Hello all! Considering I'm new to these forums, I didn't know where it was appropriate to bring all this to the table. (Feel free to relocate, Admin heh) I was brought to this website via a friend's recommendation, and I really hope the community here would be willing to offer some guidance to someone who has a very, very basic idea of what is necessary for starting a new Mud.

The very basics of the game are it is planned a Role-play intensive, PvP allowing, space themed Mud. I would like mechanics of this to be at least somewhat intuitive, and I have a very small (hopefully reliable) group of mixed strengths and experiences in muds in general. I personally am familiar with Iron Realms' formats, where the others are from various other Muds I've played. I understand that this sort of Project WILL require dedication and teamwork, I understand that I'll be building rooms, bumping into coding walls, and various other frustrations. I am still interested in attempting this, if not for success then for the experience.

So, with that out of the way, my questions!

- How much time can be expected of my group (a day?) to be dedicated without it becoming something frustrating in constructing this?
- What are reliable codebases we can use, or which can anyone here suggest?
- What if we'd like to sort of work with another Mud group and be affiliated?
- Copywrite etc? Is this ever a problem, or coincidental?
- Server suggestions?

I understand I MIGHT be asking for a lot from a forum - If I am I apologize. Really any advice is more than welcome, or any assistance, links, what have you are greatly appreciated. <3

hey Scorpii, welcome. Let me ask you a quick question which will help guide the answers to your other questions. When you say RPI and PvP, are you envisioning an IR-style game with fast-paced coded combat, extensively coded crafting, space travel, and all that jazz? I'm guessing that's the case but just want to make sure before setting you down the wrong path.

I want it similar, yes, I'd like the immersion to remain in the same context and when of course, these harder details are ironed out I can work on making them more-so immersive such as merchant trading and familiarization between NPCs and Players.
As far as combat, yes! Fast based combat with broader ranges of meaning that are more effective than the typical hack/slash/afflict of IR.. (Like buildings being able to be destructed from certain AoE attacks and such)
Crafting isn't priority but I see it in the future if anything happens to work out accordingly.
Space travel would be awesome in various ways, like using portals created by players, or gear, or the environment. So many ideas! It's just difficult to prod at anything entirely!

Hmm, leads me to wonder also about the RP-Immersion thing a little though, is that not something which Administration enforce, not mechanics? I had more in mind the mechanics encourage immersion and RP and admin manage the interactions and what not, enforce it.

Do you plan on doing all (or most) of the coding yourself (or have it confined to a very small number of people who have full access to the source)? Or would you prefer to have other builders be able to write code?

The various Dikurivative codebases all hardcode the game systems, and 90% of the gameplay in the server, meaning a "builder" typically just fills in templates for rooms/objects/npcs/etc, and has only a very small amount of flexibility via a small scripting language that can trigger off a fixed set of events (like someone walking into the room, or combat starting, etc).

The LPMUD style of codebase (as well as MOO, some MUSHes, Cool/Cold, etc) give more creative control to the builders, as they can code much more generic systems in the game. In many of these systems, the entire game logic is soft-code and can be changed without touching the driver source. Of course, you can assign different levels of security access to limit what parts different builders can modify.

The tradeoff is that the learning curve for an LPMUD may be a bit steeper, and it imposes a particular style of coding on you that hard-coding in the driver does not.

My suggestion is to download several different kinds and try implementing something simple in each of them, but make it something fairly unique so you aren't just cutting and pasting an existing thing and changing the text. See how much you'd have to change in each one to make it work (even if you don't finish, doing the research to see what you might need to do will teach you a lot).

To answer your question, No I would be more in the writing/building than the actual coding. I intend to learn of the coding and I have a few good friends who will be coding and helping me through out the project. I think they also said the same as you about LP, that it was a bit harder to handle.

OK, I'll take a shot at your questions.

Time

Do you mean frustrating like it'll take too much time per day and you'd rather be doing other things, or that there won't be enough time in the day and you'll be frustrated that it's not done as fast as you want? :) It depends on your goals but I'll say up front that if you want to run a 'successful' mud – and just for the sake of the question I'll say a successful hobby mud has an average of 20 unique logins at any time of day – be prepared to spend a lot of time. First in building it, and then in running it.

Let's take the building of a typical 50 room area as an example. I'd say your average builder can create that area (with mobs, objects, and some interactive scripts) in about 20 hours. A 'small' mud would be about 2000 rooms, so your world will take 800 hours to create. If you have a large (3+) building team that's great, but in my experience it's more likely a start-up mud won't have more than two steady builders at first, so you're looking at 400 hours. I think most hobbyists would put at the most 15 hours a week into building. It's hard to keep that up continuously but let's give the benefit of the doubt and say you do, so you're looking at about 26 weeks of continuous building to create the world – 6 months in other words.

If you have a steady coder or two as well (see how the if's are stacking up :) ), then I think by the end of six months they would have most of the code in place (though probably not completely fleshed out).

In my opinion, in three months, if you're all working steadily on the mud (at least 15 hours a week from each team member), you should have a playable beta. About half of the opening world will be complete and the basic systems (combat and so on) will be playable.

Remember, this is working continuously. No breaks, no leaves of absence, no drop-outs – pretty unlikely, but with the right team you could get lucky.

Of course there are ways to speed this up. Get a codebase where you don't want to change much of the code, and get stock areas. If you want to stand out though I suggest you make a mostly original game. Another option would be to let the code procedurally create some or all of the world. It depends on your design for the game and what kind of feel you want.

As a final word, coding and building are not all it takes to create a successful mud, so these time estimates are artificial. It's not like you put all the ingredients in a blender, hit puree and then wait six months for your mud to be done. You want to consider the design of the mud as a whole, how systems interact, what kind of social atmosphere you want to create, and a hundred other things. It's helpful to create a design document at the beginning that kind of explains what you're going for, what the world will be like and how the major systems will work together. But coding and building time is the easiest to estimate, so that's what I did :) .


Codebases

This is a hard question to answer without knowing more about what you want. Would you be happy with a space-themed mud like SWR? Or are you looking to start with something more original? Do your coders want to use an older codebase or would they prefer something newer or in some other language than C?


Working with other mud teams
By this I take it you mean something similar to the IR model, where they have Achaea, Lusternia, etc. all under one umbrella. As far as I know there aren't any other existing non-commercial muds that do this right now. It's an interesting idea though. If you wanted to go this direction I think you'd have to find some other muds you liked and figure out what it all means – shared promotion, advertising, maybe collaborating on mobile apps, etcetera. Plamzi here on the forums has talked about this in the past, look up his threads.


Copyright

I think there have been muds taken down for copyright violations in the past (sorry, I don't have a reference close to hand). It depends on the property you want to use. Some tolerate fan material and some don't. If you want to be above board about everything (and I strongly encourage it! :) ) you just have to investigate that property's opinion on fan material and go from there. If you can't find whether they allow it or not you have to contact them directly.


Servers

By this you mean server hosting? For a start-up your best bet is either free space if you have a buddy with a reliable server – sometimes you'll also see veteran mudders advertising free hosting on mudconnector or here – or a cheap VPS like from Digital Ocean or a similar provider. If you have the money you can go up a tier in service to something like Linode. Lowendbox is a good website to scout for inexpensive VPSs. Or, you can host on a home network if you have reliable uptime and know what you're doing.

First, a thousand e-hugs from a random, possibly weird, stranger! Thanks for all the input in your response. I'll do my best and go through to answer the questions to your post accordingly and so on.
Frustrating: I mean just general code roadblocks, absences and the like. I do not want to set my expectations for my 'team' so to speak too high as I'd like them to enjoy this. But you pretty much addressed this in the next few lines anywho so this seems like it will be somewhat inevitable, which is fine. I was working around the limit of 2 (more or less) Hours a day of effort, so no one's exhausted, overwhelmed or irritated and we can sort of spend a little extra time in evaluating what got done that day if anything.

Codebases: Would really like to start something original, but the team I have (so far) do have real lives. After doing my own research I've also read a lot more than I'm comfortable with about… "Stealing code from 'your' mud"? What's this about? Is it actually a common issue? (Please be gentle as you have been doing, this is someone who has only played muds, never has seen the opposite side of the spectrum in the works.)

Copywrite: I just don't want to accidentally someone else's plans, I know people are coming out with new creations of all sorts and I would be ashamed. Thanks hehe

Your answers were fantastic, and encouraging and I look forwards to forwarding this to the rest of my friends and thanks so much!

Based on what you've said so far, I think you need to have a frank talk with whoever your team is right now, and find out which codebase your technical person is most comfortable with. By technical person I mean the person you will be leaning on to modify code, implement systems, etc, because it sounds like that's not you. Find out what the person who will be doing the heavy lifting wants to use.

Now, listen, here's the important bit: If he tells you "Meh, I don't care, whatever. You pick." That is a blaring flashing alarm. That means you don't actually have a technical heavy load lifter. You have someone who either isn't very experienced, or doesn't care much about your project and will bail or not help much.

The chances are that you're the person who cares most about your own project, and so if what you're getting from your people is "whatever", the message you might want to take from that is "this is your thing, you'd better be ready to learn to code yourself".

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net/newcomer.html

Only you can really answer this question, in my opinion. I would recommend talking to your staff on a case by case basis and working out what is best fit for the both of you. Most importantly, if you create an environment that is enjoyable to work in, people may contribute even more than they originally intended to.



That would depend on what you want to achieve and how much you want to have to do. NakedMUD would be a good start if you want to start with something a little more bare boned, whilst SWFOTE would be fairly suitable (AFAIK) for a Sci-fi MUD. I'll also second what Cratylus said above.



Not entirely sure what you are asking here.



That would depend on the source material. There doesn't seem to be much of an issue with people using Star Wars, for example but other themes may be more strict. It can be a problem though; Games Workshop had a popular Warhammer Fantasy themed MUD taken down a few years ago. I also contacted them [Games Workshop] about obtaining permission for using the Warhammer 40k theme in the past, which was given under the condition it could be revoked at any time (essentially). G.R.R Martin is also very strict regarding the use of A Song of Fire and Ice (for another example).

The safe bet would be to contact the necessary people beforehand if you think you need to permission to use it.



Zeno runs a free MUD hosting service, that might be ideal for your project, at least initially.

Scorpii, since it sounds like you're coming to this pretty fresh, maybe this would do some good:

http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Virtual-...