[MUD-Dev] Re: Finer points of Telnet programming ...

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On 03:14 PM 8/23/98 -0700, I personally witnessed Jynx (Wyrm / Tygr / Myth)
Ryn jumping up to say:
>
>Why I was building my own MUD was three-fold: First of all,
>when you have built the MUD Server from the ground up, you
>know it by heart, and so any improvements are made easier
>and probably work better. 

I'm working on replacing the internal communications of an existing game
system, myself, so the game aspect is already handled and all I really have
to worry about is the socket programming and a few bits and pieces. I
agree, building from the ground up is the best way to go... I'm trying not
to use ANY publicly-available code except as an offline reference. 

>So I decided that I would design
>as simple a MUD platform as I can

I've thought about doing something like this... I have this hairbrained
idea of a modular MUD, where the internal networking code is in one module
and everything else hooks into it from external plugins. So the question of
room or coordinate based, combat or non-combat, programming interface,
etc... all of that's basically irrelevant. How to make it portable and
such, I have no real answer for... but ideally, I'd like to have a little
plug-in module that doesn't do anything but accept and manage connections,
then plug everything else in from there. I keep imagining having a single
OCX control that I grab in Visual C++ and drop on my project, and boom,
there's a basic bare-bones telnet server that handles IAC
DO/DON'T/WILL/WON'T sequences appropriately. (I can probably buy one of
these, since I think I've seen something similar advertised, but I want to
build one.) 

Okay, so I'm developing under Windows 9x. Everyone says this is stupid, but
I tend to think that if your platform has a problem, you work around it.
That's what we do all the time in the Real World(TM) -- when your customer
says "Develop this under Windows NT 3.51", it doesn't matter how much
easier it would be under 4.0, you develop under 3.51 and that's the end of
it. I've decided Windows 9x is what most of the people who want to start a
small cheesy MUD are running at the house, so when I build the server for
"Small Cheesy MUD 1.0" it probably ought to run under Windows 9x. If it
becomes a problem, then I'll balance platform changes against feature
modification. Feature modification will probably win.

I could always work under Unix, where the code will work much better, but
where I have to work under an interface I'm not as familiar with and use
applications that I can't operate in my sleep. Either way, I have to design
the code the same way. Why not do it under 98 where my target audience
doesn't have to switch operating systems to run it? 


---
=+[ caliban at darklock.com ]=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=[ http://www.darklock.com/ ]+=
"It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more 
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new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by 
the preservation of the old institution, and merely lukewarm defenders in 
those who would gain by the new one."              -- Niccolo Machiavelli
=+=+[ FREE KEVIN * http://www.kevinmitnick.com/ * IT COULD BE YOU ]+=+=+=