[MUD-Dev] Character development [was Re: ]

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On 08:06 PM 4/14/98 +0000, I personally witnessed s001gmu at nova.wright.edu
jumping up to say:
> 
>> This is deliberately analagous to Berkely Universities reputed method
>> for laying out their paths about campus: They didn't.  They built the
>> university, sodded and seeded the lawns etc, brought the students in,
>> and then watched where the paths formed.  They then concreted those
>> paths.
>
>My Father swears that Ohio State U. did that with their Oval, which
>explains the rather odd layout quite well, when you look at a map of the
>surrounding areas and where the buildings are.

Well, that's the Right Way. Data driven rather than design driven. 

Irrelevant old-timer anecdote:

When I was working on mainframes in COBOL, in a shop that required every
project to be FULLY documented, I built a simple program (also in COBOL)
which would parse the source and document every function and module in
plain English. It actually just added a few words and some punctuation to
the existing source, lowercased all the letters except where necessary for
proper grammar, and organised things into chapters. It did need a few
comments here and there, and would incorporate any properly tagged comment
verbatim into the final document. People found this unnatural for some
reason, but after a while the whole shop adopted the method until
management decided to forbid its use... evidently because the documentation
didn't take long enough to develop and you couldn't easily omit selected
functions from the document. 

:end anecdote

(Um, uh, ahem. I don't remember the first thing about COBOL anymore,
unfortunately. So uh, I'm sorry if you uh, need someone to uh, maintain a
legacy application and Y2K it or something. Although if you have $85kpa on
the offer, I could probably remember real fast...)

I wonder if you could do something like that with a MUD's actual interface.
Like create a server which basically handled login, speech, and emotes,
period. Then put everything else together based on what people complained
about wanting. I've considered doing something like this, except with a
powerful scripting language in the base engine so you could literally write
anything and everything in the softcode. The drawback, of course, is that
you would HAVE to.

What if you had a server like that and gave everyone who logged on a
wizbit? Then the people who logged in could all build and code and whatnot
to their heart's content, and maybe in the end you'd have... oh, wait a
minute. I think I've been on places like that. 

Never mind. ;>