Hello reader, This bundle of files you got are the foundation of the guild system I first designed and coded as a coder of "Dragon's Fang", and later cleaned and adjusted for stock CircleMUD. This guild system is much more advanced than the several guild/clan systems that are floating around the CircleMUD community world, methinks, and I thought it would be nice to give something back to the community and maybe make your lives a bit easier :) Anyways, enough babbling :) What is so good with this guild system ? First of all, IT DOESN'T REQUIRE A PWIPE. Moreover, THERE IS NO MANIPULATION OF THE PFILES at all. This means every CircleMUD can essentially patch this system in with relative ease. There are a lot of cool features to this guild system, other than its relative easiness of installation: - Everything is color coded. - Everything can be set online, EVERYTHING. - Guild bank accounts, fully featured. - Guild seeking system, combined with a sponsorship system. - Guild equipment system, guild zones system, guild skills system. - Guild ranks and subranks. - Guild channels: online settable, including their names, colors and layouts. - Guild help system: Online adding/deleting/removing of guild help entries. - Guild gossip system. - Saved guild information: guild descriptions, guild requirements. - Guildwalk rooms set online. - Special titles for Guildleaders and guildies. - Every guild feature can be turned on/off using guild flags. - A permission system for guildies, using guildie flags: Guildleaders can give guildies the permission to guild other, withdraw money from the guild bank account, sponsor seekers, authorize seekers, write gossip in the gossip file and skillset guildskills. - Guildleaders can be either morts or IMMs. - Guild types supported, also one can use "clubs" as OOC guilds. - Commands for handling all guild aspects and guild information. Quite extensive, in short. There's a couple of requirements, though. First of all, the guild system uses XML for saving/loading of guild files. I used gnome-xml, so you need to install it before actually patching this system. You also need easycolor, as the guild system has extensive color use (even the guild channels are color settable). You can get the gnome xml lib here: ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/stable/sources/libxml I used version 1.8.11, which you can get here: ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/stable/sources/libxml/libxml-1.8.11.tar.gz However, I run this on my cygwin, and this version has problems saving colored text (using &s), although on my MUD, Dragon's Fang, it works with colored text just fine, if I remember correctly. Maybe one needs a better version (this version is somewhat outdated, methinks) to get it to work with colored text better. Anyways, after getting the libxml, untaring and ungzipping it, you need to configure it ("sh configure"), make it ("make") and install it ("make install"). You need root access to install it, so either do it yourself or get your sysadmin to do it, if you can :) The easycolor patch is available throughout the CircleMUD community, and it is also included in my patch. After installing libxml, you can either use the included patch file to patch in the entire system, including easycolor, automatically. This patch is provided to beta patch level 18, and there prolly won't be patches for earlier or more advanced patch levels in the future. Instead, I wrote a walkthrough for hand patching the entire system, and it is included in the HandPatching file. I suggest doing it this way, as I'm not sure I'll update this release frequently, and source code changes might be needed to hand patch this system successfully. I also intend to write a tutorial for using this guild system, but I'm not sure when this will be done. To add a guild after patching in the system, use "addguild " and check out the help entries starting from "help guild-system". This should be enough to get you going, methinks :) Two more things: 1) DISCLAMER: I am not, in any way, responsible, for ANYTHING that may happen to your server and/or MUD and/or code and/or your mental health because of this guild system. Use it on your own risk, and leave me out of it. This is an open source, and anyone can choose to use it or not, on his/her own risk. 2) This is an extensive system, and it took me quite a lot of time and effort to design it, code it, clean it and so on. Please, credit me in your credits' file or wherever. You don't -have- to, but it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside to see others use my code :) Also, if you want to contact me, send bug reports/fixes, ask questions, say 'hi', tell me you installed this system, suggest improvements and so on, feel free to do so. I'm not sure I'll answer every mail I'll get, but I'll sure answer the important ones. Also keep in mind I'm gonna travel the US for a few months a couple of days after releasing this public release, which means I'll have VERY limited Email access for a couple of months. In short, don't bug me, unless you have good intentions ;) Thank you for reading all this babbling, and I hope you'll enjoy this guild system ! Yohay Etsion yohay_etsion@hotmail.com