Introduction

[Oliver Jowett]

I originally started mudding about 2 years ago. I suspect I'm a bit
unusual in that I never spent much time as a player, and only on a handful
of muds; about 18 months ago I started coding for BTVOS (a ROM
derivative), and ended up running the place, which precluded spending much
time playing.

Most of my experience is with Merc derivatives, although I briefly
experimented with a LP. My interests lie very much in the low-level coding
side of things; I've had enough of admin to know what a nightmare it can
be.. 

I'm the author of IMC2 (http://sa-search.massey.ac.nz/~oliver/imc2/), an
intermud network which has (from the info I have) roughly 35 muds using
it.  Much as I'd like to get into involved discussions about packet
forwarding strategies, I'm yet to find someone also interested in this
(I'd guess that it isn't really on-topic here, either)

Currently I'm working on IMC refinements, and slowly building a C++ mud
from scratch. It's debatable how far this will get though, considering my
general lack of patience ;)

One of the things I'm aiming at is getting a decent UI in place (this
seems to be a popular theme here from the posts I've seen :) - a set of
commands that is more intuitive than the typical "command [arguments]" of
mercs, but one where you can still fall back to a concise command set once
you know what you can and can't do. 'get a pie from the third backpack' is
all very well, but 'get pie 3.back' is much better if you know what you're
doing (I know, this is a trivial example). Anyone here have a HCI
background?

About 2 weeks ago, I set up a moderated mud-design list after getting fed 
up with the level of noise on the merc/rom/etc lists. That was roughly 4 
days before I was made aware of this list :()


Oliver