[MUD-Dev] MUD Design Fundamentals(Was: Looking for

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad <olag@ifi.uio.no>]

Jon A. Lambert wrote:

> list would find satisfactory. The waterfall approach makes sense in
> common business problems where domains are well-understood.  In muds,
> if one is redesigning or rewriting an existing code base then yes, a
> waterfall approach seems productive.  Keeping in mind, that many

Of course, most development processes do not follow one strict course.  theyare
more or less waterfall/iterative (evolutionary) or other.

> > Yeah, except there is crossovers.  Besides what good is OOA/OOD going to
> > do you, when you don't have a real world to model?
>
> I'm puzzled by this question.  The process of analysis is building
> models of your proposed "world" whether it's real, fictitious or a
> combination of both.  Methinks you are taking the OO methodology
> too literally.  Your virtual world concept is the real world you are
> modelling.  If there is _nothing_ in your virtual world that you
> can model with a real world metaphor then you are in some difficulty.

I believe MUDs differs significantly from most applications.  In most
applications, you have got some concrete problemspace as the backbone of the
system. In my view, a MUDs general problemspace mainly consists of users, a
geography and whatever interaction these users find interesting. The OOA methods I
know of, won't help a whole lot.

> The scenario you present is far-fetched but nevertheless can be
> handled.  If sensor/detector subsystems exist external to the mud,
> the unprocessed collected data can certainly be fed into the server
> at startup, mud time can be advanced to the current time with no
> data lapse.  This type of setup is currently done in many commercial
> and scientific applications.
>
> If you are not talking about THIS kind of realtime information (in
> your example), what sort of realtime information are you really
> interested in?

I'm interested in THIS kind of realtime information, as well as whatever happens
on the clientside (when using an intelligent client). However I believe this
warrants some special attention in any persistent store, and that was the issue I
guess.

--
* Ola Fosheim Groestad  (http://www.ifi.uio.no/~olag) *