[DGD] Any advice?

[Ben Chambers]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Stephen Schmidt" <schmidsj at union.edu>
To: <dgd at list.imaginary.com>
Sent: Tuesday, May 20, 2003 12:14 AM
Subject: Re: [DGD] Any advice?


> On Tue, 20 May 2003, Ben Chambers wrote:
> > While the challenge is part of my reason for doing this, I also feel
that
> > coding it myself will allow me to have more flexibility in how it is
> > implemented and what exactly I want it to do and how it does it.  For
> > example, I'm sure that because Melville was written from scratch, it is
more
> > like what you originally intended than if you had changed your ideas in
> > order to allow the mudlib to be built on top of the kernel.
>
> In truth, probably not, for two reasons. First, the kernel mudlib
> is, if you build over it correctly, highly transparent to the
> end goals. In terms of functionality, the kernel strikes me as
> extremely flexible (though I'm not very familiar with it) and
> I doubt it misses any features I would consider important. In
> terms of elegance, that might not be true - the kernel has
> features that I personally don't anticipate that I'd ever use,
> and if I built something for myself from scratch, I could get
> something that did less than the present kernel does, but did
> everything I wanted, in less space (but much more programmer
> time, of course).
>
> Second, Melville was always oriented towards being a real simple
> mudlib that would be familiar to someone who coded on MudOS or
> other post-LP-2.4.5 drivers, but would let you start to get
> into the internals of how DGD worked. In 1994 I think it did
> a decent job of that. Nowadays the driver has moved so far
> beyond Melville that it doesn't anymore. Today it's main
> purpose is to give a familiar mudlib to someone who wants to
> code more or less the same way they did in 1994 (which is
> perhaps a dumb goal - why use DGD if you're not going to take
> advantage of its power? - but the evidence shows that there
> is a small but reliable market for it.) Both of those goals
> could be carried out equally well in a mudlib that ran over
> the kernel, and the "intro to DGD" one could, of course, be
> carried out much better that way. Today I would guess that
> Phantasmal, which does run over the kernel, is the right way
> to go for someone relatively inexperienced in game design who
> is interested in learning how to hack DGD. (Disclaimer: I know
> Phantasmal only from discussion on this group, I may be totally
> wrong about that.)

Learning to 'hack' DGD is most definitely not my only goal.  The one biggest
issue that I have with the kernel library is lack of documentation.  At
first glance I thought you would simply hack it to expand it.  Then when I
read stuff at Phantasmal's site (which is wonderful, I might add) it turns
out it looks in some directory in the user directory for extensions of these
objects that you can apparently drop in place yourself...

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