[DGD] Problems With Melville

[Stephen Schmidt]

On Mon, 3 Dec 2001, David Jackson wrote:
> Has anyone done much with Melville?

A fair number of people have hacked on it, most of them using
it as a basis for their own mudlibs (which is the way it was
intended to be used). I am not aware of anyone who has released
code for such a mudlib, and I"m not aware of a mud open to the
public which is derived from Melville, although I don't track
either of those things closely.

> #1) The parser is over-simplistic.  This is easy to fix, I just can't
> imagine why they didn't do it better in the first place.

The Melville philosophy, which is discussed in the docs somewhere,
is to go with the minimal functional implementation. This is because
Melville is intended to be modified, and minimal implementations are
easier to understand and easier to change. I would certainly agree
that the parser is simplistic, as the form "verb everythingelse"
is all it understands (some of the individual commands parse
"everythingelse" further, but most don't) but that's what it was
intended to be. If you need something more powerful, by all means
code it up. And, if you are willing, release it to the public, so
that others can benefit from your effort as you are benefiting
from the work of others.

> #2) I never got soul commands to work ... period.  And ended up having to
> re-write the entire soul daemon from scratch.

This is a problem caused by some changes in DGD 1.2. I don't remember
all the details, but it has to do with the fact that create() is not
automatically called when an existing object has its code upgraded,
and the soul daemon needs its create() called to load the soul data.
It's not a terribly difficult fix, but it sounds like the need has
passed.

> #3) Equipment saving on quit.  This should have been a switch.  Does anyone
> have any elegant solutions?

I don't like equipment saving on quit, because it causes problems
for persistent muds if the player never logs back in, as the
equipment is "lost" to the mud world if so (unless you add some
complex code to put it back in when the player is nuked -and-
the mud administrator is careful to nuke regularly.) Of course,
that doesn't mean it's not a nice thing to have, especially if
you can switch it off, as the previous poster suggests. I suppose
it would be a useful feature to have, but there are many features
that would be useful that Melville doesn't have, and this one falls
into the same category as most of them - if you like that feature,
code it, and if you're willing, release it to the public.

> #4) The editor.  Is there any source out there for a better text editor?

Strictly speaking, I don't think the editor is part of Melville,
though that might depend on what you mean by "editor." In any
event, so far as I know, the answer is "no" if you want to do
it through the mud, and "EMACS on the host machine" if you want
a functional answer.

Steve Schmidt


Sweet words can buy honor
Good deeds can gain respect
If a man is bad, do not abandon him.
	- Tao Te Ching, chapter sixty-two






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