Greetings. :)

[Jeff Kesselman]

Guess i better introduce myself too...

I'm Senior Game Integration Engineer at Total Entertainment network (or
TEN), you know, the service with Dark Sun Online?

To give you my background Ild have to start with my roleplay expereince,
wich bagn in 1975 shortly aftyer the first release of the original three
little tank Dungeons and Dragons booklets (yes this is BEFORE the red and
blue booklets most peopel know.)  I've played and judged a wide variety of
role play games since then.  In highschool, my older brother told me abotu
a game they had at his college (MIT) called DUNGEON.  I found it on the
lcoao universoity's dec system 10 and went ape, spendign a whole summer
solving it with my best friend.  For those of you who don't know DUNGEON,
it was broken up into three games, Zork I II and III when they released it
on microcomputers. (oh nad that best friend is now in D.C. shaping
givernmental policy, scary huh? :) )

I wrote my own Scott Adams type adventure engine in high school in order to
figure out how the things worked and have been poltting the ultimate
multi-player computer adventure ever since.

I became aware of MUDs abotu 4 years ago when I was introduced to Coldmud.
My brother had written a short paper o na parser scheme he called D.O.O.R.,
in which  obejcts, rooms, players and such are al lbased on the same
fundemental object.  I've extended that into what i call teh Digoenes
system whcih is my own ColdX (the inheritor of teh Coldmud mantle) core.
Im using this core for work on a future version of DSO which will be much
more mud-like rigth now. (Yeah Im getting PAID to do MUD stuff, aint THAT a
kick ;) )

I designed my own Virtual Machien and c-ish language based on ColdX but a
little more like smalltalk as my next engine in order to have what I felkt
was a stronger archtiectural base and better handlign of externally
compiled code. I cal lthe system Kelvin. the Kelvin VM and basic Kelvin-C
compierl are workign, actually.  Fortunately or Unfortunately howver, JAVA
1.1 has coem out (Im also the in-house JAVA expert) and it ahs enough of
the features I need, finally, that I'll probably scrap Kelvin and do my
next system in JAVA.

Mentioning JAVA, I've writen a MUD IDE in JAVA I call Mudedit that I use
for my own development.  Its somehwat Cold-specific in its assumptions but
Im happy to share the code with anyone who wants it.

Anyway thats what Im up to and why im on this list :)

Jeff Kesselman