CircleMUD
Encyclopedia
CircleMUD is a MUD
codebase
written by Jeremy Elson
first released on July 16, 1993. It is a derivative of DikuMUD
that was written in 1990 by Katja Nyboe, Tom Madsen, Hans Henrik Staerfeldt, Michael Seifert and Sebastian Hammer.
CircleMUD is freely available, with restrictions provided by the CircleMUD license and the DikuMUD license.
CircleMUD is written completely in the C programming language
. CircleMUD 3.1 has 40,538 lines, including comments and blank lines.
It lacks world building facilities
or a scripting language
for game events. These features are provided by third party patches.
CircleMUD 2.0 has a memory footprint of about 2MB.
at Johns Hopkins University in 1991. Its name was inspired by the hostname of the server which was circle.cs.jhu.edu. Initially CircleMUD was run covertly without the knowledge of the local system administrator. By 1992 the number of online users had risen to between 9 and 12. At this point Jeremy Elson decided to request formal permission to run CircleMUD. His request was granted with one requirement: the disk space usage must be kept below 2.5M.
CircleMUD continued to grow by word of mouth until it had an average of 30 to 40 players online at any one time. Several times the MUD hit its maximum player limit of 58. However, due to a result of conflict that surfaced among the MUD's administrators, Elson permanently closed down CircleMUD on August 26, 1992. Several months later, in May 1993, Elson decided that the CircleMUD codebase could be used to fill a niche in the MUD community. He felt that there were many problems with the existing public MUD codebases such as portability
and stability. He also felt that most developers wanted to start with a clean slate and did not want a codebase filled with fancy features.
Elson set out to achieve this goal in the summer of 1993. He began modifying the original CircleMUD codebase, and the first public release of CircleMUD arrived on July 16, 1993.
Since then CircleMUD has undergone many revisions. The last release by Jeremy Elson was 3.1., released on November 18, 2002.
In 2006, a number of discussions between Mark Garringer, Thomas Arp, Nathan Winters, and Jeremy Elson resulted in the release of CircleMUD 3.5 on December 11, 2006. Following this final release of CircleMUD, the name was changed to tbaMUD with the release of version 3.51, and this has now become the continuation of the CircleMUD line.
There have been a number of tbaMUD releases, with the latest being tbaMUD 3.61.
MUD
A MUD , pronounced , is a multiplayer real-time virtual world, with the term usually referring to text-based instances of these. MUDs combine elements of role-playing games, hack and slash, player versus player, interactive fiction, and online chat...
codebase
Codebase
The term codebase, or code base, is used in software development to mean the whole collection of source code used to build a particular application or component. Typically, the codebase includes only human-written source code files, and not, e.g., source code files generated by other tools or...
written by Jeremy Elson
Jeremy Elson
Jeremy Elson is a computer researcher specializing in wireless Sensor Networks. He is also the creator of the popular CircleMUD. Elson received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 2003. He is currently working at Microsoft Research, in the Distributed Systems and Security group within Systems and Networking...
first released on July 16, 1993. It is a derivative of DikuMUD
DikuMUD
DikuMUD is a multiplayer text-based role-playing game, which is a type of MUD. It was written in 1990 and 1991 by Sebastian Hammer, Tom Madsen, Katja Nyboe, Michael Seifert, and Hans Henrik Staerfeldt at DIKU —the department of computer science at the University of Copenhagen in Copenhagen,...
that was written in 1990 by Katja Nyboe, Tom Madsen, Hans Henrik Staerfeldt, Michael Seifert and Sebastian Hammer.
Overview
CircleMUD is designed as a small and efficient MUD engine with a minimal set of gameplay features. The project's goal is to provide a stable and bug free codebase that developers can use as a blank slate for incorporating their own ideas.CircleMUD is freely available, with restrictions provided by the CircleMUD license and the DikuMUD license.
Technical information
The last version of CircleMUD released by Jeremy Elson was 3.1. It was released on November 18, 2002.CircleMUD is written completely in the C programming language
C (programming language)
C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....
. CircleMUD 3.1 has 40,538 lines, including comments and blank lines.
It lacks world building facilities
Online creation
Online Creation, also referred to as OLC, Online Coding, Online Building, and online editing, is a software feature of MUDs that allows users to edit a virtual world from within the game itself...
or a scripting language
Scripting language
A scripting language, script language, or extension language is a programming language that allows control of one or more applications. "Scripts" are distinct from the core code of the application, as they are usually written in a different language and are often created or at least modified by the...
for game events. These features are provided by third party patches.
CircleMUD 2.0 has a memory footprint of about 2MB.
History
The original CircleMUD began as a modified DikuMUD running on a DECstationDECstation
The DECstation was a brand of computers used by DEC, and refers to three distinct lines of computer systems—the first released in 1978 as a word processing system, and the latter two both released in 1989. These comprised a range of computer workstations based on the MIPS architecture and a...
at Johns Hopkins University in 1991. Its name was inspired by the hostname of the server which was circle.cs.jhu.edu. Initially CircleMUD was run covertly without the knowledge of the local system administrator. By 1992 the number of online users had risen to between 9 and 12. At this point Jeremy Elson decided to request formal permission to run CircleMUD. His request was granted with one requirement: the disk space usage must be kept below 2.5M.
CircleMUD continued to grow by word of mouth until it had an average of 30 to 40 players online at any one time. Several times the MUD hit its maximum player limit of 58. However, due to a result of conflict that surfaced among the MUD's administrators, Elson permanently closed down CircleMUD on August 26, 1992. Several months later, in May 1993, Elson decided that the CircleMUD codebase could be used to fill a niche in the MUD community. He felt that there were many problems with the existing public MUD codebases such as portability
Porting
In computer science, porting is the process of adapting software so that an executable program can be created for a computing environment that is different from the one for which it was originally designed...
and stability. He also felt that most developers wanted to start with a clean slate and did not want a codebase filled with fancy features.
Elson set out to achieve this goal in the summer of 1993. He began modifying the original CircleMUD codebase, and the first public release of CircleMUD arrived on July 16, 1993.
Since then CircleMUD has undergone many revisions. The last release by Jeremy Elson was 3.1., released on November 18, 2002.
In 2006, a number of discussions between Mark Garringer, Thomas Arp, Nathan Winters, and Jeremy Elson resulted in the release of CircleMUD 3.5 on December 11, 2006. Following this final release of CircleMUD, the name was changed to tbaMUD with the release of version 3.51, and this has now become the continuation of the CircleMUD line.
There have been a number of tbaMUD releases, with the latest being tbaMUD 3.61.
Third party patches
There are several public patches for the CircleMUD codebase to add additional features.- DG scriptsDG scriptsDG scripts is a MUD scripting language that MUD builders can use to quickly add advanced interactive features to a MUD without requiring knowledge of a difficult programming language such as C.- The Death's Gate Language :...
adds a scripting language for game events. - Oasis OLCOnline creationOnline Creation, also referred to as OLC, Online Coding, Online Building, and online editing, is a software feature of MUDs that allows users to edit a virtual world from within the game itself...
adds a building interface so that zones can be built within the MUD environment. - CircleMUD with Goodies Project (CWG) is a compilation of patches that provides DG Scripts, Oasis OLC, Mud Client Compression ProtocolMCCPIn computing, MCCP is a network protocol that is used in text MUDs for data compression.Specifically, MCCP is used to compress the output text stream sent by a MUD to a MUD client using zlib, in order to reduce bandwidth usage, resulting in a faster connection...
, bug fixes, and more.