FAQ

Table of Contents

What is AweMUD?

AweMUD is a MUD server codebase. It is designed not to serve a single game but to allow developers to build their own games. AweMUD is developed for developers and not for end users and players.

How Much Does It Cost?

Nothing. AweMUD is completely Free. Yes, with a capital F.

AweMUD is Open Source. It has been released under the revised BSD style license. See the License for exact details.

How Do I Use AweMUD?

It's rather complicated, technically. First you have to build the source. See the AweMUD page for details on downloading and installing AweMUD.

Once you've done that, you have to make your game. You need to build your world, write the scripts, make any modifications you feel are necessary and so on.

AweMUD is not for people who want to just make a game. AweMUD is for developers who want a powerful codebase to build off of.

Should I Use AweMUD?

I'd be lying if I just said, "of course!" For starts, AweMUD should only be used by experienced C++ developers. If you are not an experienced C++ developer, use something else, and don't bother me with your silly questions.

AweMUD is still in heavy development. The version tomorrow could be drastically different and incompatible with the version out today. Many important features are still incomplete or missing outright.

If you like what AweMUD does and like where it's going, by all means, feel free to jump on the bleeding edge and start building with AweMUD. Don't, however, expect me to be able to keep to your development schedule. If you use AweMUD, be prepared to help out and contribute code back to us so we can build the engine up faster.

Will You Help Me Make a MUD?

I already have! I've provided AweMUD to you to build off of. If you find any bugs in AweMUD, I'll fix them. If you have any feature requests that I find reasonable for AweMUD's target game style, I'll implement them.

If you mean, "Will you do all the work of making my specific game," then the answer is, "Hell no."

I don't care if you have a cool idea. I don't care if your MUD is/will be so great. I will not help anyone work on their individual MUD. I work on AweMUD and AweMUD only. If there's something I can do to AweMUD that is useful to everyone and will help you out as well, then I'm more than happy to help.

Why Is The Todo List So Long?

The TODO list and the number of TODO items in the Issue Tracker tend to grow, not shrink. Unfortunately, I have a lot of plans, and a lot of people requesting features, but I don't have a whole ton of idea. I'm only one person working in my spare time.

If everyone wants to pool together $40k or so allowing me to work on AweMUD full time for a year, I bet we'll be far, far ahead of where we are now. I think we both know the chances of that happening, though.

How Do I Use Custom Colors?

The engine automatically colorizes various bits of data, such as room titles, player names, admin messages, and a dozen or two other similar items. That is the only way AweMUD allows color to be used.

If you want to use custom title colors, colorized bits in room or player descriptions, or that sort of stuff, AweMUD isn't for you. You can modify the source to add support, but no patches will ever be accepted in AweMUD to do these things.

Color abuse is a disease in the MUD community. There is absolutely no reason to give different rooms different color titles, let players have rainbow-colored names, have the "red lizard" NPC have its name printed in red while the "goblin" gets printed in green, or any other kind of chromatic substance abuse. In fact, doing those sorts of things hurts a MUD. Color is used in AweMUD to categorize and organize the data displayed on the screen to enhance the readability of the output. As soon as you frivilously use color elsewhere you destroy that effort. Printing "red lizard" in red does not in any meaningful way assist the player at all. Printed all NPC names in one color and all object names in another color does help, however, as it lets the player quickly and easily pick out information on the screen.

Where Are All The VNUMs?

Back in the 1980's.

OK, seriously, the idea of a vnum rather irritates me. The builders have to know all these magic numbers and someone keep track of what they mean. That's silly. Humans use names, not numbers. That's why we type in web site names in our browser and not IPs (usually).

I do realize that, internally, using numbers is a lot faster than names. One of the planned improvements of AweMUD is to start using unique IDs everywhere with an optional name mapping on top of it. Then builders can use easy to remember names for everything while the engine uses quick and efficient numbers for lookups.

Why Do You Say NPC When Everyone Else Says MOB?

Because when you say "mob" I think of a mass of angry peasants with torches and pitchforks trying to kill Dr. Frankenstein and his monster, that's why. Honestly, it's personal preference.

I'd actually like to call them Agents in the future, simply because that's what the rest of the game industry tends to use these days and it makes it easier to trade ideas and papers with MUD developers and other game developers if we use the same terms.

I just know that if I use agent I'll end up with a stream of questions of, "How come all the orcs are called 'agents' in the documentation when they're nothing like James Bond!?" :sigh:

Why Open Source? Won't Your Ideas Just Be Stolen?

I want my ideas to be used! What good is an idea if nobody but myself gets to see it?

The way most MUD developers keep their code secret makes me sick. No matter how cool they think their MUD is, chances are, it's still a joke compared to what the Big Boys at places like Simutronics or the professional game market can do. All that this closed source MUD development does is hurt development. How many different times do all these MUD features need to be written? How many different quest systems, weather systems, AI systems, etc.? Every hour spent writing code that already exists in an hour that could have been spent writing something new and interesting to improve the MUD scene for all developers and players alike. In a community of developers where most of them make no profit and pretty much every MUD out there is built off of code the developers got completely for free from previous developers, it's pretty sick and stupid to keep your code secret.

I challenge you to give me one useful idea that doesn't itself build off of previous ideas from other people. The wheel and fire don't count. Hoarding code like some kind of treasure, as if it was something that diminishes in value when shared, is against the very reason we have laws like copyrights and patents. Both exist to provide very limited monopolies to authors and engineers to provide economic incentive to innovate, and then to allow them to be freed to the public domain for the rest of humanity to build off of. If it weren't for patents and copyrights expiring, we'd still be stuck with 18th century technology - if that.

I Found a Bug! Now What?

Please report it so I can fix it. Thanks!

Can I IM/Email You With Ideas or Questions?

I'd rather you didn't. We have the forums, mailing lists, and issue tracker for a reason. Bug reports and feature requests that get sent to me personally will be forgotten - please put them in the issue tracker. Any other ideas or questions are best put in a public area like the forums or mailing lists so that other users and developers can offer commentary and suggestions - the community as a whole is a lot smarter than I am all alone, after all.