A flexible (M)ulti(U)ser(D)ungeon

Hi!
I'm currently working on an flexible, expandable mud server. In difference to other mud's, this one should enable the story-author to use his/her role-system and his language, even for the commandsets. Reason for all the work: some friends of mine are playing a life-rpg and the lack of time. so i thougt, having an mud with their rpg-system might enable them to come together more often. due it doesn't make always sence to invet the wheel new, i've taken Chris Goodsell's mud server for starting further development. The code was very oo but hat loads of bugs. it took me some time to get into the code and to fix even some of the bugs. i've rewritten big parts. but now the point has come, where al little help would be great :-) (in other words...i'm nearly begging for it)
There are some features that I'd like to add, and where a helping hand would be quite nice (the list is not sorted):
1.) adding NPC (non-playing-characters) that are more likely an AIML-chat-bot that common NPC's. Walks through the locations, remebers hat he sees and due the chat-engine, it would'nt be as boring for the players as common NPS's that can only give one or two answers. Maybe an NPC engine could be an class or an dll, and could be set to any player. so there could be different brains (farmer, fighter, mage,...) and the brain-engine could be used for several characters. At this point, i'd need someone, that could do that, most.

2.) i'd like to add an "intellisense-feature" (as it is within the IDE) for the script editor, so it is easier to work within. i've played around with the itypeinfo and directX. But my app is an standard EXE :-(

3.) i'd need some good ideas of how to protect some Properties within the editor, if the values are used within the script.

4.) due i'm trying to make as much as possible flexible, i'd like to allow the user to define a players value by an formula. e.g. weigth = Sum(weigth)+10, where weigth means client.player.properties("weigth").value and Sum(weigth) would be an function that adds all weigth-properties of all objects the player has. the user would write into the properties("weight") field: =Sum(weight)
Same way, as it would be done in a excel sheet ;-)

5.) a way to import existing mud scenarios would be also great.

7.) i've massive problems with the XML parser using special character (e.g. ÄÜÖ)

8.) i've tried to split the big xml file into seperate file for each player, location and object. but I've had some problems with it and due it is not much important, so i've decided to make it later.

6.) a nice GUI for the "world-editor" (maybe even drag and drop) would be nice, so even dummy users could build their wolrd


I've uploaded an version at http://infantilo.milten.lima-city.de/

The project is absolute just for fun! But if someone wants to do some parts... YOU ARE WELCOME. You can contact me at [email protected]

Your's
Pedro