[DGD]Object manager released

[Felix A. Croes]

Stephen Schmidt <schmidsj at union.edu> wrote:

> On Thu, 21 Sep 2000, Geir Harald Hansen wrote:
> > The object manager plugs into the kernel library and keeps tab on which
> > objects exist and their inheritance structure.
>
> Question, from ignorance: If one wishes simply to run a
> garden-variety fantasy adventure type mud, does one need
> such a structure? I have always had the feeling that one
> does, and yet when I coded Melville I never ran into a
> place where I needed one, so I didn't write one. I imagine
> one could install one into Melville with little difficulty;
> it does have a manager that keeps track of user objects
> and one could borrow code from that. But it would require
> a small chunk of CPU (a call_other each time an object
> is loaded or destroyed) as well as a bit of memory, and
> I never understood what one gained, towards the end of
> running a game, that justified that use of CPU/memory,
> even as small as it is. I understand that an object
> manager lets you do Many Cool Things, such as code
> upgrading, but I'm not certain how those things relate
> to the downstream goal of entertaining the user, as it
> were. Not, of course, that everyone should have that 
> as their goal; just that there are a lot of people
> who do.

It depends on how <long> you want to run your garden-variety mud.
If you don't want to reboot when a change is made in a basic
inherited object that would break compatibility because the
old and new instances of the object use a different interface,
then something like the object manager comes in handy.

Similarly, if you want to reboot occasionally but would like your
mud to have a long lifetime, you may find some other features in
the kernel library quite useful.

Your idea of a minimal library is quite different from mine.
Melville is a very small mud, prividing a basis similar to
2.4.5 but much smaller and easier to customize.  The kernel
library is all about managing coding projects, users, and
resources -- and is not in the least mud-like.


> > Melville does not use the kernel library. 
>
> I should clarify that slightly; Melville does use some code
> (I would guess 100 or 200 lines) from the kernel's driver
> object (1995 version) in its driver object. Other than that,
> it does not.

The kernel library didn't exist yet in 1995 :)  The driver object
that you copied code from is from the 2.4.5 simulation code,
presumably.  The kernel library's driver object is entirely
different code.

Regards,
Dworkin

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