codebase
ROM
Merc's best-known descendant, and the combat engine a large share of nineties MUDs were built on.
Games running it
55 listed · 0 archived · measured, not declared
Counted from the catalogue on this request, over the same filter the link above carries — so this number and that listing are one query and cannot drift apart.
offered in their handshakes: MCCP, MSSP, MXP, MSDP, GMCP, CHARSET, UTF-8
ROM — Rivers of MUD — is a derivative of Merc, which is itself a DikuMUD derivative, and it is the one that stuck. Its combat model, its skill and spell system and its area format were the starting point for an enormous number of games through the nineties and after, and ROM 2.4 in particular is one of the most-forked pieces of source in the hobby.
Like the rest of the Diku line it carries the original credits requirement, so a game whose lineage you cannot otherwise establish will often name Diku, Merc and ROM on its login screen.
What it looks like from outside
MSSP, CHARSET and MCCP2, on the game we measured.
ROM is the server this project proved its own compression bug against. Our probe negotiated MCCP2, the server correctly began compressing, and the telnet library we depend on never inflated the stream — so the connect screen arrived as a wall of replacement characters and we briefly recorded that as the game's fault. The payload decompressed cleanly with a stock zlib call, which is what made it unambiguous. It was fixed upstream; the story is on the MCCP page, because it is a good example of a defect that looks exactly like a broken game from outside.
See also
- DikuMUD The root of the combat-MUD family. Levels, classes, equipment and area files — and a licence that shaped a generation of derivatives.
- SMAUG A Merc derivative built for large themed worlds, with deities, planes and an area set several times the size of its parent's.
- MCCP Stream compression. Cheap, widely deployed, and the protocol that produced the most instructive bug in this project's history.