A brief introduction.. ok, you got me: an introduction

[Greg Munt]

Hi. I guess I'm a newbie all over again now, oh the thrill :)

Nathan Yospe recently invited me to the list, so here's where i came from..

Im 23, and (like many, many others these days, i dont doubt) was introduced to
muds at University, early in 1994. This was a TinyMUD derivative, UglyMUG. Six 
months later, after showing skill in the internal scripting language, I was 
offered an admin position on a new mud, based on UglyMUG code. In the autumn of
1995, I was made the first 'Deity' of that game (apart from the coder). This
caused substantial jealousies to develop amongst members of the rank I was 
promoted out of.

Around easter of 1996, at an emergency admin meeting, it became apparent that 
an email list had begun, behind my back. The intent of this email list was to
oust me from my position. This meeting had been called after many months of
political arguments and disagreements (primarily because some wanted all
decisions to be subject to admin-wide vote, and I did not feel that this was
appropiate for all decisions - specifically for promotions and demotions).

Rather than return to my previous rank, I decided to resign totally from the
administration. I became an outspoken opponent of the admin, mainly due to 
the fact that they placed the enjoyment of the game by its admin, above and
beyond the enjoyment of the game by regular users. Eventually, in the May of 
that year, I was permanently banned.

I began writing a new mud, entirely from scratch. This is now called 
"Frontiers". It's written in C++, under Linux. Unforunately, since the coder
of the game I ran was *very* secretive about his code, I only gained 
experience in running a mud, and not writing one. So, not only am I writing
from scratch, I'm learning from scratch too.

Luckily, I was able to combine Frontiers with my studies, and it became my
final year project at university (Martin Keegan: 'Most people would kill 
senior members of their family to do that!') - I guess I went to the right
university :) Anyway, I'm now halfway through the 10000-word report, and am
finding that *having to* document what I've done, including a full description
of the design and functionality, is actually quite helpful in visualising what
I'm trying to achieve. A broad overview of our major goals is detailed in our 
website, the URL of which is in my signature.

But, in summary, we've taken Bartle's paper for the Journal of MUD Research,
noted the four player groups he has defined, and tried to provide something
for all of them. Obviously this couldnt all be done in a 20-week project, so
I decided to concentrate on the central area, the main 'talker' area (for the
socialisers) - mainly because I felt it was the easiest option, especially 
considering my TinyMUD background. I got bogged down by the very low-level code
quite a bit (more than I ever could have imagined;) and some fundamental 
features, such as database saves, are still yet to be implemented. The game
has been up and running for some months now though, with hardcoded Players,
and we are starting to develop a core player base, currently in the region of
10 people.

One of the main objectives of Frontiers is to combat what I see as the major
failings of the mud 'industry' (if I may call it that), which is mainly the
'family tree' of muds; because most people use code bases, there is little
innovation in mud design (my feelings on this are summaried quite well in the
'Stock Muds Considered Harmful' USENET thread). Frontiers is an attempt to
break away from this stifled atmosphere, and (attempt to) produce something
original and unique - something which might advance the community beyond late
eighties ideas. Needless to say, Frontiers has always been intended to be 
GPL'd (also, we have no rules against the advertising of rival muds). We need 
more code bases out there, to break the hold of the 'big three' over the 
mudding community. And by 'more code bases', I mean original and innovative
code bases, not another dull derivation of LP, or DIKU, or Tiny. 

I started real development in September of last year. Because of my limited
experience in these matters, I've been slowed down by rewrites. Most of the 
code I wrote in the early days was complete crap - although much of the design
has remained. I've tried to put in a lot of things to speed up database 
accesses; the database used something similar to a binary tree (except each 
node has 16 child nodes, instead of 2), and I use hash tables for player 
lookup.

>From what I have seen of what is posted to this list, it seems
to be much more high-level than I have got to yet. Also, I really do consider 
my TinyMUD-only experiences to be a real disadvantage, so I've tried to get
into LP- and DIKU-based muds, with varying degrees of success. Perhaps I might
be invited by one of you to visit your mud, and have a look around?

Anyway, I'd better stop here. I've already got carried away *far* too much for
a 'short introduction', and yet I could write so much more... :-o 

Anyway, thanks for listening. I love the idea of being able to kick around some
ideas with like-minded people; but from the length of the above, I assume you
guessed that :)

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