a MUD (multiplayer text-based RPG) written in Ruby. It's cool because MUDs are awesome. But I'm doing this in Ruby because it's a language I'm somewhat familia

a MUD (multiplayer text-based RPG) written in Ruby. It's cool because MUDs are awesome. But I'm doing this in Ruby because it's a language I'm somewhat familiar with but I don't really consider myself an expert on (as opposed to PHP and Javascript, both on which I do consider myself to be an expert). I figured that building a Ruby project from scratch would be the best way to learn the language. So far, so good. Thoughts: - No framework yet. Decided to just build it and see what happens. I'm not trying to learn Rails -- I'm trying to learn Ruby. They're not quite the same, obviously. - It's harder than I thought. It took quite some time for me to figure out how to mix together sockets and threads to keep track of multiple players - It's more fun than I thought. I've used Ruby in the past but have never really been impressed. (I think that's mostly Rails.) But this project is full of far more epic wins than my usual ideas. - Ruby probably isn't the best language to do a MUD in. I initially started with C and I got pretty far, but I decided I wanted to learn a new language, not build a MUD in a language I already know. - The old school Merc/Diku muds out there are based on flat files. All data, such as character files and area files, are stored in a custom flat format. I'm using JSON for my test data, since it's pretty easy for Ruby to consume, but I'm thinking I may switch to a DB-based setup. But then again, the flat file thing is working just fine... I guess I'll publish the source some day, when I get to the point where it's playable.