F.A.Q

What is Nightmare? Nightmare was a mud. It was part of a branching of mud development that occurred early in the days of popularized mudding. Some folks decided to take MUD library development in a particular direction, and eventually made available what is now known as the Nightmare mudlib. Nightmare went through a few major changes, most notably from version 3 to version IV. By that time, the development of Nightmare was solely managed by a coder who called himself Descartes.What is the relationship between Nightmare and Dead Souls? It appears that Dead Souls began as a "development" MUD. This means that while Descartes ran his own MUD, he also worked on improving that MUD's lib. It is unwise to make major changes to a MUD that people are playing on, so the Dead Souls development MUD was one which served as a platform to develop, extend, and improve the Nightmare lib without risking harm to active players. Sometime after the release of the Nightmare IV mudlib, Descartes decided to withdraw it from distribution. Based on their interpretation of copyright law, people now do not distribute the Nightmare mudlib on Internet servers. However, somewhat inexplicably, Descartes released the mudlib for his development mud, Dead Souls, into the public domain. This meant that the Dead Souls mudlib was completely free to be used by anyone in any way they chose, be it distribution, modification, spindling or folding. Because Dead Souls was the development mud for Nightmare Mud, which was the base of the Nightmare mudlib, the relationship between the two is a very close one.How close? The similarity between Nightmare and Dead Souls cannow best be described as close cousins, rather than twins. At one time it was almost identical. A close comparison of the Dead Souls lib that Descartes released (version 1.1pre) against the last released Nightmare lib (IVr6) reveals that they are very nearly the same thing, file for file. The main differences between the two are:* A small number of Nightmare library files aren't on Dead Souls.* Dead Souls doesn't come with the driver or install script the Nightmare had.* All documentation files were removed from Dead Souls.* "Nightmare" in file headers was changed to say "Dead Souls"This might sound like a lot of difference, but consider this: not counting documentation, Nightmare IVr6 lib contained 1064 files and directories, and the Dead Souls 1.1pre lib contains 1082. Dead Souls 1.1pre actually had more lib material in it than the last release of Nightmare.Why mess with Dead Souls, then? The main problem was that Dead Souls was a bear to set up. Because driver development had not stopped (the driver is a separate software project), but lib development had, incompatibilities grew in number over time. Using the original driver from 1997 created a MUD that lacked important features of modern muds, and risked instability. Using a modern driver required a modification of fundamental lib systems that required some expertise to perform. People stopped using Nightmare because they couldn't get it, and they didn't use Dead Souls because the damn thing didn't work right. My own Nightmare lib MUD, Frontiers, continued to chug along, quietly fading into obscurity along with all other Nightmare IV based MUDs, while scrappy young newcomers like CoffeeMud lib started elbowing their way into the MUD community. Then a funny thing happened. I really got into lib coding. I mean, full-on lib obsession. I can't really explain it, other than to say that when I was younger it seemed hard and impenetrable, but now that I've been working in a technical field for years, I have the mental tools (and patience) required to disassemble and understand complex systems. I got turned on by analyzing and understanding stuff that I'd considered over my head in years past. But I was living in the past. I couldn't share my exciting lib ideas and discoveries with anyone else, because the Nightmare LPC community was in the very last stages of extinction. I decided to do something about it. Maybe I'd be whistling into the wind, tilti