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Give LeakTracer a try. I uses LD_PRELOAD to avoid needing a recompile, and hooks into the new and delete operators to provide a concise leak report.

Burn!

I need to put the Bartle Test in the wp article...

Here's an idea for free... dying makes you play in a "netherworld" together with other dead. Meanwhile, your actions in the netherworld affects the "real world" in various random ways, do X and you have a ghost etc. The right actions in the netherworld might "reincarnate" you (but with some weird changes), or living world avvies can "raise" you... oh and there ought to be a "death-counter" visible to others, so you'd have unlucky-Tom and deadite-Jane and 4Clover-Harry... furthermore, death could turn you into an undead in the living world instead, with the next death meaning winding up in the Netherworld...

/me doesn't play MMORPGs with leveling though, or games with levels for that matter. Prevents you from seeing what's just behind the corner, or how to get to the unreachable ledge, but then I've always preferred tactics/strategy to mindless shooting in all directions... I'm primarily an Explorer I guess: Bartle-test (same bartle, yeah).

Anyway, prompted by mention of this topic on Slashdot I finally got around in releasing a maintenane release of mcl, 0.53.00. It basically fixes all the ancient C++ code that only compiled with 2.95, and also makes the code work with Perl 5.8.0 etc.

Get it from http://www.andreasen.org/mcl/ as usual.

For a more modern MUD, non-text-only client, check out Papaya.

http://www.andreasen.org/. Still up.

For windows, the best free stuff out there is probably MudMaster or MM2K (the non-console version of MM). Other free ones can be found by putting something dumb like "windows mud client" into google.

For linux, I have never found any clients that will do everything I want them to do. As Michael implies, tf will do most everything you want. The two issues I currently have with it are no easily usable input buffer (/recall .... prints it, but doesn't rerun it...), and its ansi support doesn't do well when presented with muds which spew crap. MCL is probably the second most popular unix mud client, after tf. Non console... good luck. Sourceforge has a couple dozen projects in various states of undress.

-R-

For a good MUD client for UNIX, I'd recommend MCL. It's got the simplicity of telnet without the pain.

What features are you looking for?

I went back to mud a few months ago a bit for old times sake. I went looking for a tty-mode mud client, and found mcl, which doesn't seem bad.

Back when I mudded more seriously, all I used was a pretty normal telnet client (well, with a separate line-buffer text field...that's kind of a must-have).

LeakTracer
http://www.andreasen.org/LeakTracer/

MemWatch
http://www.linkdata.se/sourcecode.html

These are two free memory debuggers that I've used, and had much success with.

Why use C++ over C? Ignoring the fact that C++ is for all practical purposes a superset of C, I'll list the featured I find most useful, anf the reasons why:

• (Mostly) Strong Typing - A lot of people find this restrictive, but in the long run, proper use of datatypes, enums and consts saves debugging time. I find that I get more things "right the first time" in C++.
• Encapsulaton - Properly protecting your data with private and protected can tell you when you've coded a bad algorithm. It forces you to separate the interface from the implementation. Multiple inheritance can take this one step further, but I don't usually go that route.
• Polymorphism - Ok, this is the obvious one, but it really is extremely useful. It's also the hardest part of C++ for C programmers to "get," as it requires a completely different mode of thinking. I know it took me a couple of years and reading of Design Patterns to really, truly understand it. The Visitor pattern was my gateway to understanding. :)
• Streams - This really goes along with strong typing and includes things like strings and other fundamental library issues. Streaming is a MUCH nicer way of formatting data than printf, mostly because it's well-typed. No more segfaults from passing an int to a %s format.

• Libraries - While C certainly has excellent libraries, C++ includes the STL in the standard, which is a godsend (mostly). I don't want to code hashtables and lists. I did that in college. STL lets me get my work done in a standard way. Now, I have issues with how the STL was standardized (the STL string/iterator/streams interaction really, really bugs me), but overall it is very slick.

Finally, I'd like to address the issue of bloat. C++ does make it much easier to code badly. All of the abstract data types and code hiding can easily turn an O(n) algorithm into an O(n^2) one. As with any language, proper understanding of the code (libraries) is the key. The STL Programmer's Guide is an excellent resource for understanding the limitations and proper use of the STL.

To conclude with a "real world" example, I am currently on a team developing an optimizing compiler in C++. It's been a huge learning process, as any student project is, given that we started out with little compiler experience and only marginally more C++ experience. But throughout the project I have continually improved things by learning just a bit more about how C++ and the STL work. At this point, our compiler has similar functionality to gcc and runs in the same or less memory space. It's quite a bit slower, but I attribute that more to some non-optimal algorithms and more complex dataflow analysis than to C++.

In addition, by using C++'s ability to overload functions, I was able to quickly hack up the LeakTracer tool (which overloads operator new and operator delete), providing many memory debugging features and in the process reducing our memory consumption significantly. All in the span of a week.

--

I hate anti GiS trolls, er,

oops, now that I *am* a troll,

Guys, everquest is some dangerous stuff, and I mean this in all seriousness, Mudding can ruin your life. Like, if you skip a day of school to do a trade run or run a hard new zone, or you don't go on a date because you are on a major eq run, then like, uh, turn off the game, because it's not a carrer, although if it were i'd be playing it still or something.

A much better mud than everquest (in my own opinion, obviously.) is medievia, you should check it out, it's free for the most part too, although they like donations from people and junk. And if you need a client MCL is really good, or if you happen to be a windows junkie mud master.

I don't like everquest and UO and crap because of the way high level eq is usually traded and sold with real money, which I think totally messes up the games economy.

One thing that bothers me about muds like med, Medievia is free yet still proprietary in nature for some reason, so go figure. I wish the owner would just open up the source but thats unlikely, he fears competition and crap.


-[ World domination - rains.net ]-

Of course, I gave the wrong URL. The right URL is: http://www.andreasen.org/smart/ !

I used to write the HTML in hand, but the preprocessing makes things much easier: I changed the bland h1-h3 headings to something more nifty by just editing the style file - I still use @h1 tag in my files, but it just gets converted - I can go back to something else entirely in the future, and not have to edit any of my source files. Preprocessing also gives me some other abilities, like make a table of contents, and checking #name links. The source for the script is at http://www.andreasen.org/smart.shtml - the documentation is not very good however. Take a look at the rest of my website to see what the language can easily do.

I change some of the source pages, then run my sync script, which regenerates the HTML and does a rsync to my website - fast and easy, since rsync only sends the changed files.

(Ouch, pressing preview removed all the HTML tags and put all things on one long line, wonder if that was kfm's fault - sorry if things look strange..)