The Invent with Python Blog

Writings from the author of Automate the Boring Stuff.












CircleMUD Data in XML Format for Your Text Adventure Game

Mon 19 March 2012    Al Sweigart

CircleMUD was a popular piece of server software for running a MUD, and it came with a sizeable virtual world (which the admin could modify/append to customize their fantasy world.) It would be pretty handy to use parts of this data if you were creating your own virtual world for a text adventure game, but the format of CircleMUD's data files is kind of obtuse and not amenable to manipulation.

So I wrote a few scripts to convert these files into a single XML file which is 4MB when unzipped. You can parse this file and modify it to suit your needs. It contains 1979 rooms across 30 different areas (called zones in the file), with 46 shops and 569 different "mobs" (mobile objects, which are the monsters and NPCs). There are 678 different types of objects, including 116 weapons and 154 types of armor.

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"I Need Practice Programming": 49 Ideas for Game Clones to Code

Mon 20 February 2012    Al Sweigart

You want to practice writing code but can't seem to find any open source projects that are at your level or easy for new people to contribute to. Here's a list of game clone ideas for you to implement. Each has a short description of the game, links to videos of the game, and descriptions of what kind of algorithms you'll need to know in order to implement them.

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