Changing MUD Levels

Okay, I realize this has been done a lot before and I apologize for going over this again, but none of it seemed to help. I'm new at this, and I want to start up a mud just so I can build areas offline and tweak with some stuff while I'm learning.
I want to change the max level to 115. I've changed it in mud.h and fixed everything up, but I can't figure out how to compile it all. I've tried the Borland compiler as I thought that it would handle C, but I'm obviously not doing something right :P. If someone could let me know what to do, step by step, I'd be very much appreciative.
Thanks.

Where did you get your copy of SMAUG? What operating system are you running on? Since you mentioned the Borland compiler I assume you're running on Windows? If so, do you have a Windows distribution of SMAUG? Are you using Cygwin on Windows perhaps?

Here is a distribution from this site that comes with instructions:
http://www.gammon.com.au/smaug/smaug.htm

Im running Windows 98 SE. I got my copy of Smaug from Zylara's homepage; its Smaug 1.4. I don't have Cygwin. It won't download onto my computer right and as someone told me, it works well only if you know exactly how to use it. Im afraid I don't :P.

In that case you need to download a Win32 distribution; that link I gave has more details on where to get the file, and where to find instructions on setting it up.

To my knowledge, there is no guide for the Borland compiler; most (all?) people use MS Visual C++ 6.0 or MS VS.NET. If you know your way around the Borland compiler, however, and look at the guides for Visual C++, you should be able to adapt the settings to a Borland project.

You are entirely right about Cygwin- it's not to be messed with by people who aren't clear with what they're doing (note that generally it suffices to know Unix to be able to set up Cygwin.) That applies to the whole MUD coding scene as well; if you jump in without any/enough knowledge of programming you can very rapidly get discouraged and meet only frustration.

Unfortunately, although Borland (and Microsoft's compiler) have nice GUI interfaces with menus and cool stuff like that, you also have difficulties if you don't know how to use them. It is just that it feels like they *ought* to be easy to use.

For instance, when I first tried to compile SMAUG under Windows (using the Microsoft compiler) it took me about 2 to 3 days of full-time work to convert it from the Unix-style system calls to Windows ones, particularly in areas of file handling and TCP/IP - and I am a professional programmer.

Thus, the ease-of-use of the compiler was largely negated by the changes that were needed.

Have you read my page:

http://www.gammon.com.au/smaug/howtocompile.htm

Half-way down is an example of compiling SMAUG using Cygwin, from scratch. You can compile and run SMAUG using only 7 lines of typing (taken from that page). Here they are, for the record:


tar xzf smaug1.4a_mxp.tgz
cd smaug/dist/src
mv Makefile Makefile.Unix
mv Makefile.Cygwin Makefile
make
cd ../area
../src/smaug.exe


Once you have got that working you can make changes (eg. to the number of levels) and then recompile. Recompiling is as simple as typing:


cd ../src
make


If you change an include file (eg. the number of area) you may need to recompile everything, which involves one more line:


rm *.o
make


Once compiled without errors you can test again:


cd ../area
../src/smaug.exe


It really isn't that bad.