[DGD]Patches

[Felix A. Croes]

"Jason Cone" <jcone at uscdev.com> wrote:

>[...]
> You probably won't agree with me on this, but the cost/licensing
> requirements of DGD (if applied in a universal manner) are going to prohibit
> it from really being a part of something special outside of SkotOS.  It's a
> shame to see something so innovative (esp. with the up-in-coming SMP
> support) get passed over because it costs so much (much less costs anything
> at all as compared to its scripting/interpreter counterparts).  I have a
> hard time believing that Dworkin is putting so much work (and solid theory)
> behind this product just so people can run a better, free MUD.  He did,
> after all, rename it from Dworkin's _Game_ Driver to Dworkin's _Generic_
> Driver.

You will be surprised to learn that my motivation for adding MP support
to DGD is mostly commercial.  It is not anything that I am going to make
money with directly, but then again, the real money will be in mudlibs.
I hope that MP support for DGD is going to make the goal of running an
EverQuest-sized mud on a single machine attainable.  Keeping this in
mind, Skotos' $75K fee begins to look entirely reasonable.

As a general purpose programmable server, can DGD compete with Python,
or even with Pike?  Obviously not: Python and Pike are free.  Commercial
use of DGD has always required license payments, even though they used
to be far more modest.  It turned out that that modest licensing fees
did not work: nobody ever obtained such a license.  In order to let
DGD survive as a commercial product, I had to target it at a different
audience.

(There are further reasons for DGD not being able to compete with open
source scripting languages.  LPC, though superb for a persistent mud,
is not as good as a general purpose language.)

I don't regret going Massively Commercial with DGD, since this allowed
me to continue improving it as an independent developer.  It is a pity
that the server is now out of reach for the small-scale commercial
developer -- but that's how it is.

Regards,
Dworkin

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