[DGD] just out of curiosity

[Jared Maddox]

> Date: Mon, 10 Sep 2012 15:51:45 +0000
> From: "Schmidt, Stephen" <schmidsj at union.edu>
> To: All about DGD and Hydra <dgd at dworkin.nl>
> Subject: Re: [DGD] just out of curiosity
> Message-ID: <BEACBB441183C7499BC63182DF11406B957E740E at mbx2.union.edu>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> Dworkin wrote:
>> The second change is that muds are much further along the road to
>> extinction.
>
> Without getting involved in any of the other issues in this exchange, I
> would like to ask a question about this statement.
>
> It strikes me that what's along the road to extinction is not MUDs, but
> text-based connections. To whatever extent something like World of
> Warcraft counts as a MUD (I think it meets at least some of the
> broader definitions of what a MUD is) MUDs are doing fine. Or, perhaps,
> what is along the road to extinction is free software run by hobbyists,
> displaced by commercial products like WoW, though I think one can
> make a stronger case that freeware supported by hobbyists has a
> future ahead of it.
>
> The question is whether anyone is working on a lib for DGD that would
> support a graphical MUD? I would guess it would have to be paired with
> client software, but that's not an insuperable barrier to making a MUD.
>
> I have a feeling that if I was lurking more attentively I might already know
> the answer to this question, but I'm not and I don't, and in any event, it
> might merit a little discussion in the wake of Dworkin's statement quoted
> above.
>
> Steve
>

I don't know that anyone's actually working on such code, but there is
at least one web server implementation, so a HTML/CSS/JavaScript
solution shouldn't be all that hard to implement. If you wanted to do
it at a lower level, then I'd suggest drawing some inspiration from
X11 (but make it incompatible, X11 is apparently a big mess with too
much useless legacy stuff).

I was working on a DGD binding to SDL, but I've been working on other
projects lately.

Bear in mind that any gui system would probably be more popular if it
wasn't tied directly into a particular mudlib. Gui systems should be
minimalist things that mudlibs use, since most muds probably wouldn't
want to represent individual pixels, etc. For that matter, for muds,
mmos, etc., you don't really want a gui library, because you'll have a
client to handle that, you'll be transmitting more fundamental
information instead (such as the location of a character). Both HTML
and my SDL binding would be appropriate to this, and HTML should even
be pretty fast to do.