SolarWinds-Evennia

This is a fresh attempt at my SolarWinds MUD concept, this time with the Evennia engine: https://github.com/evennia/evennia/.

So what in the heck is SolarWinds?

I've had an idea for a MUD for a couple of years now. It would focus on space exploration and resource gathering. The world would be infinite or near-infinite, and much of it procedurally generated.

I initially tried to start this project with the TinyMARE engine, however it just wasn't made to scale as big as I wanted. I found myself doing terrible things like trying to hack on a secondary SQLite database. Even then, it still wasn't enough.

Later, I tried to use an engine a friend was writing, but it wasn't mature enough nor was it likely to be any time soon. I finally resigned myself to writing my own engine in Python, which turned out to be a larger undertaking than I envisioned.

While on that quest, I stumbled across Evennia and it appeared to be exactly what I was searching for. Coding with Evennia has been a big change for me, I'm used to building the game entirely in softcode, with the hardcode of the engine spirited away where mere mortals (anyone who isn't the engine developer) cannot easily access it, and any changes are A Big Deal. Evennia on the other hand requires all coding activities take place offline, and then the engine is simply restarted to apply the changes. It even maintains player connections while this takes place. What I like the most about it is the fact that it will work with large databases. I can configure it for a MySQL back end and then create a truly massive world that encompasses many solar systems with no problems. As a bonus, all the coding is done in Python, something I'm fairly familiar with, and far less finicky than the TinyMARE softcode parser. I have high hopes for this incarnation of SolarWinds. I think I might have finally found the proper tools to construct my vision.

The code

This is the base Evennia setup, with my modifications. There's a lot of code and doc in the repo that came with Evennia. Some of the changes of note that I've made are listed below:

Directory	Contains
typeclasses	Changes to how Evennia works
world	Features I've added myself

Prerequisites

In addition to everything Evennia needs to run, you will also need to install the noise package from Pypi into the Virtual Environment you're using for Evennia:

(venv) $ pip install noise