Never used Cygwin, but here's the basics. You need to save that as blargh.c. Then you need a makefile that tells the compiler what to compile, in what order, etc. Then it's simply a matter of running make.

http://www.gammon.com.au/downloads/dlsmaug.htm <- Try looking for info here. And I promise it's the last time I'll mention Smaug.

Thanks heaps to Tavon , I have now got CYGWIN (almost, just have to download it in full, all 100MB of it at 4.5KB/s ) and SMAUG both running well, and he also directed me to a good guide to C, which I have now read.

Now my goal is to try and find a MUD which is looking for fairly inexperienced coders/builders, and is able to teach them a little. From searching through The MUD Connector and Top MUD Sites, I am still unable to find a MUD like this .

If you know of a MUD such as this, please post here or PM me. Thanks.

It's the bastard child of C and QBASIC. And since IRE bought the engine and Aeyr has made updates, it has a splash of Perl.

Iron Realms actually has the on-line manual for Rapture available for anyone to see if you're interested.

Now, if only I could find a C manual as good as that, then I would be .

(Also, that "frenzy" smiley hurts your eyes .)

If only we had $20k to shell out to play with it. Seeing the call for new developers didn't help the ego much, either.

So, so, so close

*reads the section on ATCP* So that's how the java clients do it. I think. Maybe.

Hmm. I definitely need to try to decode that.

I think he was asking for an engine that plays similarly to a Rapture engine mud. Still, it's interesting information nonetheless. I actually have a hard time imagining what the bastard child of C and QB would even look like. QB with pointers?

If you have the disk space, I would recommend grabbing a linux distro and learning your way around it. Finding packages of software you want, then learning how to compile and install them helps get you familiar with the compiling/linking process. Plus, lots of codebases were originally meant to be run off of a *nix flavor, then later ported to windoze, with varying degrees of success. Definitely learn C and preferably C++. Scripting languages are handy too, perl and python are good ones.

You can learn some by modifying existing codebases, but personally, I think you can learn more from trying to do something from scratch. You may not ever come up with a finished product, but you will have learned enough that you may start fresh again. If you do start fresh, learn the basics of C/C++, then learn how the basic select loop works. Everything adds onto or branches off of that

As a side note, I stumbled onto that Rapture manual on my own, quite by accident (looking up info for IAC codes). Exactly what sort of info is sent in the ATCP messages? Does Lusternia make any use of it?

W00t, I'm now officially a builder. Although the MUD's (Advent of the Mists) still far from beta, it looks very promising. They're hiring builders, coders and beta testers if anyone's interested .

Good luck! And try to make friends with their coders; some MUDs have a very strict separation between builders and coders, and you'll want every opportunity you can get to practice looking at and working with MUD code. Just be pleasant and prove you're not an idiot and you should do fine.

EDIT: Ten bonus points for them having a nice (though not 100% perfect) website. Nothing ruins a first impression like that "Geocities feel." Whoever decided to use so much shadowing in some of the content headers should be beaten with a stick, though.

I've made about... 6 MUDs over the last 5/6 years with my friend Jase. I think the best we did was the "Elemental Mountain" code base kinda thing, and we pretty much just tried to screw each other over by removing levels and things from each other.
If you looked at any of my websites, you'd see I have practically no coding ability, though ideas keep popping into my head.. like http://forum.ironportal.org/viewtopic.php?t=49, but since I can barely manage to keep paying for my website, I don't have a chance of getting a MUD started.
I completely forgot what I started out saying.. the IRE MUDs have made a lot of us players spoiled, so it's hard to get people to start playing anything that isn't quite so good.. If I could give any advice.. Make sure you get some good ANSI colour stuff, and do your areas/maps on grid paper before you create them!

while bug fixing and tweaking a MUD will help you get the basics of MUD coding, if you really want to get into it seriously, you should look at trying it from the ground up. There is a wonderful codebase called SocketMUD, which does all the technical awkward implementation like your socket code and network connections etc, and leaves the rest totally up to you, so you can mess around trying anything you like, without having to figure out how the hell a particular codebase implements a certain thing. Most Codebases are badly, if at all, documented and so trying to learn by reading through 200,000 lines of code can be awkward especially if your C experience is very limited. But just incase you want to have a look you can find SocketMUD here

Argh. Downloading the entire CYGWIN is a real problem at 52kbps, it takes around 30 hours for me , and I need it before I can do much else. Due to this, and that that phone doesn't work when I'm online, I tried to download it at separate times, but after I installed it and tried it, it wouldn't work ("'bash' command not found"). So, I think I'll have to somehow download CYGWIN continuously sometime...