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

[Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai]

At 04:00 AM 8/26/98 , Adam J. Thornton wrote:
>On Tue, Aug 25, 1998 at 06:03:05PM -0700, Caliban Tiresias Darklock wrote:
>> On 10:58 AM 8/25/98 -0400, I personally witnessed Adam J. Thornton jumping
>> up to say:
>> >This is one thing I don't understand.  Why would you want to run a game on
>> >a W95 box?  
>> I figure the more people I have using it, the more feedback I get, the more
>> feature requests I receive, the better the product ends up becoming.
>> Windows may be a crappy platform, but it's still the one everyone is using.
>> If I want this in the hands of thousands of people in a short period of
>> time, Windows is where I have to develop it. 
>
>I see.  I'm not sure I believe that there are lots of people out there
>itching to run MUDs of their own but lacking the tools to do so, but if
>there are, then this makes sense.

Blech, if ye really think the porting of MUD's to the Windows 95 platform
will ensure an influx of new talents then I think ye are wrong in yer
statement. Just to take an example, on the mud newsgroups a lot of the
newbies that ask how to start a mud are Windows users with even the vaguest
idea of C or network programming.

Sure, I myself use Windows NT to work on, but only because the market
demands that. If I am able to choose I pick the FreeBSD variant of UNIX to
develop under because this tends to be a better programming OS IMHO (and
those willing to deny that, obviously love to click and point or haven't
bothered to read AS Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems).

>> "Doctor, it hurts when I do this..." Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't
>> stray pointers something you shouldn't have in the first place? Every

>> argument I've heard for W9x being a bad platform comes down to "If you
>> screw up, bad things happen". Well, call me arrogant, but I say just don't
>> screw up.
>
>I'm not smart enough to write real programs without screwing up.  And I
>like it when my mistakes don't make me have to reboot, and I just get
>"Segmentation Violation [core dumped]", and then I can debug using the core
>file and my executable, and realize that I passed in the value stored at
>some place rather than its address, or something like that.

I have yet to see the programmmer who programs without screwing up. Such a
person cannot exist in my way of vision. To err is human, when no errors
are made at all on large tasks then one cannot simply be human. But I am
digressing... =)

>And with a modular, extensible framework, where you can't necessarily
>control the quality of the code being run, well, I'd be really wary of
>running it in an environment that didn't rigorously enforce process
>isolation. 

Some call it modules, others plug-ins, same things...

>> I'd like to build one similar to the old style door games of the BBS world;
>> open the readme, follow the five steps, and lo and behold you have a MUD. 
>
>Are there really that many people out there who *want* to run MUDs who
>don't know how to?  If you're right, then yes, your approach makes plenty
>of sense.  However, I suspect that you'll run into the same problem that
>bedevils text-adventure systems: it's easy to write very simple, crude
>games with no programming skill using something like AGT.  But as soon as

>you want to do something even a little tricky, it *does* require real
>programming and bang, you're back to having to be a gearhead to get it
>done.  

I'd even like to take it a step further: on the newsgroups we often
complain about the lack of originality of the codebase (eg we discover
quickly if it's DIKU, Circle, etc...) and using the above mentioned
approach would even make the situation worse... Face it, a MUD is akin to
programming an OS: IPC, Network programming, etc, etc... This requires
skill and knowledge, I myself just bought the first two Volumes of Stevens'
TCP/IP Illustrated today, because I think I can't manage it without...

>> I want it to be easier for them to build what they want and
>> make it do what they want. 
>
>A noble goal.  A scriptable server is certainly the only way to go about
>doing something like this.

Hah, does the term OLC hit home?

>> Not to mention there are a lot more people who know JavaScript than people
>> who know Perl. I think JavaScript is definitely the more accessible
>> technology... although there's an argument to be made for VBScript. I tend
>> to think VBScript is a toy, myself.
>
>Of the two, Javascript.  No question.  VB and friends are all evil.

BASIC has never been a programming language IMHO, it was cute to start to
understand programming, but when I saw the possibilities of Pascal and C I
quickly forgot about BASIC.

>Are there any PostgreSQL gurus on the list?  I have a question: how do you
>retrieve classes from objects returned in a query?

Are we back at the OO-DBMS's in MUD's topic now?  =)

Regards,

--
Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven / Asmodai <asmodai(at)wxs.nl>
ICQ-UIN: 1564317 .:. Ninth Circle Enterprises
Network/Security Specialist

As far as ye can't tell, I am the Future in Computer Hell...