DikuMUD

DikuMUD

The spiritual successor to AberMUD, it helped proliferate the "hack-n-slash" variety of MUDs. It came complete with a world full of areas, mobs, and items and allowed non-coders an easy way to immediately run a MUD server with little effort.

DikuMUD caused a massive revolution, effectively fathering what would become the most prolific set of MUD servers on the Internet. Even its direct progeny would spawn their own very popular derivatives, and the ease with which an entire playable world could be deployed was largely responsible for this.

Whereas a TinyMUD or LPMud (or one of their derivatives) could be deployed, they often came with little to no pre-built worlds, items, monsters, and scripts, something that would have to be painstakingly and slowly built up. A Diku-based MUD, on the other hand, could be up and running and enjoyed by hundreds of players immediately.

This had a slightly negative impact on the MUDding world, which Richard Bartle referred to as Stock MUD Syndrome, where suddenly players were coming across MUDs that hadn't been given enough of a personal touch before being booted up and thus you had hundreds of servers that looked, acted, and felt the same as many others.

However, it must absolutely be noted that DikuMUD did more for the modern MMORPGs than any other game (offline or online). Many of the core concepts that people have experienced or come to expect from online RPGs can be directly attributed to their having been instituted by DikuMUD. You will recognize many of these features which were basically invented or established by Diku:

  • -The "Trinity" of Tank/DPS/Healer
  • -Pets
  • -Groups/Raids
  • -Banks
  • -Player Housing
  • -Auction Houses
  • -Combat System (procs/cooldowns/timers/aggro/crowd control)
  •  
  • And more..


The versioning scheme was a little strange with the Gamma release preceding the "Alfa" (sic) release. The Delta release, while not being official, can be considered the last/latest version as it is the Alfa code, but simply updated for the latest C standards and libraries. Essentially they are the same but Alfa will no longer compile on a new system, but Delta will.

DikuMUD also happens to be one of the few MUD codebases which still run an official site, at www.dikumud.com



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Downloads

  • Original Developers


  • Sebastian Hammer, Michael Seifert, Hans Henrik

  • Language(s)


  • C

  • Release Year


  • 1990

  • Software License


  • LGPL

  • See also

    • CopperMUD

    • CircleMUD

    • SillyMUD

    • DikuMUD II

The daily joke: We hereby declare DikuMUD free of bugs.