MusicMUD is third generation MUD engine, learning the lessons of inflexibility in Aber / Diku, and overflexibility in LP and MOO.
It is predominantly written in C++, with substantial amounts of Lua, both as a scripting language and as a secondary implementation language. It defines a tight data-driven world model, with a zone file format semantically very similar to JSON, with capacity for arbitrary customisation.
We last did a mainline public release in 2003, and 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.