Mud Languages (Introesque)

[##Make Nylander]

[Original message sent by Nathan Yospe]
| Particular styles of muds? Behavior of things in a mud? (A guy I knew,
| Newt, aka Markku Nylander, wrote a very advanced version of mobprogs, a
| language used by some diku derivatives to control mob behavior.
| Interpreted, of course.)

	Err, I wouldn't call it very advanced... a simple stack machine
	thingy. If anyone's interested in seeing the implementation,
	it's available at http://www.public.usit.net/thenewt/sd_src.tar.gz.

	I've been lurking around this list for some time now, a large
	portion of the discussion here is beyond my understanding
	(e.g. mud database/threading/object modeling). I'm a hack
	programmer, I code with RAD tools for living, my code is ugly
	and kludgy, but it works and most of the time it's fairly
	reusable (I hate reinventing the wheel). I think I started
	tinkering with Dikus because I was bored, but I soon realized the
	ratio of half-way decent coders to half-way decent area builders
	is 5:1, which is the reason Dikudom is going to hell in a
	handbasket (you've all seen these dozens of Diku hacks with
	all the bells and whistles but nothing but stock areas. Boooring).
	I like the Diku architecture, because it's compact and originally
	implemented in a manner understandable to a non-genius, 
	run-of-the-mill programmer such as yours truly. I'm waiting
	for a standalone Java compiler, because I like Java as a
	programming language and I believe I could do lots of neat
	tricks with it. Meanwhile, and speaking of graphical MUDs, I
	found an Active-X component called Render3D
	(http://www.eldermage.com) and I've been fiddling with it in
	Visual Basic 5. There are possibilities there, folks.
	As to the future of MUDding, my opinion is that a custom client-
	server thingy is the way to go. The way I figure it, Micro$oft
	owns half the world anyhow, so I'm not going to lose a lot of
	public if I create my next MUD project from stock components
	(e.g. Active-X), hook it into an ODBC database (with as much
	object persistency as I happen to feel like at any given time)
	and glue it together with VB5. Maybe do something with Java
	if they ever finish the specs for it. Anyhow, that's enough
	babbling, the Newt exits stage left.


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  Markku Nylander  | Oak Ridge, TN    | http://www.sobran-or.com             
 "If there's will, | TheNewt at usit.net | http://www.public.usit.net/thenewt
  there's a way"   | newt at iki.fi      | http://www.iki.fi/newt
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