[MUD-Dev] To flame or not to flame (was: Usability and ...)

[Adam Wiggins]

>    at 08:46 AM, caliban at darklock.com (Caliban Tiresias Darklock) said:
> >I don't expect anyone to look at the sorts of things I'm suggesting
> >and go "Gee! I did that wrong! I'll go fix it!"... I mean, if anyone
> >*does* look at what I'm saying and go 'oops', I figure they'll just
> >silently sneak off and fix it or decide it isn't worth the trouble.
> >Where the things I bring up really have application is in the
> >planning process, before you've written much in the way of code.
> >Consequently, while it would be a serious pain in the patoot to hack
> >into an in-development server, I think there are probably some people
> >on this list who either aren't really working on a server yet or are
> >just getting started; these people, I think, could benefit from
> >consideration (not necessarily implementation) of some of those
> >suggestions. 
> 
> I know that in at least 5 seperate cases discussions on this list were
> responsible for different members scrapping or rewriting large parts
> of their current server project.  I've done it more than once. 
> Effectively I'm now scrapping almost my entire server based on
> discussion on this list as I want to be able to implement ideas my old
> model was incapable of supporting.  Nathan has commented similarly (I
> think we were responsible for 3 compleat rewrites he said once?) on
> this list, as also has AlexO.

Yep, same here.  Orion and I have revamped various systems to introduce
more flexibility in order to support ideas we've discussed here.
Just recently ('bout two months ago) we finally did what we never said
we'd do and completely re-wrote the entire underlying system.  I doubt
we would have ever done that if we didn't read this list on a regular
basis.  Even if the exact discussions don't immediately make us say, 'Hey
yeah, we should do it like that!' (although they often do), they get
those brain-juices flowing in good (/dangerous?) directions, which may
trigger those terrible "You know, we should really do it more like this.."
thoughts.

> In games like this the idea can be a lot more important than the code. 
> However, as Raph said, ideas are cheap, its implementation (ie design)
> that's expensive.  Create an idea, support it with design...

Right.  This is why I don't feel bad about rewriting our low-level stuff
at all.  It's gone very smoothly - mostly replacing large blocks of code
that I've never liked anyways with smaller, cleaner blocks of code - and
the important stuff, the meat of how the game systems work and interact
with each other, is still the same.  Just changing how the code works is
easy once you have all that stuff down.