and copy it into 'Makefile': Makefile Most machines with 'gcc' Makefile.aix AIX Makefile.hp Hpux Makefile.next NeXT Makefile.tra Traditional C (see 'trad.txt') (4) Run 'make' with the following options: make -k >&! make.out This will take 10 minutes to 60 minutes, depending on the speed of your computer. If you encounter errors with 'make', send us your 'make.out' file: mail -s make.out mec@garnet.berkeley.edu < make.out We will help you get Merc running, but obviously we can't guarantee Merc will run on any particular machine. (5) Start the game: startup & telnet localhost 4000 (6) Drop us some e-mail at one of these addresses. Tell us how you like it! mec@garnet.berkeley.edu michael@web.berkeley.edu mitchell@ocf.berkeley.edu (7) Of course you're going to change the title screen, help files, and so on. Don't just erase globally erase the 'Merc' references, ok? You wouldn't like it if we did that to your work, so don't do it to ours. === Support First, read the documentation in the 'doc' directory. All of the documentation files have been brought up-to-date to reflect the current code. We have a mailing list, at 'merc-list@testeng.amdahl.com'. Send mail to 'merc-request@testeng.amdahl.com' to join the list. You can write to us directly at the e-mail addresses at the top of this document. When you write us, we need to know what kind of machine you're running on. If you can give us specific information about the problem, that helps too. Specific information means: an adb or gdb stack trace (if you're reporting a crash), or a syslog with the relevant commands logged. The player files are ascii files -- dump them into your mail message too. If your e-mail is too vague, we're likely to bounce it back. There are three of us and dozens of you -- we simply can't engage in long-distance debugging, on unknown platforms, with the added factor of more code that you've dropped in since the release.