newbie

[Marc Eyrignoux]

Hello everybody 
I'm new to this list, so I'm going to introduce myself. 
I'm a french student in an engeneering school, located near Paris. 
My project for the year is to create a MUD. The project will stop on
April, it's a bit short, as Nathan said to me, but we won't do a large
world. 
Next year we will continue what we began this year, but our game will be
playable in March of this year. 
As I have been in the list since 1 week, I've read your mails. 
I'm really impressed by their length. It's 1h30 long to read
everything... But I'm really happy to have to read all of that. 
Of course I'm not alone: I'm the boss (please excuse me for my
vocabulary, I've never been to England) of a 9 members team. 
Our client will be in Java, our server in C++ under Unix. Sounds like
Nathan's mud, I know, but it's an original idea. As far as I know,
Nathan and me have the same vision of what our mud must be: an
intelligent client which makes life easier for the server. The server
will most probably use Oracle as database. 
We will concentrate our efforts on doing something interesting for the
players, something that really gets them involved within the game. We
would like to create situations which encourage role-playing. It'll be a
player-killer mud. Each player will belong to a God (one of us), and
Gods will be allied, neutral or opposed to others. Players won't be able
to know the god of other players, or will know it through role-playing.
XP will hardly increase through fighting, but a lot through
accomplishing quests or being what you're supposed to be (a good, loyal
fellow? a fucking rogue?...) 
At the moment we are still creating our mud on paper, but coding will
begin at the end of the month. 
I've already what to connect client and server, but nothing for the
server itself (I've begun the coding of the client). 
As a part of the client, I'm really interested with String-parsing. I've
watched at what you said, and I would like to know how to get the GNU
sources that JC dealt with. 
I would still like to know if a transactionnal database like Oracle is
really efficient and usefull for what we want to do (a lot of NPC,
descriptions, ..., but simple requests). Why don't you prefer separate
files? Another question for JC: what is an account/softcode negociater?
More generally, what is the distinction between softcode and hardcode? 
As my mud isn't really begun yet, I don't have many answers to give to
the mailing list, but I promise to get more involved when I will feel
capable to give programmable and realistic answers. A little something:
my mud will be in french. 
I'm really happy to be in this list. 
Thanks in advance for the anwser.