This is a straightforward text MUD, written in Go and using gRPC instead of telnet.
I started out writing something in Java and using eJabber for communication. This was fun, but XMPP has an awful lot of overhead and that turned into a lot of work. Also, Go seemed like a fun language to learn. So the Java code was scrapped for Go, and eventually the XMPP / eJabber implementation was scrapped for JSON over Web Sockets. The original client was a single web page app using JQuery, with the intention of replacing JQuery with something better...
I found that I was having to write a great amount of code translating JSON to Go structs and back, both on the server and in the client. So I replaced the JQuery web page with a Go Client application, watchmud-client.
But there was still too much serializing-deserializing code between client and server and websocket. So I replaced that with gRPC.
What will I rewrite next??
This has more history about this project.
Install Dependencies: you'll need Go 1.14+ to build this. You'll need to install go stringer:
$ go get golang.org/x/tools/cmd/stringer
and then make sure that the directory this is installed to (probably something like ~/go/bin) is part of your path.
To compile and test the server:
$ make
This will create a watchmud executable in the project/bin directory.
WatchMud uses Postgres to hold some information about the users, game state and other interesting stuff like that. You'll need to have an instance of Postgres running for watchmud.
Installing postgres:
$ brew install postgresql
Creating the user 'watchmud' and the schema:
See watchmud/db/sql/ddl.sql for table definitions and static data creation.
By default, watchmud won't have permissions to create the directory where it wants to write its log files. Unless you're overriding this directory with the --logFile argument, you'll need to create the directory and give the watchmud user permission to write there:
$ sudo mkdir -p /var/log/watchmud
$ sudo chown myusername /var/log/watchmud
$ sudo chmod 775 /var/log/watchmud
(Or, something similar to that.)
Example Settings are shown in worldfiles/server.yaml
$ ./watchmud -serverconfig ./worldfiles/myserverconfig.yaml
Ctrl-C to terminate the server.
See the watchmud-client project for more details, but the basics are the same:
$ make
constructs the watchmud-client executable, and
$ ./watchmud-client --player=YourNameGoesHere
Starts it up, with a login attempt to localhost for username "YourNameGoesHere". (Settings, passwords, and other sorts of essentials also being on the "TODO" list.)