[DGD] DGD

[Blain]

Greetings list:

I am Blain.  I had decided to switch to DGD as my server of choice a little
over a month ago now.  I've been writing a new mudlib from scratch based on
over 12 years of design and re-writes about every year as I learned vastly
better ways to do things.  I am loving the DGD LPC dialect so far, though
it was a challenge trying to discern between how things are now when
compared to how they were when mentioned in the mailing list archives and
Phantasmal's docs.  Both the list and the Phantasmal site have been a
tremendous help.  Noah was also kind enough to discuss aspects of the
perfect perception engine with me.

Along the way, I have withheld asking questions that would be obvious to me
if I could access a running DGD sandbox.  I am currently unable to run DGD
for lack of GCC on this tablet of mine (which also isn't rooted),  My
laptop conveniently broke just as I arrived in Thailand a month ago.  I
can't wait to get home to my desktop on the other end of the world to see
what beautiful errors I have produced.  I -do- have a rooted droid phone
with me that could possibly compile DGD if I could find some GCC binaries
for it.  So if anyone knows about Droids and can kindly offer any
assistance, it would be much appreciated.  If I have to wait to go home, I
won't cry, though,  I'll just keep trucking along with the lib coding the
best way I know how.

Thus far I am more than halfway finished with a universe/planet/area/room
3D cascading space environment system.  I have my sentence parsing designs
mostly laid out and will need to play with a working parse_string() before
I actually write the thing.  I had to code my own looping afuns, like
map/map_objects, filter*, and sort*.  I'm also coding my own LPC sprintf.
 I saw that someone else has made one, but I prefer to write all my own
code.  I have been coding in LPC since '98, first on a now-defunct MudOS
MUD (which used a modified Discworld distro lib) and also Ancient Anguish
(heavily modified 2.4.5 lib since '92).

I have been reading through the mailing list in chronological order all
week.  I'm currently up to mid-'2000.  I was delighted to see some Anguish
greats in there toying around with DGD, such as Ged and Menta (And I think
the posts by a "Zor" may have been AA's Zor).  I honestly wish I had heard
of DGD a long time ago, but then I wasn't as strong an LPC programmer then
either.  I did compile and log into DGD about two years ago, but it seemed
to complex and different at the time. Though now that I understand more,
I'm stoked to have a highly useful server that can handle all my desires.

I was wondering how many people are still actively using DGD for open MUDs,
writing new mudlibs, etc.  I've noticed that the list hasn't been that
active since I signed up just over a month ago.  I hope things are still
going fairly strong.

If I can be of any assistance to anyone with mudlib design and coding, feel
free to e-mail me directly.  I'd be happy to give back to the community.

--Blain
blain at gmail.com