[MUD-Dev] Re: mud client development systems

[Jon Leonard]

On Sun, Dec 06, 1998 at 11:10:31PM -0700, Chris Gray wrote:
> [Sunny Gulati:]
>  >I'm still at a loss as to what DevMud is, exactly.   Has anybody had a
>  >chance to merge all the discussion into a semi-proposal-spec yet?   I'm
>  >not subscribed to the DevMUD mailing list.  Just a 1 paragraph
>  >description would be really helpful.  All I've seen so far is some
>  >client connection code that does telnet emulation.

This sort of discussion should really be on devmud at kanga.nu, or on the
prototype at frost.slimy.com port 2121.  There's also some useful stuff
under http://frost.slimy.com/devmud/.

The basic idea is to build a public domain MUD server which is well suited
to development of experimental MUD features.  Support for commercial use,
optimized implementations, etc. are secondary.

DevMUD consists a collection of dynamically loadable modules, along with a
loader.  Various combinations make MUDs with different characteristics, and
in theory it'll be easy to write new modules for new functionality.

> It's not clear what the status of DevMUD is right now. Jon Leonard has
> done a series of prototypes to explore dynamically loading modules and
> sharing functions between them. I've recently made my telnet code
> work in his scheme, and was supposed to do more on it today, but didn't.

That's a good summary of the state of the code.  We have proof of concept
stuff, but most of it will need to be rewritten as we figure out the proper
roles for various modules. 

> Others have proposed schemes for a few other things, too. There hasn't
> been much on the devmud list for several days. I've got some thoughts
> that I might post if I don't forget them. Some discussions have gone
> on, but have died out somewhat. I suspect one of the big problems is
> that a random set of people, when put together, don't see things in
> quite the same way. That takes flexibility on the part of all participants,
> and that is easier talked about than attained!

I think the major reason development has been slow is that it's a lot more
fun to work on code that already does interesting stuff.  After we've made
some more progress on early prototypes, it should get more interesting,
and hopefully more people will contribute.

> Personally, I think the concept has a lot of promise, but whether it
> can be achieved by the random set of people who subscribe to the devmud
> list or not is something still to be seen. Perhaps what will happen is
> that folks will just take some of the ideas and run with them on their
> own.

We'll get interesting systems eventually.  It'll just take a long time if
everyone else loses interest and I wind up coding everything by myself.

Jon Leonard