Important!

This is experimental and (currently) incomplete software. It is not yet fully usable, although with further development it is hoped that it soon will be.

At present, the code will load a database and listen for network connections. You can connect using any telnet client and interact with the MOO environment, however no changes to the database will be saved, and a few other features have also yet to be implemented.

About

EtaMOO is a new implementation of the LambdaMOO server written in Haskell.

LambdaMOO is a network-accessible, multi-user, programmable, interactive system well-suited to the construction of text-based adventure games, conferencing systems, and other collaborative software.

EtaMOO differs from LambdaMOO in a few significant ways:

• EtaMOO is multi-threaded. MOO tasks run concurrently, producing network output and changes to the database in isolated transactions that are committed only when not in conflict with any other transaction. (In cases of conflict, transactions are automatically retried.) Separate threads are also used for network connection management, so for example name lookups do not block the entire server.

• EtaMOO supports 64-bit MOO integers via compile-time build option.

• EtaMOO is Unicode-aware, and will eventually include support for Unicode MOO strings via compile-time build option.

• EtaMOO supports IPv6.

The implementation of EtaMOO closely follows the specifications of the LambdaMOO Programmer's Manual, and should therefore be compatible with most LambdaMOO databases as of about version 1.8.3 of the LambdaMOO server code.

Installing

EtaMOO is built with Cabal, the Haskell package manager. In the simplest case, simply running:

cabal install EtaMOO

should automatically download, build, and install the etamoo executable after doing the same for all of its Haskell dependencies.

Cabal itself is part of the Haskell Platform which is available for many distributions and platforms.

EtaMOO has non-Haskell dependencies on two external libraries: libpcre (with UTF-8 support enabled) for regular expression matching, and, possibly, libcrypt (often part of the standard libraries) for the MOO crypt() built-in function. You may need to ensure you have these available before installing EtaMOO.

Hacking

Documentation is available for the various types, data structures, and functions used internally by EtaMOO.