gzochi abermud is a clone of the classic AberMUD game developed by Alan Cox 
(and others) at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth in the late 1980s. This 
implementation is based on the source code of AberMUD 5.30, which was released 
under the GNU General Public License in 1992. AberMUD was not the first 
text-based, multi-player virtual world -- Multi-User Dungeon was developed at 
the University of Essex by Roy Trubshaw in 1978 -- but it was one of the most
widely-distributed and one of the first to be written in C.

The real AberMUD has a huge array of features that this example implementation
cannot hope to match: A large vocabulary, an in-game world editor, complex 
object relationships and magic spell effects, and vector graphics for certain
locations all contributed to AberMUD's popularity. gzochi abermud offers a
handful of the commands supported by the real AberMUD, as well as a parser
sufficiently advanced to provide a few extension points for supporting more
complex commands. Additionally, in place of AberMUD's explicit load and save 
operations, which synchronize the game state with a local disk, gzochi abermud
uses gzochi's powerful automatic persistence features to seamlessly persist 
aspects of the game state whenever they change. In order to bootstrap its game
world, however, gzochi abermud includes a parser for the AberMUD 5.21 universe
file format, and the "abernew" universe file is included in the distribution.

The source code for the both the server and client components of gzochi abermud
has been heavily annotated to help explicate the workings of the game logic and
the interactions between the client and server. It is hoped that the code 
comments and other documentation will be useful for developers attempting to 
write their own games for the gzochi framework. Please send any questions or 
comments to the gzochi development mailing list: gzochi-devel@nongnu.org.

For more information on the history and evolution of AberMUD, including source
distributions, please visit the following web sites:

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AberMUD
* ftp://ftp.linux.org.uk/pub/linux/alan/Software/Games/AberMUD5/
* http://www.abermud.info/mudlist/
