CarbonMU
CarbonMU is a general-purpose, extendable MUD/MUSH server framework written in Ruby. It's designed to scale to thousands of players, handle a wide variety of game types, from classic hack-n-slash MUDs to innovative text-based social communities. CarbonMU is not ready for public use by non-developers, but we welcome user contributions to help move the project along.
The remainder of this documentation is currently intended more as design documentation than how-tos.
Where to talk about CarbonMU
- In the near future there will be an official CarbonMU support site running... CarbonMU. In the meantime, you can find me on M*U*S*H (mush.pennmush.org 4201) as Rince.
- Use Gitter, a nifty chat system that integrates with Github.
The road to 1.0
See this wiki page for the latest updates on what's on the todo list. You are more than welcome to get involved! Feel free to open issues with questions, join discussions, or ask if you need help finding a task suitable for your interest and skill level.
Architecture
CarbonMU is powered by Celluloid, an actor-based concurrency/multithreading framework, plus ZeroMQ for inter-process communication, and uses MongoDB (via Mongoid) to store all of its data. The framework is designed to support a variety of connections, including basic TCP telnet, SSL telnet, and JSON over HTTP, API-style.
It's also intended to use a highly plugin-based model. A typical CarbonMU game will probably consist of the carbonmu core gem (what you see here), some number of community-supported third-party gems to provide things like a bboard system and other common utilities, and some game-specific custom code. It will not include a scripting engine or "softcode"-type functionality.
Internally, CarbonMU looks like this:
The EdgeRouter
and Server
are separate actors. The Server
can be therefore be restarted to load new game code without dropping TCP connections.
Game objects
There are four built-in descendants of GameObject
in core (modules may choose to add their own).
They are:
Room
, which mixes inContainer
so it can have contentsThing
, something tangible that is in one and only one room (mixes inMovable
), and also can have contents (is aContainer
)Player
, similar toThing
except can be logged into, and will support more interactions (i.e. you can send in-game mail to aPlayer
, but not aThing
). IncludesMovable
andContainer
.Exit
, a connection between twoRoom
s.
All of these are stored in MongoDB in the game_objects
collection.
Other data
Of course, MU*s need a lot more data than just things that can be interacted with. There'll be things like bboard messages, mail, and thousands of other things games will want to add for their custom needs. Plugins are welcome to declare their own classes that inherit Mongoid::Document
, and can even reference the GameObject
descendants. There's no need to create 'data objects' and store them there.
Commands
Defining a new command is done by subclassing Command, adding one or more syntax
calls using regular expressions with named captures for parameters, and providing an execute
model that receives a @params
hash with its named captures and a CommandContext instance in @context
. See lib/commands for examples. This will continue to be fleshed out.
Events
We will use a pubsub model (not yet implemented) to allow for both core functionality and people's gems to provide behavior when game events occur, as well as register their own events too.
Building external plugins/modules/gems
This needs to be documented in detail once an example is done.
Internationalization
CarbonMU will have full i18n support on a per-player basis, allowing each player to see game messages in their own locales (of course, chat messages and so on will not be auto-translated).
Supported Rubies
CarbonMU is supported on Ruby 2.0.x or newer, JRuby (latest release), and Rubinius (latest release). Using JRuby or Rubinius will allow your game to be multi-threaded.