You can download the source for most popular MUDs online and see how they did it. ROM (Rivers of Mud) is a good example and pretty easy to follow. It is all done with UNIX sockets.

Go to MSDN and learn about sockets, they are way easier than you would think.

Most muds don't support anything like the full telnet specification anyway. But you still need to know how to handle multiple connections. I recommend Beej's Guide to Network Programming as a good starting point. And as has already been said, existing muds can give you an idea of how to do it, although their code is nearly always in C rather than C++, and is usually very poor, both in terms of actual code quality and documentation/commenting.

Edited by - Kylotan on August 16, 2001 9:14:01 AM