= The Multi-User Environment Server (MUES)

== Authors

* Michael Granger <ged@FaerieMUD.org>
* Dave McCorkhill <scotus@FaerieMUD.org>
* Martin Chase <stillflame@FaerieMUD.org>
* Jeremiah Jordan <phaedrus@FaerieMUD.org>
* Alexis Lee <red@FaerieMUD.org>

== General Information

The MUES is an event-driven Internet game environment server written in Ruby.
It is intended to facilitate the building of online multi-player games or
simulations by providing one or more dynamically-programmed object
environments (worlds), the means to access these environments using a network
client, various useful services or daemons for creating in-game systems, and
an event system for facilitating the interaction of all the parts.

The design of the MUES attempts to assume as little as possible about what
sort of thing an 'environment' is, and so comes with little to no game code.
It is planned to eventually include code for useful game services, such as
linguistics, physics, and a metaclass system for defining the classes which
make up a game environment, but such things are only in their very nascent
form in the current distribution. Community contributions in this area are
especially welcome.


== Caveats

*IMPORTANT*: This is an *alpha* release, a work in progress. It might blow up,
compromise your security, write random data to sensitive portions of your hard
drive, or otherwise fail to work as advertised. It is intended to be used by
developers who are interested in helping out or curious onlookers who don't
mind getting a bit wet.

That said, we would greatly appreciate feedback on any aspect of this
software. Suggestions, feature requests, questions, design critiques, and bug
reports are most welcome. Relevant patches are particularly helpful. We may be
reached at <architects@FaerieMUD.org>, which is a mailing list of parties who
are interested in MUES and FaerieMUD development. You may access the interface
to this and other FaerieMUD-related lists at: <http://lists.FaerieMUD.org/>.


== Installation

There's nothing really to install at this point, but you can go back to the
1.0 release by updating to the 'before-191-conversion' branch and read the
INSTALL file there. It's not guaranteed to work, but it might be fun.


== More Information

For more information about the MUES project, see <http://deveiate.org/projects/MUES>.


== Legal

Copyright (c) 2001-2009, The FaerieMUD Consortium
All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

* Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice,
  this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

* Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice,
  this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation
  and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

* Neither the name of the author/s, nor the names of the project's
  contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this
  software without specific prior written permission.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS"
AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE
IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE
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