I’ve been ripping and tearing a bit more and there have been quite a few internal changes:

• Much of the use of char * has been replaced with std::string, which is a bit more powerful and somewhat safer.
• Almost all of the shared string routines are no longer being used and the shared string manager will be removed soon.  This means that the MUD will take up more memory, but will ultimately end up being more stable and less prone to “string weirdness”, segfaults, etc.  The shared string manager was a fine idea in 1996 when the typical desktop system was a Pentium 1 running at somewhere between 60 and 150 MHz and would typically have about 16-32MB of RAM.  In fact, most MUD codebases were designed to run well on a slowish 486 PC (i.e. 486DX-33).  I remember Illustrium Arcana, the first MUD I worked on, being SUPER SUPER FAST on a Cyrix 6×86 200MHz processor with 32MB of RAM.
• Many of the “new” and “free” routines that were used in the C code have been converted to constructors and destructors.  This is good because we don’t have to worry whether a creation or destruction routine is called on a mob, object, room, etc.  The initialization and deinitialization how happens automagically.
• Two zones have been connected and are loading – the Thri-Kreen hometown Thannik’Tzil and the Kobold Village, both written by me.
• I’ve been exchanging emails with Thendar and she has granted permission to use all of her zones – Plateau, L’strizzen, Ice Palace, Gypsy Quest, Court of the Muse, and a few others.

It’s still just running on my home PC and is far from stable (I still have quite a lot of major changes to make too), but it is gradually coming together to look like something.