Dark Castle MUD

Dark Castle is a MUD that has been in existence 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 or 6969 for the standard no-botting/no-multiplaying server or dcastle.org 6666 for the botting/multiplaying server.

Use existing Docker image

$ docker create -p 4000 --name darkcastle jhhudso/darkcastle
567cc580ca65a9fe249ba77312a358a11ab772291a8f4ab01104e1102a7d112d
$ docker start darkcastle
darkcastle
$ docker inspect -f '{{range .NetworkSettings.Networks}}{{.IPAddress}}{{end}}' darkcastle
172.17.0.2
$ telnet 172.17.0.2 4000
Trying 172.17.0.2...
Connected to 172.17.0.2.
Escape character is '^]'.

What name for the roster?

Local development

Follow the instructions below to build and run DarkCastle MUD locally. Traditionally, Dark Castle is developed on openSUSE Tumbleweed or Leap. I've also included instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 which can also be used within Windows 10 WSL2.

Install dependencies for compilation.

openSUSE Tumbleweed

sudo zypper ref
sudo zypper in git fmt-devel libfmt8 gcc-c++ libpq5 zlib-devel cmake qt6-base-devel postgresql-devel qt6-httpserver-devel libssh-devel

openSUSE Leap 15.5

sudo zypper ref
sudo zypper in git fmt-devel libfmt8 gcc-c++ libpq5 zlib-devel cmake qt6-base-devel postgresql-devel qt6-httpserver-devel libstdc++6-devel-gcc12 gcc12-c++ libssh-devel

Ubuntu 22.04

sudo apt update
sudo apt install g++-12-multilib g++-12 libstdc++-12-dev g++ scons libcurl4 libpq-dev libpq5 libcurl4-openssl-dev unzip zlib1g-dev libfmt-dev cmake qt6-base-dev

Now build the DarkCastle project. Change -j64 option below to match the number of threads your CPU(s) can run in parallel.

git clone https://github.com/DarkCastleMUD/DarkCastle.git
cd DarkCastle
# The c++ compiler should be g++-12 or newer
cmake -S src -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=g++-12
or 
cmake -S src -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=g++-12


make -C build clean
make -C build -j64
or
make -C build -j64 VERBOSE=1

Run DarkCastle server

cd lib
../build/dcastle

Test server by connecting to it from another terminal.

telnet localhost 4000