Technical resources on starting a new MUD client?

Mordtrius

Hello All,

I am in the very very beginning of PLANNING (not starting) work on my own MUD Client. It may never actually exist, but either way it'll be fun to plan.

Some goals/thoughts I have:

• Written in and scriptable in Common Lisp
• AGPLv3 Licensed (Note that this allows you to keep your own system and changes private as long as you don't distribute them or provide them as service. If you distribute your system + the core then you'll need to provide the source under AGPLv3 terms but can still sell systems etc since the license doesn't forbid it. If you distribute your system separately from the core you can distribute it under whatever license AFAIK. I am not a lawyer though.)
• Terminal based (likely curses library or similar)
• Extremely customizable and modular(for ease of sharing configs)
• Only needs to work for aetolia since that's the only MUD I play
• Only needs to work for SBCL common lisp
• Only needs to work for linux
• Only really needs to work for me, if other people find it useful then great.
• Only connect to one server/character at a time (multiple servers/characters is what multiple terminal windows are for!

In any case, the main challenge(besides all the inevitable display issues) starting out is understanding how to communicate properly with the server.

I understand it is basically just telnet but was curious if there is any documentation on how iron realms MUDs' use the telnet specifically(especially how GMCP works) so I don't have to stumble around for ages.

Any documentation that anyone knows of to help me out?

(Also if anyone knows of a MUD client that is works well with aetolia and supports common lisp scripting let me know, I might not want to write my own MUD client then)

Thanks!

Mordtrius

For anyone curious, I found this http://www.ironrealms.com/rapture/manual/files/FeatGMCP-txt.html for the low level stuff and http://nexus.ironrealms.com/GMCP for the high level stuff. I'll find out if this is enough basic info to get started once/if I really start work on this.