LambdaMOO is an old virtual community that's still running. It's a text-based world that caught my eye with its interesting design principle: everything is an object in a parent-child inheritance hierarchy with a single root object. Rooms, players, containers, and everything else are described by properties that are either inherited from their parents or defined directly on them. Actions are carried out by executing "verbs" which can be modified by other verbs (and by extension, players). A MOO is the kind of game in which the primary goals of players are not only to play and interact, but to build.

This project is an attempt to create a system similar to LambdaMOO using a new programming language called Nim.

I'm using the LambdaMOO Programmer's Manual as a very loose guide for this project.

You can't really use it yet because this is just an engine. There's a whole world that I have to build within it which I have not completed yet. However, in the meantime you can run tests to make sure that some parts of the engine work properly on your system.

The tools needed to build this package are the Nim compiler and the Nim package manager, Nimble.

Start by cloning this repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/sid-code/nmoo

Then, simply build with nimble:

$ nimble build

Check the bin directory for the server executable.

You can also run tests with nimble test or generate docs with nimble docs (they go into the doc/ folder)

Verb code is written using a custom S-expression based scripting language. The fundamental concepts of the language differ from traditional S-exp languages such as Lisp or Scheme because the fundamental data type is not the pair, but rather the MOO data type (which can hold numbers, strings, and lists among other things).

MIT