MusicMUD is third generation MUD engine. It is written predominantly in C++, with substantial amounts of Lua, both as a scripting language and as a secondary implementation language.
We started this engine in the late 90s, learning lessons from previous MUD codebases we were familiar with. We define a data-driven world model, stored in a data dictionary, with capacity for arbitrary customisation with C++ modules, lua verbs & an extensive system of events.
We last did a mainline public release in 2003. The presently available version is a patch made in 2025 to build under modern compilers, which is here for historic interest. We caution to use it at your own risk.
We hope to make a source release of version 3.0, which is written in modern C++, uses Lua 5 (with a custom static lua typechecker!), and is even more data-driven, later in 2025 or early in 2026.
It's licenced under the GNU General Public Licence, version 2, or at your option any later version. Note: we do not consider a game world written for musicmud, or code written in lua to interface with it, a derivative work of musicmud.