DIY Online MUD/MOO/RPG

Does anyone know of an RPG project of some kind that can be tailored to your own needs without too much effort. I want a text based multiplayer RPG that can be run from a web site. I can program, but I don’t have enough time to invest fiddling about or learning anything new, so something that only needs the minimum of modification would be best. Preferably I’d just like to set a few options and invest most of my time to writing the text.

Have you tried running a search on Sourceforge for a basic MUD program? If you can find the source of a game written in a language you know, it shouldn’t be too hard to retro-fit that to your specific wants.

Raph pointed me to this site some time ago. Worth a look.

This one is rated pretty high for a text based web browser game. I was going to eventually try it on my site.

http://dragon.se7enet.com/dev.php

Thanks everyone. That’s about what I am looking for DivDevlin, but I would like something that was multiplayer, and I don’t think that was.

For simplicity of content creation, you best bet is a MUD based on the DikuMUD family. These are text muds (so full text-based massively multiplayer games) where the game system is hardcoded and the content is almost all text writing. Because of this, you won’t be able to change how the game plays much (it’ll be basically like EQ/DAoC/FFXI) unless you code.

There’s several codebases out there, and there used to be (and probably still are) several GUI tools for making the worldbuilding easier. Some of them also support online worldbuilding on the fly. Some codebases you may want to look at include Circle, ROM,

On mudconnect.com, look under Resources, Mud Code and Snippets, and you should find several listings.

Note that to run one of these, you most likely need to have access to a Unix system that is on the Net. Some of them may run servers under Windows as well, but most will be Unix-based.

Yeah, that’s the thing, you see. I want to run this off a web site. I guess I may end up having to write one myself, or giving up :D.

Very customizable.

You could also always install and run a regular mud, and then offer a java-based telnet client on your web site. I’m not sure that qualifies entirely as “web based”, but it would give you a much broader array of existing options.