[DGD] just out of curiosity

[Ragnar Lonn]

On 09/14/2012 01:46 PM, Felix A. Croes wrote:
> been more or less ignored.  I came to the conclusion that the period of
> great growth for LPmuds was enabled by an influx of competent 
> programmers,
> who were attracted to LPmud when it was cool technology.

I think this is very much spot on. The text MUDs are dying because they 
are not cool anymore. That limits their ability to recruit - both new 
players and new programmers. Graphical MMOs are, however, cool, and like 
I wrote previously, that means there is a huge reservoir of people of 
all shapes and sizes to recruit from, when you need content creators. Be 
they programmers or graphics artists.


> are replaced by new students, this would not be a problem.  Alas, the
> competent programmers are gone, and they are not coming back. It is
> more difficult now for text muds to evolve into graphical muds than it
> was in the mid 90s.

I'm a little bit skeptical about the feasibility to make existing 
MUDs/mudlibs "evolve" into graphical ones. I think that any MUD/mudlib 
that gets graphics added to it at a later stage, will have text and 
graphics that are mismatched. The whole thing will look awkward. To get 
a really good graphical MMO, you have to think about the graphics from 
day 1, not when you already have a system with functionality and 
processes that are all about text content.

> This in spite of new enabling technologies such as HTML5 and websockets.
> Web browsers with good javascript support are as ubiquitous now as
> telnet used to be, and could, even for text muds, enable step-by-step
> improvements such as separate map and inventory screens.  Best of all,
> since it would all be happening in the browser, from the user's point
> of view there is no client.

Yeah, Javascript clients are definitely a possibility. If you specify 
the protocol people can write their own clients.


> What now for DGD? From a technological point of view, DGD is an
> object-oriented database management system.  It has advanced features
> such as atomic functions and fast, easy upgrading of LPC code without
> taking the server down.  There is a future for DGD in the cloud.
>

If you're aiming for the cloud, wouldn't automatic state distribution 
across the network be the absolute killer feature for DGD?
(One can always try...)

   /Ragnar