New Host Software? Interest?
Posted: Tue Nov 15, 2016 7:25 pm
Hey Everyone,
I've been toying with something and I wanted to see if there was any interest in others both helping, and wanting to use it.
GreaterMud was a recreation of a stand alone MajorMud server with some added features. Vitoc up until now, as far as I know, has not allowed it to be open source or provided it to be installed anywhere but on his own servers. In fact he's been pretty emphatic about releasing it into the wild. But at this point, with so few users across the world, I'm not sure if it matters at this point.
With that said, recently I toyed around with hosting my own server via WG, but decided to play on someone else's instead. That gave me an idea to not just recreate MajorMud, but to build a foundation and create a WorldGroup clone, that could easily host MajorMud. It's not a FULL WG clone, I didn't add RIP or FTP or FINGER or any of the other 200 things Sysop's turn off before starting it up. Honestly, for now, it's just a simply multi-user telnet server with a Teleconference clone I was working on and a hard coded test account.
In case you're wondering why I chose Teleconference. The answer is simple. A Teleconference module is a bare bones module that contains a lot of the core functionality that any other module for the system would use.
By trade, I'm a software architect and I've been in this career for around 16 years. So I'm pretty confident that I can release a stable system that I can then move on to creating a new MajorMud for.
Right now, my todo list would look something like this...
1. Refactor what I've done so that Modules become a 'Plugin' type system.
2. Push my code to Github
3. Finish up the Teleconference clone.
a. This should require an eventing system, which I haven't gotten figured out yet.
b. As part of this, I'd like to create the basic globals of the system, paging, who's online, things like that.
4. Add a database layer and new account creation
5. Abstract away any components needed for modules that aren't currently abstracted.
a. Purpose here, using the data layer as an example, would be so that modules can use the data layer, without beging concerned about how it works, or overriding what the WG server needs from it.
6. Get started on a MajorMud clone.
Additional Features I'd like to add..
1. Web interface (Not mud via browser)
a. Ability to Login to your account
b. View / Chat with those online
c. Sysop commands
2. Editor
a. I'm probably going to need this sooner rather than later when working with the MajorMud stuff, but regardless, I know a lot of people like to edit their boards.
At any point in there, I felt like others could jump in and help with what needs to be done, or get started on other clones they'd like to see, or simply make something from scratch. Some ideas I had were TradeWars, LORD, Rose?, BladeMaster?
Oh yeah, It's currently written in C# 4.6.1 as a Windows Service. Once I have it in Github, I'll setup the master branch to CI deploy to one of my cloud servers. Just need to figure out DB Migrations before that's setup (Don't want to wipe out everyone's data every time we make a change)
So what would be your interest level in something like this? Would you like to contribute? Test? Add your own module? Run one of these servers?
If you have any questions or comments, let me know. If no one is interested, that's ok too. This was simply a fun challenge for myself, so nothing lost.
I've been toying with something and I wanted to see if there was any interest in others both helping, and wanting to use it.
GreaterMud was a recreation of a stand alone MajorMud server with some added features. Vitoc up until now, as far as I know, has not allowed it to be open source or provided it to be installed anywhere but on his own servers. In fact he's been pretty emphatic about releasing it into the wild. But at this point, with so few users across the world, I'm not sure if it matters at this point.
With that said, recently I toyed around with hosting my own server via WG, but decided to play on someone else's instead. That gave me an idea to not just recreate MajorMud, but to build a foundation and create a WorldGroup clone, that could easily host MajorMud. It's not a FULL WG clone, I didn't add RIP or FTP or FINGER or any of the other 200 things Sysop's turn off before starting it up. Honestly, for now, it's just a simply multi-user telnet server with a Teleconference clone I was working on and a hard coded test account.
In case you're wondering why I chose Teleconference. The answer is simple. A Teleconference module is a bare bones module that contains a lot of the core functionality that any other module for the system would use.
By trade, I'm a software architect and I've been in this career for around 16 years. So I'm pretty confident that I can release a stable system that I can then move on to creating a new MajorMud for.
Right now, my todo list would look something like this...
1. Refactor what I've done so that Modules become a 'Plugin' type system.
2. Push my code to Github
3. Finish up the Teleconference clone.
a. This should require an eventing system, which I haven't gotten figured out yet.
b. As part of this, I'd like to create the basic globals of the system, paging, who's online, things like that.
4. Add a database layer and new account creation
5. Abstract away any components needed for modules that aren't currently abstracted.
a. Purpose here, using the data layer as an example, would be so that modules can use the data layer, without beging concerned about how it works, or overriding what the WG server needs from it.
6. Get started on a MajorMud clone.
Additional Features I'd like to add..
1. Web interface (Not mud via browser)
a. Ability to Login to your account
b. View / Chat with those online
c. Sysop commands
2. Editor
a. I'm probably going to need this sooner rather than later when working with the MajorMud stuff, but regardless, I know a lot of people like to edit their boards.
At any point in there, I felt like others could jump in and help with what needs to be done, or get started on other clones they'd like to see, or simply make something from scratch. Some ideas I had were TradeWars, LORD, Rose?, BladeMaster?
Oh yeah, It's currently written in C# 4.6.1 as a Windows Service. Once I have it in Github, I'll setup the master branch to CI deploy to one of my cloud servers. Just need to figure out DB Migrations before that's setup (Don't want to wipe out everyone's data every time we make a change)
So what would be your interest level in something like this? Would you like to contribute? Test? Add your own module? Run one of these servers?
If you have any questions or comments, let me know. If no one is interested, that's ok too. This was simply a fun challenge for myself, so nothing lost.