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2.2 Running the Kernel Library

You'll need to run the Kernel Library to do most of the exercises in this book. A copy comes with every copy of DGD. So if you've already installed DGD, you've already installed the Kernel.

Your copy of DGD came with a file called mud.dgd. Look in DGD's directory and you should find it pretty quickly. You'll need to edit that file before you can use it.

In mud.dgd, you'll see various lines assigning values to various names. One line will say something like directory = "/home/dworkin/dgd/mud". You'll need to change that path to the absolute path for the directory where you installed the Kernel Library. That's the mud subdirectory of DGD. For instance, if you installed DGD into ~alan/dgd on your Unix system, you'd change the filename in quotes to /home/alan/dgd/mud. If your DGD directory wound up in C:\Programs on your Windows machine, you'd change the line to directory = "C:\Programs\DGD\mud". The end of the line, the part surrounded by stars and slashes, is a comment. You can ignore it or remove it entirely (including all the stars and slashes).

Note that the path has to be an absolute path. That means you have to start it with a slash on Unix. You'd use a backslash or a drive letter on Windows. But you can't just start it with the name of the directory where you installed DGD and leave out where on the drive that directory is, that won't work. No relative paths. So /home/bob/dgd/mud and C:\Programs\DGD\MUD are fine, but DGD\MUD isn't.

Once you've done that, you'll need to run the DGD program. If you're running on Windows and you compiled with Visual C++, you can run dgd by double-clicking it and then choose the mud.dgd program from the menu. If you compiled on Unix or used the Cygnus tools on Windows, you'll need to run the program from the command line, with the .dgd file as an argument. For instance, from Unix, in the DGD directory, you might type ./bin/driver mud.dgd. Note that while Win32 permits you to run DGD from the command line, you won't get proper error output if you do. So it's recommended you run DGD and then choose a configuration file from the menu instead.

If you've done it correctly then DGD will print messages about what version you're running and various other things. Then nothing visible will happen. If you're not used to running your own MUD server, this can be a bit disconcerting. Don't worry, it's normal. In fact, if DGD stops and goes back to the command line (usually with an error message), that would be abnormal. The messages DGD prints will look something like this:

Jan 29 16:09:52 ** DGD 1.2.73
Jan 29 16:09:52 ** Initializing...
Jan 29 16:09:53 ** Initialization complete.

Once you're running the server, you'll need to telnet to your MUD. That requires a telnet client or MUD client. On Unix, the simplest method is to run telnet from the command line. The syntax is simply telnet <host> <port>, where host is the name or IP address of the host you're telnetting to, and port is the port number. If you leave off the port number, telnet will use port 23 by default, which is almost never what you want for a MUD.

On Windows, you'll want to download a MUD client like zMUD or a terminal program like TeraTerm or Putty. Do a web search on one of those names, or just on 'Windows terminal program' or 'Win32 MUD client' or similar.

Telnet back to your own machine, on the port where DGD is running. Normally your machine's address will be 127.0.0.1 when you telnet to it, which is called the localhost address. The Kernel Library will usually start its telnet server on port 6047, though you can check the file mud.dgd to be sure. You'll want to telnet to the telnet port, not the binary port, from that file. Your telnet program will attempt to connect to the wrong port if you don't tell it the correct port number.

The Kernel Library will ask you for a login name. Tell it you are admin. Then choose a password for this account. The admin account is special, and gets a lot of privileges that other accounts don't — you won't be able to do many of the exercises in this book except with a privileged account.