Indie-Resource.com

I want to pursue my dream of turning Rifts into a mud and was curious if any one knew some really good open source mud engines. Telnet, HTML5, or any language really. I have done some searching and found ones so looking for opinions and suggestions.

BTW I am currently using a old engine I built some time ago and just updating it some. Just curious what else is out there for options.

a node one would be cool.

Probably the best Node.js MUD engine, at least that I am aware of is RavierMUD. There is also nMUD, but I know little about it. Hopefully Havoc will eventually release, because it looks awesome.

For the most part, I would only suggest you mess around with a non-Node MUD engine if it had a really nice scripting engine that would allow any changes you needed to make through it. Coming to grips with, and then editing, the source code of these MUD codebases can be a nightmare. A lot of their code is inherited from a long family line of code, much of it going back into the 80's with horrendous multithreading and ancient programming techniques. A lot of 80's developers cut their teeth on socket and multithreaded programming by writing MUD servers, and some of them are so notoriously complex that only a handful of people fully understand what is going on in them. CoffeeMUD may be an exception to this, since I believe it was written from-the-ground-up as a new codebase with at least the sensibilities of the turn of the millennium. It has a very nice web-based editor called MUDGrinder, but I don't know if the whole package has been kept up to date through the last 15 years of change in CoffeeMUD. The main page says "Play now! (IE/NS7/FF)", which is not a great sign of the codebase staying with the times, but I could be wrong!