The Melville mudlib is a native DGD mudlib, designed from the start to be
used with the DGD driver and to take advantage of the features of that
driver. The purpose of the mudlib is to give you enough code to organize
a group of wizards and admins to start coding any kind of multiuser
environment you might wish to have; a game, a meeting facility, a
text-based virtual reality, or any other purpose you may have in mind.
The code is designed to be simple enough to be easily understood, and
easy to change if you want to build something more flexible, more powerful,
or just different. At the same time it offers enough features, including
a working security system, an admin/wizard/player hierarchy of users,
functional rooms, objects, and other inheritables, and mail and bulletin
boards for communication, to let you being building your mudlib and
a game world on top of it if you wanted to do so.

There are a number of important user defines stored in include files
in the /include directory. The most important is config.h, which defines
the file names of all important objects in the mudlib. Another is options.h
which lists various user-definiable options that you may with to change.
Another is admin.h, which contains an array of the names of the admin
characters. This directory also includes std.h, which is not used, and
limit.h and status.h which are provided by the driver at start time.

There are four main system objects in the game. All four of them are
found in the directory /system in the mudlib. First is the auto object,
which is inherited into all other objects. This object overrides sensitive
kfuns, provides object security, and provides various functions like
input_to(), present(), and other things useful in all objects. The
auto object functions are described in /doc/functions/autofuns.
Second is the driver object. All calls from the driver go into this
object, except those which go directly into a user object. It handles
editing permissions, opens and closes user connections, and various
other driver-interface tasks. See /doc/functions/driverfuns for a list
of the functions in this object and their descriptions.
Third is the user object. The user object holds the connection between
the user's socket and the mud, and stores data about the Real Person on
the other end like name, email address, and wizard status. Every user
object is associated with the fourth object, the player object, which
is the body of the player in the MUD world. The player object contains
the short and long description of the player, stores his character
related data like gender and inventory, and does command parsing for
commands the user sends. In addition, when a wizard starts an editor
session, the player object is the object which holds the editor instance.
See /doc/functions/userfuns and /doc/functions/playerfuns for the various
functions defined in these objects.

There are four important inheritable objects which can be used to build
the mud world. These objects are in the directory /include in the mudlib.
Of these, the most basic is object.c. It defines short and long description
handling functions, id functions, and movement and environment functions.
Any object which is intended to have a physical presence in the mud world
should inherit this file (or one of the other files, all of which inherit
tobject). The functions defined in object.c are described in the file
/doc/functions/objectfuns.
The next most complex is container.c, which defines inventory handling
functions. Any object which will contain other objects (including rooms
and players) inherits container.c. /doc/functions/contfuns describes
the functions of this object.
The next object in the chain is room.c, which inherits container.c (and
thus object.c indirectly). It defines exit handling commands, and has
a query_long() function that handles describing room contents and the
brief mode when players move. Its functions are described in the file
/doc/functions/roomfuns.
The last inheritable object is board.c, which provides a basic bulletin
board object for posting and reading notes.

There is a small mud world consisting of two rooms, which are defined
in /world, a board also in /world, and two objects in /obj.

There are 21 player commands and 28 wizard commands (six of which are
admin-only commands) available in the mudlib. These commands are
listed and briefly described in the two files /doc/wiz_cmds and
/doc/player_cmds.