tbaMUD Continued development of the CircleMUD core

My turn for a vacation, I'll be gone for one week. Checking in occasionally. As usual email myself and Welcor if there are any problems with the server or the game is down. Shamra is in charge with Fizban and Tink to back him up when he is not around. Have a good week everyone. tbaMUD 3.57 will be coming in August.

This question came up again so here is an incomplete list of differences between stock CircleMUD 3.1 and tbaMUD 3.56:
ANSI Color
OasisOLC 2.0.6
trigedit (DG Scripts) 1.0.14
hedit (help editor)
cedit (config editor)
tedit (text file editor)
aedit (socials editor)
qedit (quest editor)
ASCII Player Files 3.0.1
128bit Support
Copyover
automap (ASCII map generator)
buildwalk (walk a new zone to link rooms)
tell m-w (an in game dictionary lookup)
gemote (emotes over gossip)
history (of all communications, tells, gossip, etc.)
file (allows imms to view syslog, errors, etc.)
pagelength (custom pagelength setting)
showvnums (previously roomflags)
zpurge (purge an entire zone)
zcheck (head builder tool to check balancing)
mob autoroll (standard values set on mob level entry)
checkload (
Auto Toggles
Hidden mob/obj
mob/obj stacking
hindex
helpcheck
mcopy/ocopy/rcopy/scopy/tcopy
export
(lots of major bugfixes too)

Thanks to Tink from Astoria for pointing out that spell messages were not working properly. Corrected messages file attached below. It turns out I did a find and replace (sed) to get rid of several ^M's leftover from MSDOS formatting. It also stripped the required M prior to every block of messages.

I just wanted to take the time to welcome Astoria on to the tbaMUD band wagon. Jamdog is a major contributor to the tbaMUD codebase. Tink and Detta have been helping builders for years on TBA. I am looking forward to our continued joint ventures!

tbaMUD's:
The Builder Academy
Astoria
CrackWhip
Paragon
AderonMud
Azereth
Dragonball Fate
Smallville Untold Stories
Dragonball Awakening
Sermon MUD
Twilight's Failings

Let me know what tbaMUD's I missed.

The Mudconnector recently added the tbaMUD codebase to its list of MUD codebases. Those of you using tbaMUD can now update your TMC listing to show the proper codebase.

Jamdog added an excellent patch here for those wanting to add more directions to tbaMUD.
http://cwg.lazuras.org/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=2108

I have granted SVN write access to a select few trusted individuals and wish to post the ground rules here so there is no confusion about what is to be expected.

First we have standardized our commenting and format of files per Jeremy's post so please follow them:
http://www.tbamud.com/content/source-code-documentation-project

To checkout the SVN:
svn checkout http://tbamud.com/svn/circlemud/circlemud tbamud

When ready to make a change to the codebase always do an "svn update" prior to your modifications and to decrease the possibilities of conflicts run an "svn commit """ or "svn commit --file " as soon after as possible. Now any change you make in game be sure to test and then comment the details in the changelog via the in game command "changelog " then copy and paste the same text into a commit or a file to commit. All changes must be described in detail to prevent confusion. I will be checking all changes by looking at the different revisions. i.e. "svn diff -96:97" to see what was done.

If there are any questions don't hesitate to ask. The great part about SVN is we can easily track all changes and revert them if necessary.

If you have already contributed heavily to tbaMUD and desire SVN access please contact me on TBA.

Thanks to Dan Blix for submitting this, it will be in the /doc directory next release. Here until then.

Compiling tbaMUD under BSD
based on UNIX readme for circlemud
by Jeremy Elson
For help, visit http://www.tbamud.com

Compiling tbaMUD is easy using FreeBSD. If you plan on compiling on a
FreeBSD machine, these instructions are for you. If not, check the main
README file to get a list of other operating systems that can be used to
compile and run tbaMUD.

Current versions of tbaMUD use the GNU 'autoconf' package to
automatically determine most of the important characteristics of your
system, so chances are good that tbaMUD will compile correctly on any
UNIX system -- even one that we have never seen before. However, if you
do have problems, please visit http://www.tbamud.com so that we
can try to make tbaMUD work with your system.

1) Download the latest version of tbaMUD. You can always find the
latest version at the following site:

http://www.tbamud.com

2) Unpack the archive. If you have the .tar.gz version, uncompress it
using gzip (GNU unzip) and the tar archiver. (Both of these utilities
can be downloaded from ftp.gnu.ai.mit.edu:/pub/gnu if you don't have
them.) To unpack the archive on a UNIX system, type:

gzip -dc tbaMUD-xxxx.tgz | tar xvf -

3) Configure tbaMUD for your system. tbaMUD must be configured using
the 'configure' program which attempts to guess correct values for
various system-dependent variables used during compilation. It uses
those values to create a 'Makefile' and a header file called 'conf.h'.

From tbaMUD's root directory, type

./configure

If you're using 'csh' on an old version of System V, csh might try to
execute 'configure' itself, giving you a message like "Permission denied"
when you try to run "./configure". If so, type "sh ./configure" instead.

'configure' can take several minutes if you're using a slow computer.

'configure' will attempt to use the 'gcc' compiler if it exists; if not,
it will try 'cc'. If you want to use a different compiler, set the
'CC' environment variable to the name of the compiler you wish to use.

For example, if you want to use the 'xlc' compiler, and your shell is
csh or tcsh:

setenv CC xlc
./configure

Or, if you want to use the 'xlc' compiler, and your shell is sh or bash:

CC=xlc ./configure

This will tell 'configure' to use the 'xlc' compiler instead of 'gcc'.

4) Build the tbaMUD server. This must be done from the 'src' directory.
Type:

cd src; gmake all

This will build tbaMUD proper as well as its 10 or so ancillary
utilities, which can take anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour depending
on the speed of your computer.

Note that in the future, when you need to recompile tbaMUD as you make
changes to the code, it is NOT necessary to run 'configure' again (it
should only be run once, after the first time you unpack tbaMUD from
its .tar file). If you move the source code to a different computer,
you should reconfigure it by deleting the file 'config.cache' and
running 'configure' again.

The first time you try to compile tbaMUD, you will be asked to read the
tbaMUD license. Please read it!

5) Go back to tbaMUD's root directory (by typing "cd ..") and run the
tbaMUD server. The easiest way to do this the first time is
to use the 'autorun' script, which can be run in the background by
typing:

./autorun &

Make sure to do this in tbaMUD's root directory, not the src directory
that you used for the previous step. A file called 'syslog' will start
growing in the same directory that contains tbaMUD's log messages.

If you're using 'csh' on an old version of System V, csh might try to
execute 'autorun' itself, giving you a message like "Permission denied"
when you try to run "./autorun". If so, type "sh ./autorun &" instead.

6) Wait until the line 'No connections. Going to sleep.' appears in the
syslog. This indicates that the server is ready and waiting for
connections. It shouldn't take more than about 30 seconds for the MUD
to reach this state, though performance will vary depending on how fast
your computer is.

If a file appears called 'syslog.CRASH', the MUD has terminated
(probably abnormally). Check the contents of syslog.CRASH to see
what error was encountered.

7) Type 'telnet localhost 4000' to connect. The first person to log in
will be made an implementor (level 34) with all powers.

(write to help@tbamud.com for help)

TBA's sixth release of the codebase formerly known as CircleMUD. Special thanks this release to Jeremy Osborne for his major contributions.

Download here: http://tbamud.com/filebrowser/patches/releases

Full changelog here: http://tbamud.com/files/changelog.txt

As of 3/23/2008 the tbaMUD SVN repository has moved: http://tbamud.com/websvn/

svn checkout http://tbamud.com/svn/circlemud/circlemud tbamud

This will checkout the latest codebase repository to the tbamud directory on your machine. cd tbamud and start making whatever changes you want.

After the initial checkout your codebase will be up to date. But in the future before making any changes you should always update to the latest version by typing:

svn update

This will automatically update your tbamud directory with any changes that have been comitted to the repository (only developers can comitt changes).

Developers: To commit your changes back to the repository:

svn commit -m "comments about what changes you have made."

Other useful stuff:
svn diff - current diff of the repository and your changes
svn diff -r 59:60 - diff between version 59 and 60
svn commit --file tmp - for really verbose changes you can send a file.
svn log - view the comitt changes (what was submitted during comitt).
svn log -r 3:HEAD - view the last 3 comitt comments.

The SVN bible can be found:
http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.4/svn-book.html