[MUD-Dev] Re: An Introduction

[Chris Gray]

[Ross Nicoll:]

 >The other really serious problem I have with it is it is quite difficult
 >to change code once it's in the system, and that you really need to
 >keep an external copy of all the text needed to set up the DB, which
 >takes a while for the server to take in once you get to anything
 >really usable.

Yep. Not sure if there is anything that can be done about that. Once
a structure has been set up in code, it is a lot of work to try to
change it on the fly. Starting with the source again is usually easier.

 >Hey, Chris is you're readin this, how about having the server be able
 >to dump the DB into a source file? Would be ugly I know, but might be
 >a nice option...

I've thought about that, and its likely on one of the many lists of things
to do on my desk here. There are some problems in being able to produce
a complete enough dump to be parsable again. It also might be quite a
bit more ugly than you can imagine - the dumper would have no idea of
the various helper routines that the original source uses to generate
things like rooms, etc. and so the output would be quite a bit larger
than the original source. It would also likely be in a very arbitrary
order, and often have a lot of machine-generated identifiers on things.
All in all, its never made it very high up my priority scale.

--
Chris Gray     cg at ami-cg.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA