[DGD] Heaven 7 Conversion

[Neil McBride]

David Jackson wrote:

> Greetings, List,
> 
> Following a serious hardware crash, I lost all of the work I had done on my 
> Melville hybrid.  The backups I had made were also corrupt (you should never 
> rely on older tape drives for important things).  
> 
> Sadly, I was crushed by this loss of work (many, many hours), and have not 
> gotten up the desire to start from scratch again.  Melville will just have to 
> wait.  I'm sorry, Steven.
> 
> However, I have started a new project, on something quite a bit different.  
> If any of you are familiar with the Heaven7 lib, it runs on the Amylaar 
> driver.  Someone named "Sarak" at one time had stated that it could be 
> modified to run under the DGD driver.
> 
> Since I know that it is indeed possible to modify this lib to run under the 
> DGD driver, I am attempting to convert this lib now, and when I am done, I 
> will strip down the lib to it's bare essentials (the version I have is 
> essentially a tarball of the MUD Magia), and release it to the DGD community.


It seems odd that I only resubscribed to this list 2 hours ago and that 
this is the first message.  Perhaps my ears were burning ...

First of all, it is possible to convert H7 to the DGD lib.  The best 
path is to start with the 2.4.5 lib and then move the H7 lib into it. 
Many of the efuns that H7 attempts to use will need creating or 
modifying within the 2.4.5 lib but after much work it is possible.

However, I would advise against it.  As I found out after much hard 
work, modification of the H7 lib to work under DGD is almost a complete 
waste of time.  The underlying design of the lib prevents the use of 
many of the features that make DGD attractive.  For that reason, you end 
up running a lib under DGD that is incapable of making use of the driver 
beyond the features that the Amylaar or LDMud can already provide.

You can of course modify the H7 lib to overcome these flaws, but the 
result is an entirely new lib, and I can tell you from experience that 
the result would be easier to achieve if you started from scratch - I'm 
not exagerating either btw.

Anyway, I hate to be negative, but I spent several years on this path 
and after a break for the last year or so have decided to start again, 
this time from scratch ;)  If you really want H7 but want something more 
stable than Amylaar, go with LDMud.  It's fairly simple to get that 
driver working with it.

On the positive side, converting H7 to DGD could be used as a learning 
experience as many of the design flaws within the lib aren't immediately 
obvious, as I found out ;)  I don't have the time to list all the issues 
I had, but if you do decide to go ahead with this, feel free to contact 
me when you get stumped.  Chances are I've hit the problem before.

Cheers,

Neil, aka Sarak.

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