Dark Castle is a MUD that has been running (almost) continually since the early 90s. Branched from an early version of DIKU the code has been rewritten multiple times by many authors over the years. It has been a source of enjoyment and rivalry for many over the years. In 2020 it was decided to open-source it for the enjoyment of our players and for some nostalgia for those that return for a visit.
The game is available to login via telnet dcastle.org over ports 23, 6969 or 8080 for the standard no-botting/no-multiplaying server or dcastle.org 6666 for the botting/multiplaying server.
Follow the instructions below to build and run DarkCastle MUD locally. Traditionally, Dark Castle is developed on openSUSE Tumbleweed or Leap. However, the following steps can be followed by anyone with native Ubuntu or Ubuntu within Windows 10 WSL2.
From Ubuntu terminal
git clone https://github.com/DarkCastleMUD/DarkCastle.git
cd DarkCastle
Now we follow most of the steps listed in .github/workflows/ccpp.yml
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
sudo apt update
sudo apt install gcc-10-multilib g++-10-multilib gcc-multilib
sudo apt install g++-multilib scons libcurl4:i386
sudo apt install libpq-dev:i386 libpq5:i386 libcurl4-openssl-dev:i386
sudo apt install unzip zlib1g-dev:i386
sudo apt install libfmt-dev:i386
Install cmake and gdb
sudo apt install cmake gdb
Need to set FLAGS to build 32 bit fmt lib
export CFLAGS=" -m32"
export CXXFLAGS=" -m32"
Install fmt lib
git clone https://github.com/fmtlib/fmt.git
cd fmt
cmake .
make -j4
sudo make install
Now build the DarkCastle project
cd ../src
scons -j4
Run DarkCastle server
cd ../lib
../src/dcastle -p6969
Test server by connecting to it from another terminal
telnet localhost 6969