Way back in the dawn of time, William Astle decided to create a MUD from scratch. Obviously this is a massive undertaking and fraught with peril. It was motivated partly by the desire to have a codebase that one person understood and also because no code base had quite exactly the features desired.
The original attempt to write the MUD was started in later 1998 and was coded using C++. There was very little planning done before starting out which led to some very brutal code. Old snapshots are online for achaeological purposes. Anyone wondering how awful C++ code can be is invited to take a look. This attempt has been long abandoned.
William Astle attempted a rewrite of the code for AugMUD which served as a test bed for concepts. It also served to demonstrate that writing the MUD in C is simply not practical because too much energy must be put into dealing with details rather than making things work. This went from 2003 through 2006 before being officially abandoned as too time consuming. Not to mention the programmer got bored.
As of May of 2006, planning has been started for a third attempt. This attempt will involve careful planning before beginning to write code. With a project as large and complex as a MUD, however, it simply isn't practical to plan the entire project first so the planning must take this into account.
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