If you’re still shopping for a MUD codebase to get started on your world-building project, look no further. I’m going to introduce you into the shiniest of the ol’ crusty Diku’s out there. Dawn of Time may have very old-school roots, but it was improved upon lovingly for years by very talented programmers, builders, and community managers. I am biased as hell and for good reason.
You Can Build a DOT World Without Changing The Hardcode – Dawn of Time’s superpowers come from its Editor tools. You can create, edit and delete everything you need for a dynamic world from inside the game world itself, without having to change the game engine’s programming at all. Here’s a list of DOT’s editors:
- area editor – Areas or zones are collections of rooms, mobiles, objects, and scripts.
- clan editor – Clans or guilds are social groups that allow players to recruit, promote, demote ranks, share a recall room and share a bank.
- class editor – Create or edit classes that players can choose.
- colour editor – Create color schemes that your players can use, share and edit to customize your world as they see fit!
- command editor – Change the level, position, council, and groups that can use a game command and toggle whether that command appears on the player’s command list or not.
- deity editor – Change the beings your players can worship.
- game editor – The mother of all editors, drastically change the very way your game world works without coding changes. Tons of options. Tons. It needs its own blog post. Seriously.
- help file editor – Your players have questions about gameplay, give them the information they need.
- herb editor – Make the plants that your players will collect with the forage skill.
- language editor – Create different languages that players can learn to speak and read.
- mix editor – Create the recipes that crafters will use in your game.
- mobile editor – Mobiles or NPC’s are the people, animals, and monsters in your world.
- mud program editor – This is the script editor that can make your NPC’s and your world feel even more dynamic with a few lines of basic code.
- race editor – Create or edit the game’s races, both the playable and non-playable races.
- room editor – Rooms or locations are places to explore in your world.
- social editor – Socials are quick RP actions that make interacting with other players quick and easy.
- skill group editor – Create groups of skills for class templates, advanced classes, quest locked skills, any collection of skills you want to be able to grand the player at game start or later in the game.
- spell and skills editor – create and edit spells and skills that players can learn, practice and use.
Dot Has All of The Advanced Stuff Right Out of The Box – Dot Makes use of MXP, MSP, MCCP and tons of other awesome features! Do you want your game’s editing menus to have clickable links to toggle settings? DOT (along with a modern client like MUDLET) can do that. Do you want combat sounds and a built-in overhead map that is dynamically generated based on conditions, skills, and distance? Got you covered. Dawn of Time comes with a built-in web portal so that prospective players can read your helpfiles, see who is online, see a list of the game areas to explore, see the MUDs stats, see a bunch of information about race/class balancing in your MUD and see which game settings you have chosen in the game editor in their web browser. It’s all built-in.
The Code Isn’t Changing If You Don’t Want It To – a fancy new codebase in the experimental stage can go through sweeping and drastic changes. If your game’s codebase is being created right now or is being drastically overhauled, you should wait before building too much content. There’s nothing worse than having to redo your creative work because the files are no longer compatible with a new format that you need based on recent hard code changes. Dawn hasn’t changed in a decade. You’re not going to be interrupted or have to change how your workflow sings due to an update to the game engine.