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Shadows of Isildur — a roleplay-intensive Tolkien MUD.
Connect at middle-earth.us, port 4500.
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“If you’re looking for a game with good RP, great world, excellent building
and over the top coding, Shadows of Isildur could be for you.”
Evilone
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The Shadows of Isildur RPI Engine is a publicly-released version of the fully-functional MUD
server we use as the foundation for the world we've built here. Our server, written in C, is a derivative of
the original DIKU GAMMA (0.0), and in addition to being developed by the Harshlands
coders for a period of nearly six years, represents an intense three-year investment of heavy, full-time
development by Traithe, our founder and lead programmer. He
decided to release it to the public and contribute something back to the community in the hopes of fostering
growth in the heretofore relatively limited RPI niche.
Please note, before proceeding, that this server is not supported by any Shadows of Isildur staff;
it may or may not be maintained and developed further in Traithe's free time. For the most part, however,
you should expect to do your own development!
Finally, be aware: this is not a beginner's codebase. Unless you know and are familiar with the terms "linux",
"mysql", "database", "compile" and "C", installing and administrating a MUD is likely beyond your current capabilties.
This particular MUD codebase contains a number of extremely advanced features that will make it difficult for someone without
any system administration or programming experience to set up, so be forewarned! If don't have this sort of expertise you
will probably be better off looking elsewhere for the time being.
Why This Codebase?
The RPI Engine is, to our knowledge, currently the only publicly-available MUD codebase tailored specifically
to the creation of RPI (or "roleplay intensive") MUDs. Specifically, it contains a number of features designed
to enhance and enforce roleplay and in-character behavior, including permanent character death, a required
character application process, a skills-based advancement system, player literacy, wounds-based combat, and more.
In addition, however, it is also one of the most sophisticated servers publicly available. Features such as
complete building OLC, a crafts OLC, and a fully-editable online registry for things like clan registrations
and skill advancement values ensure continued and progressive development by non-coding staff, while the server's
fully-functional mySQL foundation means that all your MUD's information is easily accessible and at your fingertips.
Finally, the server itself is quite solid. This release of the RPI Engine has functioned on our player port to host
events with over 100 simultaneous and heavily-participating players without a single crash, and often runs for over a
week at a time without a segmentation fault despite heavy traffic. It has been thoroughly debugged with a memory profiler,
and hence most of the server's memory leaks, though not all, have been removed.
All that being said, however, this is a fully developed codebase; it is by no means bare-bones, being quite heavily
packed with many advanced features. Therefore, if you are looking
for something sparse that provides room for completely self-guided development without having to worry about a great
deal of pre-existing structure, our server will probably not work.
Interested?
The public release of the RPI Engine is packaged with all the materials you'll need to set up and run your
very own MUD server out-of-the-box, within minutes, on most *NIX-like operating systems. Although it has been
stripped of all crafts, mobiles, rooms and objects, the online creation capabilities and extensive administrator commands mean that with a team of
dedicated builders and staff your MUD will be up and open to the public in no time.
The package has been tested and compiles with little to no configuration on a wide variety of *NIX-like operating systems, including most recent
x86 linux distributions, Free BSD, and OS X for the Macintosh. Other information, including system requirements and
licensing specifications, are available for your perusal in the package itself. Be sure to review this information
before deciding whether or not you want to use this server as the foundation for your new world! There are a number of
important instructions inside.
In order to download the server package, you will need to first register for a MUD account with us. This is done
so that we can track mailing information for all software downloads; the only time this information will
be used is if we need to contact you to inform you of an urgent vulnerability, exploit, or other dire issue. We
take our users' privacy very seriously!
(You should know that all new game accounts, by default, are registered to receive our weekly newsletter. You may easily
disable this option from the MUD's main account menu, or by clicking the automated opt-out link included at the very bottom
of all newsletter mailings.)
Once you have registered for a MUD account, you'll need to log into our website using the left navbar. Afterward,
you may download the server package here.
As of this moment, our server has been downloaded 991 times.
If you're interested in discussing the codebase or your development efforts with other users of the software, please
visit the RPI Engine area of our web forum, located here. Note
that the username and password you registered for your MUD account doubles as your forum login.
If you find that you do not meet the system requirements for the current release of the RPI Engine, you may find a very
early and unstable alpha version of our codebase here.
It is a code version preceding the RPI Engine by nearly two and a half years, and thus lacks a great deal of its stability
and more useful features - however, it is much less resource-intensive.
From all of us here at Shadows of Isildur, best of luck in developing your new world. If desired, let us know,
and we'd be happy to help spread the word and link your project's website.
Have Something to Contribute?
If you'd like to peruse our database of user-submitted snippets for the RPI Engine, click here. If
you have a snippet you'd like to make publicly available, submit it to us and we'd be happy to post it
on our website for download. If it's well-written enough and deemed needed, it might even make it in-game here! We look forward to seeing what everyone comes up with.
Happy world-building.
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