rlandrito / rivamud

A text-based mud written in only basic C

rivamud

A text-based mud written in only basic C

Dec 2 2016

BACKGROUND

In the 1990s, Rob, Harlan and Riva made a game called "rivamud". A small text-based mod (ala ravenmud) where you could walk through the house and fight.

It was the first time we:

• Wrote a larger C project with meaningful memory management.
• Wrote a tcp/ip daemon networked app.
• Wrote a threaded app and deal with all the locking and threadsafety issues.

While the project was maintained in a cvs repository, the computer it was maintained on (sdf1.cc) was lost.

THE GOAL

• Reproduce rivamud.
• Stick to fundamentals: make + C with standard unix posix libraries (pthreads, tcpip).
• Don't link in mysql, python or a bunch of cute opensource libraries to make it easy.

Code layout

Startup sequence

- Loads up map data file

- Generates the world

- Starts listening on the network

- Waits for connections.

- Each player's connection has a "context". Says their location in the world, current stack of context.

- The world ticks 10 times a second.

- Connections can send messages. Which are parsed in "command" objects

- Each command object is evaluated against the context in the world.

- At the end of each ticket, each of the connected players is sent a

message with updates if anything in their context changed.