A few dumb would-be newbie questions

Hi,

I was considering building my own MUD server, just so I can have a play more than anything and had a few questions. If I do it on a Linux machine, as far as I can tell I just follow the seemingly obvious instructions at:

http://www.cs.utk.edu/~london/smaug/howto.html#UNIX

Which seems relatively straight forward. My other questions would be...

1. What happens when its installed? I am assuming there is some kind of MUD that you can log into and mess around, adding rooms, classes, areas etc, but enough to play with initially?

2. I can't see an official manual of any kind, is this because its included in the download and not really available as HTML anywhere? I was hoping to have a read before I try and install it.

3. Any other info I may need, have you installed it and missed something obvious which bugged you for ages that I m may be likely to?

Many thanks in advance,

Curly

SMAUG does indeed come with a sizable collection of rooms for you to mess around with. If I remember correctly, it comes with limbo.are, gods.are and darkhaven.are, but it's been a while. :)

As far as I know, there is no official, up to date manual. It's one of the rather unfortunate points about SMAUG. Your best bet is to look around on the Internet, and to spend lots of time looking through forums like this one.

Nick Gammon has some extra material for beginner SMAUG coders:
http://www.gammon.com.au/scripts/showfaq.php?productid=6
http://www.gammon.com.au/smaug/howtocompile.htm
http://www.gammon.com.au/smaug/vi.htm
http://www.gammon.com.au/forum/bbshowpost.php?bbsubject_id=3653

The most useful thing you can do is to search the forums and look and what other people have been doing. Do you know how to program in C? If not, you should poke around on the Internet for some simple FAQs to get started with, so that the code inside SMAUG isn't an opaque wall. Once you've done that, you should be able to start tinkering with it, making very small changes to learn the ropes. As you tinker, you'll get more proficient in C and more familiar with the codebase.

Good luck and don't hesitate to ask questions. :)

Thats great, thanks for your help.

I have installed Smaug it ran perfectly first time, so wasn't too bad, I got it running on a Red Hat Linux system and managed to find a Red Hat specific makefile which worked a treat.

Now I am in the process of slowly customising small things. I changed the second screen and read on this forum to change the front screen I needed to edit the greeting under the help.are file, which I have done. This doesn't seem to have made any difference though, so was wondering if I need to re run the makefile or anything to implement these changes.

Many thanks,
Curly

If you edit help.are while the MUD is running, you will probably lose your changes when you reboot the MUD since it saves all areas on quit/reboot. So, you should either edit it while the MUD is down, or edit it using the online help editor (hedit, if my memory serves).

You only run the makefile to compile the source code, which is in all the .c and .h files in the src/ directory. You shouldn't have to run it if you don't change the source.